You have no math behind your view. It's all anecdotal evidence. You're a poker player; I'm not... so what are you seeing here?

All you have to go on is your assessment of my intelligence, observational abilities, deductive reasoning skills, and experience having dealt at tables ranging from the absolute bottom to the absolute top.

If that's not enough, there's not much more I can offer. But it makes little sense to hold up "no math; merely anecdotes" as a criticism against me, as you have nothing more to offer yourself. If it's no good for me, then it's no good for you either.

The only reason I care about it is that non-strat tables are more fun and don't break as quickly. I recognize that many players want to talk strat. Hey, power to 'em, that's the game they want. I merely observe that those tables tend to be tighter and less chatty, overall, in my experience. I've directly observed the effect on the same stakes in the same room at the same time often enough to feel comfortable with this assessment.

"If you disagree with me you must be a losing player" is a powerful argument, one to which it is difficult to respond effectively.

Hah. Well I play at Commerce, O11 and sometimes bike/hg. IME, while strategy talk won't influence the degens it does influence the social gambler. To me, fish have multiple sub categories, each one with their own motivation to play. The degens love to gamble. The social player wants to gamble as well but have fun more than that. If you are at a more social fish type table, talking strategy and especially embarrassing a fish for gambling is HUGE -EV

Law:
It's possible that 1-2 has more degen style fish who just want the gamble. However if you ever move up in stakes you will find that the players start to split between good and recreational players with fewer and fewer degen/more and more social style fish. Move up and you will see.

Also, ever stop to think that you COULD have won more? -EV doesn't necessarily make you a loser in a soft game but it could be a metagame leak ( even if it's not you spewing the strat there are still probably better spots)....

I play mostly 20/40 limit these days. Over the years I've regularly played in 8/16 and 15/30 limit, and I dabble in 1/2, 2/5, 3/5, and 5/5 no limit.

Whether I "could" have won more is an unanswerable counterfactual. But that's the point. Live poker is a series of unanswerable counterfactuals. And in the absence of math, people make a bunch of assumptions. One of my favorite law professor scholars, Duncan Kennedy of Harvard, lampooned judges who made assumptions about economics in their rulings, saying "it all seems to depend on empirical data which nobody seems to have at hand". That's basically the premise upon which I analyze the various old wives' tales of live poker.

I don't care about this issue, particularly. It isn't like I go to the poker tables to talk strategy. I'd say that the vast, vast majority of the time, I'm not really a participant in these discussions.

But I also know that basically every winning poker player I know here in California doesn't give a crap about this issue. Some of them don't participate in the discussions at all, some participate. But none of them are bothered about it or go and post threads about it on 2+2. It's taken as part of the game. If anything, the strat talk keeps the fish happy.

Good poker players question received wisdom. If there's math to back it up-- as there is with a lot of questions about gameplay thanks to online poker, tracking software, and tools like PokerStove-- then fine, but it happens that there are many things that lots of players seem to believe that don't have any mathematical backing at all. They just believe them.

Now some of those things are obviously stupid things like having better luck after asking for a set-up. But others are not so obvious. For instance, there are plenty of live limit players who leak like a sieve in kill pots because they have convinced themselves of their amazing Superman-like ability to "outplay" their opponents who will wither in the face of their aggression when there is more money on the line. And I have seen that bad advice repeated more than once in online poker fora. I suspect if an online site offered kill pots and we had tracking software to analyze millions of hands, these players would be in for a shock. But we don't and the wives' tale persists.

The point is, if you want to say "don't talk strategy at the poker table", you need to analyze exactly the claim you are making. Are you really saying that the fish will turn into Phil Iveys if they hear a bit of poker strategy? I doubt that-- although I will tell you that some players I know (who are not winning players) actually seem to believe this. Are you claiming instead that the fish will change their play if there is strat talk? OK, if that is your claim, how would you go about proving this? How many hands would you need to record? 10,000? 20,000, for a significant sample. You probably need 10,000 with the strat talk and 10,000 without, right? And you'd need to carefully record statistics such as VPIP and agression factor. And you'd have to analyze if players react differently to different sorts of strat talk. Do the players react differently to a discussion of pot odds than they do to a discussion of starting hands? And what about whether it is presented in an insulting manner ("you play that garbage?") or a more neutral manner. For each of these questions, you need another 10,000 hands with good recordkeeping.

Nobody's done this. It's all assumption. It's all "well I saw some player do X when there was strat talk". Yeah, and you don't know if that player would have done not X without the strat talk. You know, sometimes bad players tighten up when they realize that they just lost 1/2 their disposable income for the week, or when they don't want to lose the winnings they already attained, or when they get tired, or when their mind drifts, or whatever. Attributing all these things to the strat talk, in the absence of hard data collected over tens of thousands of hands, is nothing but the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy.

