u should post a link/screen shot when u say things like this

Defamation is a spoken or written expression which is deemed to harm the reputation of an individual and proved to be false. HU4ROLLZ?

https://www.reddit.com/r/acesup/comm...alysis_week_2/

It's about half way down the thread.

Anyone providing poker coaching or training materials is a fraud or scammer who can't beat the games. Why else would you market stuff rather than play? Upswing, RIO, and 2+2 are just the worse offenders.

Additional income stream with far less variance, risk, and stress. Why play a ****load of poker to make $250k when you can sell 250 copies of your $1k HU course?

Not that all coaching is created equal. Plenty of people providing lessons that shouldn't be.

I want to add some further genuine concerns about poker coaching. A big one is that coaching or some parts of it may be the wrong or bad advice. Example is that JNandez the PLO specialist coach at Upswing has posted a YouTube video including a section on strat for playing weak Aces pre flop in PLO, e.g AA94 rainbow.

His analysis IMO is horribly wrong and I told him this direct on Twitter. I also told him that I've seen a lot of his other stuff on YouTube and can see that it's good. So the validity of any coaching is not certain and if he is wrong on this aspect of PLO then he is probably wrong on some other aspects too.

In all likelihood he is right and gives great coaching on 90% of all PLO strategy but for me that isn't good enough, particularly if someone is using his course as the bible of PLO strat. Just to qualify my opinion on his weak aces pre flop strat. I am not saying he is talking nonsense, however he is applying some thinking that discounts and dismisses a lot of game factors. I would guess that his strat on weak aces has been formulated, and may well work or at least not be -EV based on him playing some quite aggro mid to high stakes 6 max on line PLO cash games.

But in his video he is super confident in his assertions, which are quite rigid, and I am 100% sure that a lot of what he is saying is completely wrong if applied to a large chunk of PLO cash and PLO MTT games that people play. In fact he did the strat in direct reply to a Daniel Negreanu question and his answer to Dnegs is wrong for the specific PLO game that DNegs was asking about.

Speaking of DNegs. This links to another major concern of mine about coaching. In one of DNegs recent videos he admitted that a lot of the strat advice that he gave 3, 4 years ago he now knows is wrong, he just didn't realise it at the time. He said it was plain wrong based on what he knows now. Also on a general level, even generally accepted correct strat given by a top coach now might be a week or a month out of date because the game and solving the game is moving forwards or altering all of the time, or if coaching given is correct now it may quickly become wrong and not work in 3 months time.

Third big concern is one's ability to execute what is learned from a coach. Even assuming none of the issues above are present, you still have to properly understand what the coach has taught and execute it to a high standard of proficiency. This is not easy to do.

So whilst Luke Schwarz's choice of word "scam" is unfair and inaccurate, like a lot of things in business and commerce the seller (selling coaching in this instance) is nearly always on the much more favourable side of the deal with lots of upside and virtually no downside.

Didn't you recently admit to being a losing player? Not a personal attack, but seems odd to have such strong convictions on games you're still learning to play.

Sage back again with the adderall binge

To the people who want a match, there is a 0% chance that will happen.

Let's just put aside the poker for a minute and think about what happens if we have a match. Luke gets another chance to go off on me publicly with an audience. That is inherently -ev for both myself and my company.

Imagine you had a legitimate business and someone was calling it a scam. Do you then work with that person to give them airtime? Obviously not.

At the end of the day I don't have to piggyback on podcasts/news sites because I built my own audience myself. I'm not giving this completely false story by a crazed lunatic the light of day on my personal platform.

Rough figures, I think there are some more accurately calculated figures on quite an old thread, I made about £120K (Sterling) in live PLO cash games at a high win rate (£1/£2/£5 straddle game) combined with live cash Dealer's Choice cash games at the same stakes, where most of my profits were in Omaha variants on the DC rotation, i.e. PLO, PLO8, Courschevel and PLO Triple Flop. I am exceptionally difficult to beat in the games above live and, again this is an estimate and more accurate figures are posted elsewhere, I won something like 70 per hundred cash game sessions, broke even on 15 and lost in 15. These were nearly all long sessions and it was over about a 2 1/2 year full time live cash grinder period of time.

In addition, again pretty accurate estimates, I have an ROI of circa 45% in live PLO MTTs. Whilst I don't claim to be a total boss at live PLO cash, I believe I am pretty good maybe very good, I am definitely right up there in live PLO MTTs, been on tables with a lot of top PLO players and I simply do not rate their PLO MTT skills, many of these players are rank bad at PLO MTTs. My live PLO MTT profit is circa £23K sterling.

My losses in poker, again more accurate detail sits elsewhere on 2plus2, are on line. To cut a long story short, some life tilt was involved and with it some poker tilt and bad game selection. Also was no doubt sometimes/maybe often playing in some games a bit slanted against me, e.g. people using HUDs when I wasn't and some likely card sharing players at certain tables. Bottom line though is that I played very poorly on line so fully deserved the bad results I got.

