The 35k night I did run good. But I make a lot compared to what I read about online, and compared to what people describe.

As for de size of the games. I am not talking about dollars, so yeah, the games aren't as large as it sounds. I wrote whilst tired, so I didn't think about that. 35k in my local currency corresponds to 6.000 USD. Normally the game size is roughly 900 USD in buyin. That evening it was a bit smaller. Here, the games go:

10/10
10/20
25/50

etc. The largest games I play are 25/50, with a buy in of roughly 2k USD. In those games I make less than I do in the smaller games. I prefer the 10/20. The casino that offers the larger games (also above 25/50 of course) lies in a larger city, and the players are more skillfull. So in those games I only make 1/5 to (tops) 1/2 buyin/2 hours. Also, I don't like risking that kind of money, since I am underrolled for those games.

And yes, the goal is to make money. I have a really awesome venue with really nice people, and I honestly think it is a better investment to put myself in other peoples' shoes and show some goodwill, than acting like a prick. For instance, after paying back 3k to the guy, he had still donated 7k for me - that is my budget (rent + food and everything) for a month. By showing some goodwill and commeradery, he still enjoys to play against me. And I would rather know that he doesn't end up 100% broke (since that sucks) than knowing that I busted his budget. Also, it makes for a nice atmosphere and I can enjoy fun and lucrative games with him in the future. So that is how I approach the game. I don't see any problem with that.

Anyways, yes, you are all correct. The donklevel at the venue is high. And I wrote "shark". My point is that people that position themselves have a wrong attitude, and sometimes they are just egobloated donkeys. The guy that used to position on me stopped. And he is a reg that earns money on poker (mainly tournies - and they are soft too). Sharkness is relative. It took less to be a shark in 2003-4 than it takes now on a large pokersite. And it takes more to be a shark in Vegas on a dry tuesday, than it takes being a "live" shark in a dump somewhere in Europe, where you play the same old donkey-degens day in and day out at pretty low stakes.

Get of your high horses, geez. Was just making conversation. And my advice still stands. Live players are prone to act in conflict with what they preach. The only law that always holds is that a degen can't resist temptation. Employ it wisely, maybe you will find that your "GTO" (stfu, haha, as if!) style becomes a lot more profitable, when you admit that your GTO opponent rarely achieve inner zen and follows through in the heat of the battle.

Edit:

Maybe I misread your tone. I might see what you are getting at. I usually cut my winrate in half when I discuss it with others, since I discount certain run-good evenings. As for the time I have spend playing. I have been making a buck (never had a down month there) for over a year, playing roughly 3-7 hours a night for the first 9 days of the month and the last 9 days. So 18 evenings. So, well, around 30k hands I think. But yeah, might also have been running good. I play 200nlh online succesfully, but suck at, say, 10nlh. I can make money on dryspells at 200 but have little tools at the lower levels and get impatient after a while. And my focus is poor when I table more than 3 games at a time. So I become a super spewy fish if I try to grind microstakes.

Btw, if you guys have access to the site, then my approach has utility at Unibet. My donkey-imitation approach works wonders on that site at the "high" stakes. It doesn't work below 50euro buy-in. 50 euro is where people start to get greedy and frenzies can be triggered. At 10 euro people don't get nervous and impatient, and at 4nlh you just have to play solid ABC in my experience. But at 50-400 you can run your roll up real quick with my approach. Can try to make some videos and show it in action if it has any interest. Haven't tried it on pokerstars, but my feeling is that it gets picked apart rather quickly on that site.

And to be constructive, my main point was that games become more profitable if you contribute positively to the culture at your venue. That is my experience at least. Santa Claus or not. I am living off of it, so it is not as though I don't take my game seriously. I do follow conventional wisdom as my baseline, and I do reflect on my play. And I employ the strategies that I deem best and build on what I find to work. Also, I usually start out solid to get a feeling of the temper at the table. I would never jump into a foreign crowd and play funky tricks. The right conditions must be established, or else it is a sure way to fail.

If you have a tiny player pool it might be +EV to make slightly losing plays to keep the fish happy to keep playing with you. Dumping 3k though is crazy. Nothing wrong with that if you're playing for fun, but no pro can afford to do this kind of thing regularly, even if it feels good to do it. Poker wins follow the 80/20 rule pretty closely, which means roughly 80% of your winnings come from 20% of your sessions. On the rare occasions you run insanely good, you can't afford to give that money away because there will be times you run insanely bad. Professional poker is pretty cutthroat. You can't really afford to be thinking about whether the guy you stacked is a degenerate who just lost his paycheck.

