Now I know why he was so mad at stars taking away VPPs at 1k++ guy isn`t winning without rb anymore. GG.

I'm not defending the article's content (I've given up on that now) but I'm pretty sure that it won't have any effect whatsoever on the high stakes ecosystem - they don't play for our entertainment you know? A person who plays high stakes poker for a living isn't going to read one article in which his table selection is questioned and think "that's it, I'm never playing again, see how you like THAT HSDB"

Personally I've received considerably more criticism in this thread than Dani ever did in that article but (I'm sorry to say haters) at no point have I thought, "I'm going to stop doing this job because someone called me a bad writer". That's not how it works.

These are more like the all star game. These are HU matches to determine who is the best in the world or whatever, like Moss versus Dandalos or as depicted in "Rounders". I would assume anyone playing them in a really top player. I know Dani was playing high stakes online NL before BF. I would assume that he has made millions playing at close to the highest stakes that he has money to blow on these matches.

So your perspective as fan is a little different from mine as a player. People are saying Polk was once the best in the world. He also is an extremely strong player to have beaten just about all comers in HU NL.

I didn't mean to offend you, but when you write an article like that it is sort of understandable that people would say things back about you.

Someone please present the evidence that Dani Stern is a great PLO player, or even a good PLO player. A screen shot from the old PTR (poker table ratings) web site, or something else with some evidence would at least demonstrate this, even if at low to mid stakes, and this would lend some more realistic chance that his big downswing at high stakes HU PLO could be a lot to do with run bad.

He has some very good PLO MTT live results but overall his live MTT ROI across all variants is unlikely to be more than ~+15%. Do the calcs yourself from The Hendon Mob. He would have to be cashing on average >1/6th of the time in live comps to be making a profit (assuming no big skew in the distribution of total buy ins versus the buy ins of cashed in comps shown on The Hendon Mob, and assuming a small degree of unknown rebuys/re-entries)

Yes he may have made truck loads of cash in live games (perhaps including PLO), this is very possible particularly as live play is much softer than on line. But branding him as a top HU high stakes on line player, or a top high stakes on line player in general, looks unfounded to me, certainly in PLO, without adequate evidence to support this.

The evidence that there is on HSDB shows that he is either being owned huge by Berri Sweet and some others, or is being owned a fair bit plus some run bad, or he is a good/great player but has been one of the unluckiest players in recorded on line poker history. He is also down $515K in PLO on HSDB playing PLO on Full Tilt as Ansky451.

Untracked sites where he may well have made huge profits are always a possible caveat to all of the above.

"Presumably both he and his opponents have a high winrate in high stakes ring games."

Not exactly sure how this could be presumed.

"These are more like the all star game. These are HU matches to determine who is the best in the world or whatever, like Moss versus Dandalos or as depicted in "Rounders". I would assume anyone playing them in a really top player. I know Dani was playing high stakes online NL before BF. I would assume that he has made millions playing at close to the highest stakes that he has money to blow on these matches."

So all of Dani's winnings came from the untracked euro sites? HSDB tracked games pre-BF. He wasn't a winner then, and he sure isn't a winner now (on the tracked sites). Additionally when 2m2m came out, he was still grinding the high mid stakes to low high stakes and not winning. If he did make "millions" pre-BF, I am sure he would have jumped into the rail heaven games, etc.

Seriously, why do people think he is good? Has he made instructional videos (that I am unaware of) where he details out elite level thought processes?

This article wasn't really that controversial. I wonder if people would be having similar reactions if it was a player that didn't know/like...

For some balance on whether he is/was profitable at poker.....

Firstly when big rewards/rake back were being paid by Pokerstars and others he could/may have been earning $100K to $150K per year as a "break even" (P & L graph) mid to high stakes player. I think they are the kind of rebates players could get, so this is ~$500K to $1M in a 5 to 6 year period.

His overall ROI and bottom line $ profit in live MTTs has a few unknown variables so he may have run good in the sense of cashing in the bigger buy ins and bricking the smaller buy ins, so his cashes being distributed in a way that is massively in his favour.

Also, who knows if he has had pieces of other players who have had big MTT scores or crushed cash games.

Regarding the headline in the HSDB article, it was 100% deliberate click bait IMO. The headline was qualified and explained in the article but the headline itself was a low blow so a bit scummy.

He used to do videos I think for PokerSavvy Plus, mostly playing like 25/50NL online. He charged $175-300 for coaching. I assumed he was winning a lot. If he never was winning, where did he get the $1.5M to lose playing HU PLO? Why would he be playing HU against top players if he wasn't good at PLO?

Yes, all very good questions.