I think I lost around $100 to $120K (USD) on line over the same 2 1/2 year period. I played virtually no PLO MTTs on line, nearly all PLO cash and some 8 game, Razz, 2-7 and general other punty stuff when on life tilt.

So overall I am a small up lifetime on poker but quite a big up when game selecting properly in live games and with a pretty big edge in those games, in particular in PLO tournaments.

This leads into the main reason why I am super confident that JNandez's weak Aces strat advice is flawed, because my absolute forte in PLO is pre flop play in both PLO cash and MTTs, it is an area that I worked out for myself a long time ago without any coaching because it is well suited to people with innate mathematical ability, which I have.

Incidentally, I won't be explaining (giving my viewpoint) to JNandez or to anyone else regarding playing weak Aces in PLO because he and a lot of other players/coaches etc display a very poor understanding of it.

There is basically only one player (who I won't disclose the name of) whom I talk PLO strat with and give away some little known stuff to, because we buy pieces in each other and give ecah other moral support during comps, and funnily enough in his last PLO tournament he made the identical error that JNandez has got wrong, only he made it in reverse, because he was up against weak aces pre in a 3 way pot and passed to a 4 bet when it was blatantly correct to call.

I dare say JNandez would have incorrectly passed in that spot too, because of his flawed maths based belief that "bad aces have 57% equity, so are doing well against AAxx, AKxx and KKxx plus the top 3% of hands", blah, blah.

Trust me, it is all blah, blah and wrong. When I explained where my poker buddy had gone wrong in the hand and gave him the correct maths and the correct logic, he quickly recognised why he should have called or shoved, but calling was better, and understood the exact mathematical logic and game based reasons why.

Hey Sage check your dm's, I let Jnandez know we found a much better replacement (assuming the numbers look right) and we are looking forward to working with you in the future.

I'm pretty sick of this stupid false equivalency that is being pushed ITT

where minor strat disagreements are somehow justification for someone calling the business an outright scam

The two situations are hardly equivalent and its bull**** to come in here piggybacking on Luke Schwartz's verbal diarrhea with some horsecrap about how one point about playing weak aces was wrong.

Post something better than I am if you want to. I am specifically addressing the issue of if poker coaching is good, bad, worthwhile, worth paying for etc. Sorry if that is not agreeable to you.

It isn't horsecrap at all and the reason why it isn't is that JNandez and many others from various training web sites portray and project themselves as knowing all correct strategy. So when I saw something today in his video with all its fancy presentation and special effects I called out some of the actual strat he gave as plain wrong.

Sure JNandez is a big winning player but we don't know how much is down to absolute correct strat knowledge and how much is down to other factors like good game selection, a strong mental game, bum hunting, good BRM and possibly some run good above EV.

Additionally, if one was to read say 5 different books on PLO cash game strategy you will see a lot of conflicting views on identical hand spots. This is what I found when I read a few books, a) lots of conflicting views and information and b) that I completely disagreed with some parts of various strat in all of the books.

It actually set my game backwards for about 3 weeks afterwards. After I had emptied my brain of these books' contents my live PLO game went straight back to winning ways. IMO you cannot trust coaching in poker, it can be an aid albeit not always a reliable one but you really have to work out most things for yourself and use coaching as a peripheral aid at times, but not as a bible.

Thanks Doug, I'll be in touch with the kind of remuneration package that I am looking for. It will likely include a penthouse suite with Jacuzzi. Keep up the good work Sir on your YouTube channel, your content is brilliant, informative, entertaining and funny and this is not me being sarcastic, I genuinely mean it.

I am not out to attack Upswing's coaching specifically, and as I have written I apply all of my thought's on coaching to all coaches and training sites, not just yours.

Everyone wants to make a living, and if one method is through poker coaching, why not. But all poker coaching is far from perfect and I think it's valid for people to debate this.

I don't mean to derail, but do you still stand by this statement? I don't know if this is bad phrasing on your part, but you seem to be implying that you could come up with better (in a GTO sense) strategies than a solver can which is... a bold statement to say the least.

How is Doug framing Luke's HSDB graph and displaying it in his videos not perpetuating the situation? If your so worried about his airtime maybe let the situation die rather then levelling with a 'crazed lunatic' and firing shots right back.

this thread is basically an ad.

Probably a top online cash player, which presumably Doug is, can come up with better approaches. Calling the software scams seems incorrect. They may be misrepresenting and exagerating what they do, but that doesn't make GTO software scams.


Yeh, so maybe Luke has been losing lately at high stakes online. Why pick on him? What kind of reaction do you expect to get when you show his downward graph like that in videos with 70K views? It is sort of understandable Luke is trolling.