Hmm...I'd be careful about intentionally letting regs get position on you. Even if they're not that great, position is such a huge advantage you don't want to be in that spot if you can help it. Also, these players aren't necessarily moving to your left because they view you as bad. It's also advantageous to be on the left of anyone with a big stack or any aggressive player, including good players, so you don't have to act like a fish to get regs to sit on your left, if that's what you want.

I didn't say anything about GTO play. I just don't think you'll find any decent player here who thinks playing random hands OOP against regs is a winning formula, even if they're "sharks" rather than legit sharks. You want the opposite in fact. The three biggest things that determine your edge vs. another player are

1) positional advantage

2) hand range advantage

3) skill advantage

If you're intentionally playing OOP a lot, you're giving the other players positional advantage. If you're playing random hands, you're giving the other players a hand range advantage. And if you're targeting sharks, you're decreasing or even inverting your skill advantage compared to targeting fish. It just seems like a recipe for disaster.

Generally you want at least 2/3 of these advantages to be true to play a hand (sometimes 1/3 is okay, like playing KK+ OOP against tough players is still +EV). Ideally you want to play in position as much as possible, with strong hands, and against weak players. You can play OOP, but you want to do this with strong hands. You can play weak hands (I don't know about random, but probably up to 50% or sometimes more) if you have position, particularly against weak players. And you can play tough players, but you want a strong hand range advantage and a positional advantage when doing so.

Agree live players will sometimes act differently than they should.

I guess I came across as a little snarky, but honestly I'm just trying to point out what you are doing is probably going to lose you money long term, even if it seems to be working up to this point. I have no hostile intent. So you have about 30k hands. This is a relatively small sample size, and considering you had at least one insanely rungood night, and no losing months, I wouldn't conclude much at all based on your results. You're probably winning, but other than that, who knows? 30k hands is roughly 1000 hours of play. Running up 35BI in one night is the equivalent of a really good player's (say 10BB/hr winner) expectation over 350 hours. And if you're a decent but not exceptional player your winrate might be more like 5BB/hour, and in that case 35BI in one night is equivalent to 700 hours of play. And if you're a slightly winning player like 2.5BB/hr, 35BI in one night is equivalent to 1400 hours of play. So you can see how just one night of running extremely good can drastically influence your results over 1000 hours.

I do agree it's a good idea to contribute positively to the culture at your venues, as you put it, and so in this sense bumhunting might be a bad long-term move, particularly in small player pools, but LordRiverRat is playing in Vegas where there's a huge player pool, so there's not much downside to him bumhunting IMO, aside from some people seeing it as a bit scummy.

Shai Hulud (reminds me of the old movie Dune, haha, dunno why) @

Thank you for your reply. I don't disagree with any of that, actually. And I think you are misunderstanding the strategy I was trying to convey. I don't play random hands OOP, I sacrifice a hand once in a while, if I am feeling certain that it will cause "villain" (hate that expression, hehe) to get excited. The point is that, apart from certain singular hands (of which I usually win 7 out of 10) where I pressure with random holdnings (I decide before hands what action to fold at etc.), I tighten up. But the table as a whole, in response to this perceived donkey mania, loosens up considerably and starts (literally) donking all-ins on middlepair etc. Also, I have a huge skill advantage, but mainly because I have a natural ability to "soulread". Most have it to some degree. I am very good at seeing (even on a pokerface) if the sentiment underneath is one of fear or anticipation, and I am very sensitive in general, so I almost always know very precisely where I am at. I KNOW that I can't discriminate hands that are played equivalently as to betting etc., but the level of play I am talking about is not that high. So I can avoid paying off at the river, for instance, while my "villains" happily pay off during frenzy. So, though I sacrifice some EV on the particular hands, the EV of the game goes up.

But sure, I get what you are saying about position. To be honest, it only happened a bunch of times and quickly stopped, but I found it profitable, since the person that used to position, was clearly having dollar-signs in his eyes. So it was easy to put out bait, and he was influenced to some really dumb decisions.

And as for winrates etc., you are correct. I have been working on a more serious moneymanagement plan. I still don't think I can felt a guy 7 times in an evening and just walk away. I truly don't believe that another person should suffer, in case I just secured my budget for 3 months. Yes, I know that cash flow can be unsteady. Haven't had that experience with live poker (yet). But it seems like a gambler's fallacy to think that a big win entails a downswing around the corner. Not to take anything away from your advice about caution - that is sound as can be!