Possible answers:

PLO is the crack cocaine of poker and a lot of players get tempted into it and once you've started playing PLO, for a lot of players going back to NLHE feels like going back to a dial up analogue internet connection from a high speed digital one.

As already mentioned by others, he might be backed or part backed for these big games.

$1M to $2M might be a realistic estimate of his life time profits from poker: cash game playing profits at low to mid stakes, rake back, live MTTs and other bits and pieces like coaching, so perhaps he could "afford" to drop a ~$1M dollars at nosebleeds.

He may have other income outside of poker and/or be independently wealthy.

He might have borrowed the money to play.

All of the above is of course pure conjecture.

But before BF, I remember he was doing videos for a major site of his play of $25/50 NL and the like and he was obviously a regular in those games. He seemed to know what he was doing, and I wouldn't think they would accept the videos if he was break even at those games. He also had a long time coaching advertisement on 2+2 charging around $200/hour. I assumed his stats were such that he was not charging way over his hourly from playing. Maybe that is not a correct assumption? I assumed from the coaching rate that he was making at least $200K/year.

There was also a thread about how he got cheated in Spain at high stakes live PLO a couple of years ago.

If he isn't a top PLO player, I can't imagine anyone would stake him playing HU. Is he really throwing away $1.5M playing way above his level?

What I don't like about the article, aside from the click bait and targeting someone, is that it is written in a glib tone, and doesn't really give much background about his winnings and reputation as a player.

Yes there is something odd or that doesn't add up about him playing these $200/$400 HU PLO games. As you infer, the proper roll to play them is maybe $2.5M to $3.5M which it doesn't instinctively feel like he has to play with from his pure poker earnings and on the other hand who would back him in these games without him having a good track record in them, unless it is a wealthy individual who is doing it mainly for the thrill.

Perhaps the answer lies somewhere in the middle: e.g. he has made $1.5M from poker and has been 50% backed for these big games. This would kind of make sense as it wouldn't bust him out of the game (it would only lose half of his roll) but at the start of it would be a not so bad way of taking a shot at some quick huge profits even if knowingly playing an opponent/opponents who might have a slight skill edge against him.

Rly?

Who cares how he got his bankroll and how much money he has and whether he is rolled properly

He got smashed HU and and an article got written about him/thread

Well it is kind of rail bird interesting and there don't seem to be many other big swings going around at the moment, with most of the on line high stakes players mainly moving and swapping money around between them.

The really big games aren't really there on line any more ($1K/$2K etc) so
this is the big on line battle right now, although it seems to have halted on 11th May.

An extra dimension to this is that Dani Stern was the (or one of) the self appointed spokespeople of the players in the protest against Amaya's wriggling out of paying Supernova (Elite) rewards and generally reducing rake back and FPPs etc. The rep that he projected at the time and that people apparently didn't question was that he was a high stakes pro.

Now that he has incurred these heavy losses, one has to question whether he was really that, or whether he was some kind of break even high volume high stakes rake back pro who might not even be that good at poker.

I can't remember specifics but he did a podcast with Joey Ingram, but I do remember thinking when watching it that some of what Dani Stern said was pretty biased and not all of it was fundamentally sound. As a previous poster said ITT, now that a few people are scrutinising his graphs more than they probably did back then, it is apparent that rake back and rewards must have been a very significant part of his income as he wasn't showing much of a profit from actual hands played.

I am not saying that he wasn't putting forward a lot of valid and logical points in that interview about Amaya irrevocably damaging the poker eco system but I now have doubts about whether he really cared at all about the overall system and about other players or just about his own rake back.

Something else that comes through from all of this is, how many people are really that good at poker? when someone perceived to be a top player has had such a downswing and apparently was never a (without rake back) winner at tracked on line high stakes, and how much dead money is being fed into the system nowadays as the money supply for high stakes? when this HU match is about the only one that has recently created a very big P & L swing between players.

As has been stated many times, the clickbait headline – plus the "perhaps that's misleading" buy-back in the lede – is the only really objectionable part of this article. Normally, I would never blame the writer for the headline, as those two are usually handled by different people. In this case, it's clearly the same person.

Yes, Stern's per-hand loss has been higher than Hansen's over a much smaller sample of hands. But to say Ansky has lost "bigger" would be as ridiculous as a MLB headline reading "Aaron Judge hit more home runs than Babe Ruth," only to learn that it meant Judge's PA-to-HR ratio has been higher in his first 58 games (13.3) than during Ruth's 2,503-game career (14.88). Very hackish.