What I'm asking of you is to engage in some actual critical thinking. The same critical thinking that produces winning poker players, who not only understand what to do but why they have to do it, and what conditions would make it appropriate to do something different. All those things originate from the ability to question received wisdom, to not assume that just because somebody says something, it is true.

On this issue, nobody has anything but anecdotes and stories. They aren't enough.

If you don't want to talk strat, don't talk it. If you don't want to play at a table where they talk strat, ask for a table change. If you can't avoid getting bothered by this issue, you need to think more critically about poker and what we actually do and don't know.

My view is, fundamentally, that (1) the math of this is unknowable, (2) it's possible to be a successful poker player without worrying about this issue, and (3) it's generally a bad idea, in my experience, to get hung up on any of the common aspects of poker as it is played at the tables you frequent, because you want to concentrate on playing your best game.

None of those are mathematical claims.

In contrast, "I lose money because people are talking strat at the table" IS a mathematical claim, and one that is completely unprovable.

That's not what I said.

I said if you are hung up on this issue, you are probably a losing player. Just like if you are hung up on players making string bets, or you are hung up on players who take too long to act, or you are hung up on players who flash their cards, or you are hung up on players who slowroll, you are probably a losing player.

These are all parts of the background conditions of the game. The more time a player thinks about these things, the less time the player is thinking about playing his or her A game, and patching his or her own leaks.

Lawdude:

Of COURSE there is no way to statistically prove either side, especially in a live setting. Even if you had 10,000 hours of proof that strat talk at the table DOESN'T impact results (which I know you don't), it's in an uncontrolled environment so your point about testing to prove statistical significance is ridiculous and impractical for BOTH sides of the discussion. In absence of testing what do we have? Well we have observation. This topic has been written and discussed by MANY players, writers and yes, even dealers and you are the first person I have ever seen who claims it DOESN'T impact the game for the negative.

To be honest, I love strat talk because I want to improve my game, just not at the table. Do I think that strat talk will improve the fish's game? Maybe a little but more than likely their gambling instincts will take over and will revert to their habits anyway. It's also not entirely about a player all of the sudden leaving when "he could have left anyway for any variety of reasons". It's a concern of metagame. I have personally SEEN time and time again a previously great table tightening up after somebody clearly pissed off about a bad beat starts badgering one of the fish about making a gut shot draw with a pot sized bet on the turn without enough implied odds. It makes things UNCOMFORTABLE for the fish and they BACK INTO playing more correctly because they tighten up. Not because they are actually listening to anything the idiot was yelling about, but because they generally don't want to be EMBARRASSED.

At the end of the day, those who have perfected the art of not tapping the glass are the greatest +EV gamblers of all time. Casinos. Do you honestly think that a casino would bar a fish who just dropped 5K on 13 in roulette and hit his number? HELL NO. Do you think they would drone on about how LUCKY the fish was and how incorrect it was to even play that game at all? Nope. They say "congratulations sir" and try to get him to STAY. Why? Well because they have an edge. We at the poker table who have a similar edge want the same thing. If you claim that in YOUR GAME, some special universe exists that fish love to be made fun of and don't care about the atmosphere of the game, well that's great. Good for you and your (probably pretty unfishy) game. However, for the rest of us, strat talk/player abuse/dealer abuse/and just general pissed off or non social attitude is -EV.

Actually, those same casinos DO tap the glass in subtle ways. "Loosest slots in town" taps the glass. So does offering classes on how to play (which many casinos offer). So does publicizing jackpots which lower the negative EV of playing.

Race tracks tap the glass too, with plenty of handicapping information.

In actuality, a casino that never tapped the glass would be giving up revenue.

Please don't feed the troll.

This guy can't be serious...

Talking about VPIP and what your winrate is/optimal play is bad for game. It's that simple.

Fish tighten up/leave, regs hear your thought process. It's bad.

I don't need a 20,000 hand sample to determine that. Use some common sense.

haha yeah ok I'm done. **** lawyers.

There are lots of things that poker players' common sense and intuition tell them that are wrong.

BTW, horseplayers talk to each other about handicapping and strategy a lot, including winning ones. Is that bad for the game too?

I am not trolling here. People are simply assuming things without evidence, which is what people tend to do when they don't have 20,000 hand samples.

lawdude, I must have missed the data you provided for your 20,000 hand sample. I know you have it, otherwise you wouldn't be brazenly and insultingly dismissing everybody's personal observations, and explanations for opinions.

Link, please?

Fyp.

Also, please see previous post about your so called "evidence". It can't exist, period. However when the opinion of every winning poker player/theorist/dealer who has discussed it is different from your own it takes a seriously arrogant personality disorder to not consider that you could be wrong. Arrogance is the enemy of learning, I would be extremely surprised if you are anything more than a break even player even at such a monkey game like 8-16 limit.