As for bumhunting, the topic of the thread. My point still stands. Perhaps it can't be applied to Vegas, as you mentioned. Especially the sending-cash-back-where-it-came-from move. But I still think that, at the level of a singular game, playing some hands -EV may cause the games value to increase. Poker is a social activity, humans are social beings, and playing a bunch of fun hands that get everybody's adrenaline going is a sure way to cause changed behavioral patterns. Half the table may become timid, the other half may go into feeding mode. Each reaction can be utilized to maximize profits, and that is what I usually aim for when I am in the zone. If I just feel like a boring grind, then I stick to a boring grind. So, yeah, long story short: You can bumhunt in scummy ways, or you can groom the bums and increase the overall excitation factor in your game. It achieves the same, but one is more fun than the other.

Your original post wasn't very clear as to your strategy. It sounded like you were advocating playing huge pots out of position against regs with random hands. If that's not the case then I guess I misunderstood.

If you haven't run bad yet you're running good, by definition. I'm not saying because you had a 5sigma level upswing you should expect a 5sigma level downswing around the corner. You might go your whole life and avoid such a horrific downswing. But you will experience -3sigma downswings and likely -4sigma downswings if you play enough. It's just probability, not the gambler's fallacy. You're likely at some point to lose 10+ BI in a row, and if you play a lot, eventually 15+ BI. That's why I think you have to bank the times you run good, as you can't expect that to keep happening. It might, if you're really lucky, but you're unlikely to experience another 35BI win in one night if you play the rest of your life. It's just a super rare event.

Your altruism is admirable but it will inevitably drive down your winrate, possibly past the point of sustainability if you take it too far. Playing poker professionally isn't for everyone. You have to be willing to felt people regardless of their circumstances. Now, if this is a tiny player pool and these guys are your friends, you might make an exception sometimes, but in general you can't afford to be that generous while expecting to maintain a solid winrate, IMO.

Oh, and Shai Hulud is from Dune, though my avatar is currently a Vorlon so maybe that's confusing. Shai Hulud is what the Fremen call the sandworms, particularly when speaking of them religiously, like in their prayers: "May Shai Hulud protect us".

I think we agree on everything now actually. And I grant your point about overly rewarding fish monetarily to keep them happy. Its basically switching to off-table fish for me, and it risks offsetting the results. Will say a little prayer to keep the -5 sigma downswing away. May the lord grant me a -3 at worst, and may he let it wait until I have padded my roll more conservatively.

Oh, yeah, of course, the sandworm. On an old forum, my username was Paul Muad Dib, hehe. Gotta rewatch the movie now.

Anyways, thank you for the discussion and the advice! And to all the bumhunters: Grow up and treat your fellow players with respect and dignity. Don't kill the gambling man's libido!

A Friendly personality and a Gom Jabbar will go a long way to make friends at the poker table!

Sure man. Good luck with your future play. Hope you avoid those nasty downswings. And I hope you can continue to keep the fish happy without giving too much of your winnings to them

Ahh, not the Gom Jabbar!!

I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.

All right, I'm okay now.

I'm gonna tell you guys a quick story. Tonight there was a euro grinder at my table. There was also a spewy fish three seats to my right and a loose fish one seat to my right. The seat two to my right opened up. The euro grinder immediately jumps on that seat. A few minutes later the spewy fish moves to an open seat on the euro grinder's right. I laughed on the inside. In four hundred hours of bum hunting in Vegas, I've never had a single fish move or leave cause I was bum hunting him.

The euro grinder was quiet, didn't smile much and didn't really speak unless spoken to. Maybe that's the reason. Be pleasant and social and you can get away with bum hunting.

Maybe your room is full of major league bums, but where I play there is exactly one guy who I would bum hunt in this way. Don't see him much. He literally donked away about 4k at 1/2 in about 4 hours. He was perhaps lucky to only lose that much. Literally clicking buttons.

There are plenty of minor league bums to go around usually. I'm changing tables only to get away from a bad table, and that's rare.

Well don't ask for a seat change when the fish first sits down, do it when you initially get to the table so it doesn't seem you are doing it b/c of them.

And don't seem overanxious about it when the seat opens up. Chances are the fish will just see right through this and either seat change to your left at first opportunity, or even worse leave the game.

People are there to have fun. Being an obvious vulture will more than likely turn newer and recreational players totally away from the game sooner than later.

Yeah I'll usually seat change to the left of a competent, winning LAG, and I'll straight up tell them "I can't wait to 3-bet the **** out of you every hand."

Though sometimes there'll be an incompetent maniac that justifies the seat change even more. Those are somewhat rare though.

Incompetent maniacs likely over-bluff IP much moreso than oop so you'd print by check/calling them and check/raising your nutted hands.