* * * *

As a public information officer, I work in the opposite side of journalism. However, if poker reporters want to refer to themselves as "journalists," they better learn to write like journalist. Thus, indulge me for a moment as I don my editorial hat.

For starters, lose the exclamation points. Those who know me might find that odd, given that I tend to use such punctuation quite freely in personal correspondence. Furthermore, the Associated Press Stylebook and Chicago Manual of Style do allow for occasional usage, but overall, I take a Jake Jarmel stance on exclamation points.

After that...

Headline/lede graf: see above.

Second graf: PokerStars needs an apostrophe after the "s" because it appears to possess "high stakes tables."

Second graf: "high-stakes" should be hyphenated as a compound modifier of the noun "tables."

Third graf: "It's fair to say that it has all gone wrong for supernova9 over the last year or so." This is simply poor writing, especially since the pronoun "it" shows up twice within the span of six words yet references two different things. Rewrite to "It's fair to say that the last year or so has all gone wrong for supernova9."

Third graf: typo on "March." Add a comma after "2016" while you're at it.

Fourth graf: you have already gone to Stern's last name as a second reference, so no need to write out Stern's full name in this situation.

Fourth graf: no apostrophe on "2000s." English classes might suggest otherwise, but our writer wants to call himself a "journalist," and the AP, Chicago Manual and Oxford style guides all dictate to omit the apostrophe.

Fourth graf: the words in the TV show title should be capitalized as "Two Months. Two Million." Sure, the numerals get tricky because the secondary title was "2M2MM," but the full name had written-out numbers with the period. Whether you use quotes or italics depends on the style guide used. AP says quotes, CMOS says italics.

Fourth graf: the parenthetical sentence should start with "it failed" rather than "they failed" because the subject of the sentence was the singular "team."

Fifth graf: Change "given the way his bankroll is going to be looking" to "given the way his bankroll will look."

Sixth graf: "none-too-impressive" should hyphenated as a compound modifier preceding the noun "selection."

Seventh graf: A question mark always ends a sentence. It should not precede a comma or an en dash (which should be an em dash). Thus, that monstrosity of a final sentence should be rewritten into three separate sentences: "Perhaps he can't get action elsewhere? Or perhaps he just loves the action a la Isildur1? One thing's for sure, if he doesn't execute a pretty rapid turnaround in his results, his bankroll isn't going to look too pretty." (Note the comma after "results.")

Eighth graf: remove it altogether, as it is unnecessary for reportage. If this piece was an op-ed piece, I suppose it would be acceptable, but this reads more like a fanboy's reply in the comment section. Everything else in this story has been factual or fact-backed until this last sentence.

* * * *

Maybe he's filming a new show:

1 year two million.

No, not at all.

The next headline should be:
So called "poker journalist" rekt by grammar police end boss.

so dani > berri at plo?

How dare you

As far as the article, the main problem is not with the writer but the management. They shouldn't let a headline like that go through. Also, the article should have been edited more thoroughly. Many of the articles for online publications originally have serious punctuation mistakes and so on. Often the authors don't speak English as a first language. However, most places have editors to fix that sort of thing.

Dani may have been playing for rakeback at high stakes recently. However, like I said, he did videos at major sites and was charging $200/hour coaching for a long time before BF. If he was making close in hourly to the coaching, than he may have been making about $300K/year for a few years. So that seems the likely way he got the bankroll.

Kind of sad if he blew most of it playing high stakes HU. Not a good idea to do that unless you are crushing high stakes ring games. I guess it is a common trap, and has been for some time. Presumably, the scenes in "Rounders" are based on true stories of grinders blowing their bankrolls playing top players HU.

+1


this

this is the logic of a live player or a railbird

'But to say Ansky has lost "bigger" would be as ridiculous as a MLB headline reading "Aaron Judge hit more home runs than Babe Ruth," only to learn that it meant Judge's PA-to-HR ratio has been higher in his first 58 games (13.3) than during Ruth's 2,503-game career (14.88). Very hackish.'

This is an example of an obviously sensational but also not very criticizable headline. If I were to say "Aaron Judge has been hitting more homeruns than Babe Ruth" and pointed out his hr/ab ration I don't think many people would think he has more overall homeruns than babe ruth. To be honest I'm surprised there aren't sports articles written with a similar headline.

Similarly no one really believes Ansky's lost several million dollars overall playing online pokers. The fact that he's lost at a similar rate to Gus would be interesting, except for the fact its not that many buyins and he's likely experiencing a fair bit of negative variance.

When HU PLO had old system of capped regular tables, Dani always had tables up to highest stakes. This means other regulars were giving up tables to him because they were scared to play him. If he would really suck that wouldn't been the case.