These guys are both being awfully loose with what they call a scam. I have a problem for using that term publicly for things like Upswing and GTO software which are clearly not scams.

Obviously not a scam, just a money grab. Upswingpoker has no longevity

I disagree with you there. The rate of devaluation of coaching is directly proportional to the level of play it’s aimed at. Upswing aims to build a solid understanding of the fundamentals. The basic subscription doesn’t aim too high so the info should retain it’s value for a long time.

Looks like Dp has been playing fast and loose with the scam talk too. Live by the sword…

WRT Jnandez vs SageDonkey's opinions on bad aces;

Just a hunch but could the fact that one guy is playing 100bb deep and the other guy is probably playing 500bb+ deep have something to do with it?

Stack sizes are important yes, when applying ranges and equities with more confidence, so I agree with you in so far as if this was very shallow stack poker. e.g. ~<40BBs that his ranges have some more relevance. But not at ~100BBs and higher.

This is part of what is wrong with his analysis (I'm starting to give some of it away here), that you also have to look at what SPRs will be on the flop given effective starting stack sizes, you can't just blanket say that we have x% of equity against this range if your SPR on the flop is high enough that you will sometimes or often be surrendering your equity by folding the flop. (Sometimes it will be a correct fold and other times not.)

But the above is just one area that he either has wrong in his video, or at least is not covering it in any detail, perhaps he does cover it more in his more detailed tutorials.

The worst part of his analysis though is his ranges that he gives. They are just way out in the real world in so many types and buy ins of PLO games and in many real pre flop spots one can define way narrower ranges than he is giving. This in turn means that his equity calcs he is giving are wrong and therefore his advice on how to play hands is wrong.

Remember, and this applies to NLHE too, the very fashionable current GTO method that a lot of coaches are advocating, including Doug Polk, of basing a big chunk of one's strategy on defining opponent's hand ranges, is not a method that has always been around, used or put forward as the correct way to play.

It is just a theory. Most of the theory is logical but not all of it is practical or works as well as people claim it does. It is really a method, a starting point if you will, to enable or assist in playing a balanced strategy, so to take some of the guesswork out of decision making because by using it, it kind of makes your mind up for you regarding certain decisions.

As far as I can tell, JNandez is a bit of a slave to this hand range based GTO system. It is wrong to be a slave to it in PLO because unlike in NLHE, we have so much more info in front of us we can garner from our opponents betting, bet sizing, and our own holdings, so consequently we often have relatively easily definable equities.

So I get why in NLHE that using ranges mainly makes sense, because NLHE compared to PLO is a game of far less certain information. But in PLO when certain pre flop 3 bet then 4 bet sequences happen from certain table positions, by certain players, with certain effective stack sizes, it is just plain garbage to start running sims against arbitrary ranges as we can define much narrower ranges using common sense fairly obvious logic.

He makes some ridiculous equity assumptions for weak AAxx hands but doesn't mention or possibly even understand that weak AAxx hands can sometimes have only ~12% to 22% in certain spots AIP against certain other pre flop action that is 3 way and are often ~28% to 33% equity AIP 3 way. His analysis is made worse by the fact that we aren't always AIP if we are deepish stacked, whether we are HU or multiway.

This fairly recent new trend of GTO play based on hand ranges could so easily be proven to be a fair bit wrong in some or many areas in 6 months or a year or whenever, but some players and coaches are adamant that it is definitely correct right now. I am not an expert at all at NLHE but in PLO I can see many holes in using hand ranges as a big influence to our decision making, not just in the area of JNandez weak Aces miscalculations and incorrect assumptions but also in other areas of PLO.

Doug Polk hasn't come back to me yet regarding his offer to me to replace JNandez as the resident Upswing PLO coach. I think he was put off by my demand to receive 25% equity in Upwing poker plus free use of his hair stylist once per week.

I'm a lab member and it annoys me Doug is sooooooooo upset Upswing was called a scam while he himself throws that term around so loosely with what seem like well run companies with well designed software (regardless of whether you put full stock in their calcs it's undeniable they are making people better). Hypocrisy is a trust killer. With that said I still think it's a minor thing. Would have rather see him just brush it off and not try to act so sanctimonious about it.


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hmm rofl

same guy talks about applications of nlhe as if it's a godsend

I don't get why people aren't more mad at doug. he's literally running a minor scam. he claims on his site to be the best nlhe player in the world (!!!) and has a whole bunch of fancy graphics and stuff on his site to sucker people in. reminds me of those spam sites that pop up and tell you how you can make $7453 a week with one special trick. and his whole blowing off being a massive douchebag to people (does he realise these are people? whow make mistakes? with feelings?) douchebag by saying he's just trolling/meming. I mean I don't actually care, but he isn't in a place to look down on others and **** like that.

eh actually I just had a look at his site right now. he may have removed the bit claiming to be best nlhe player - was there since ~launch to about a week ago