A few things:

1) The HUD argument is asinine, and very old. People who argue that the HUD takes skill out of the game are unbelievably wrong and don't even know why they are so wrong. First of all, analysing most HUD stats beyond vpip and pfr is pretty complicated. For example, knowing that someone cbets 80% is great and all, but figuring out how to counter it best is a complicated problem. Do you check raise more, or just call more? What about his defend cbet to check raise %? If he is defending a lot do you then depolarize your check raising range? What if he rarely 3bets your check raises, then do you apply a pretty linear check raise/check call/ check fold strategy? Maybe if he is doing a lot of cbet folding you can check raise him with a very polarized range, and just check call your mid strength hands. Wait, but then all of a sudden you see him get to showdown with a hand that you thought was not in his range based on his stats, so you now have to immediately rethink your strategy and figure out if he is possibly adjusted to your strategy. I wonder if he knows that I noticed that and is aware that I am changing my counter strategy now?

That is all based off of basically 1 pretty basic flop HUD stat. Reading a HUD doesn't simply mean "he is loose, go all in more!!!" I think one thing that live players and/or the anti HUD crowd don't quite understand is that when online poker is being played at a fairly high level, most of what is going on is strategy versus strategy. This is not to say you are not playing each hand to win the most amount of money possible, but everything is framed within the context of attempting to come up with a strategy that will most easily exploit your opponent, or avoid being exploited by him/her. Most live players pretty much just try to own people every hand. And livb not using a HUD is somewhat of a unique case with successful online players. He plays HU mostly, only 1 tables, and plays against a pretty small player pool.

2) Some very good live players do some things that online players are either incapable of, or unaware of. I don't mean they are incapable because it is not within their understanding or skill set, I mean because of who they are. Take two examples, Vanessa Selbst, and Daniel Negreanu. Vanessa scares the **** out of some amateur players in live tournaments, to the point where they are literally afraid to play pots with her. So they will do things like rip 50bb over her raises, make absurd folds because they just don't want to deal with her, or get panicked into making terrible calls. A lot of the time if a random was playing the exact same style as Vanessa, an amateur might look at him and say "pfff **** this guy who does he think he is bluffing every hand?" But with Vanessa they get their seat card and say "oh jesus christ, I hope she doesn't yell at me."

Kind of on the opposite end of the spectrum is Daniel. Daniel is aware of his "character" in live tournaments and plays off of it. If he gets into a pot vs a random amateur, he can often convince the guy to do what he wants, because the guy wants to be Daniel's friend. He has spent the last 6 years watching Daniel on TV with his homegame friends, and now Daniel asked him politely to check behind trips on the river? Sure! This just happens all the time, and is obviously going to be more effective in main event fields than in high rollers and that sort of thing.

3) Virtually everything learned from playing online can be pretty easily transplanted into live poker, the same cannot be said for the opposite. Learning elaborate preflop strategies may not be necessary for live poker, but it would be very easy to simplify everything you have learned when playing against live players. I don't see how being an expert at live tells could possibly help you when playing online, except for the odd timing tell.

It's pretty easy to explain why online poker is viewed by most online players the way Olivier does. The average online poker game is played much more closely to a GTO solution than the average live game. Of course not saying that we are actually that close right now, but just that it's closer than live. So from a strictly technical and fundamental perspective, online poker is more "advanced" than live. I'd say rather than chess versus checkers, it's more like online poker is chess in 2013, and live poker is chess in 1950. That would all be valid and fine, except that they are actually two slightly different games, because of the human aspect of live poker. Having to put chips into the pot, socializing, making or avoiding eye contact, controlling your breathing, not being embarrassed or pressured, and observing all of those things in your opponent make the game different from online poker.

So in short, online is played on a more complex level, but the nature of live allows for extra variables that exist completely outside the boundaries of game theory and normal technical analysis.

Live is like Scrabble. Online is like Words With Friends.

Edit: oh, and Ansky's post above this is outstanding.

Ansky of course nails it, but the sad thing (or perhaps great thing) is that this same argument can even still be in dispute in 2013. If anyone can possibly think Oliver (or what ansky just wrote) is wrong or off base, then to be frank, they truly have no idea what's even remotely transpiring in the poker world. If you find a high level winner arguing anything to the contraire they most likely are just trying not to tap the tank.

thank goodness his post didn't get posted in the make poker more fun for rec players thread.

Gathering statistics is time consuming, requires memory and recall, and is labor intensive.

When software running in the background does it for you, it's little different than some person doing it for you. Some "thing" is working on your behalf. Organized, categorized statistics are not a part of the natural landscape. They must be manufactured.

A HUD may not make decisions any easier, but it makes the overall online game easier by some degree.

And I agree Ansky's post above is outstanding. I've never seen that point explained so clearly.

Is it just me or did Danny Stein's post seem like he's a bit mad (bro)?

The number of winners live poker, per player per tournement is probably equal the number of winners in online poker per player per tournement.

Olivier doesn't realize with so few tournements variance live feels alot diffrient than variance online where ever second you can fire up 30 tables and go. Olivier thus whines like a (insert your choice words here) and equates this variance in live poker, as to the difference between chess and checkers, and insulted live players with his comment, regardless of wether it was true or false.

end this thread before anyone else goes off the deep end...

online = HUDs, multiaccounting, collusion, and various other things that allow non legitimate winning players to win

live poker has far more variables that need to be accounted for and many more skills needed for sustained profitability


the statement is beyond ridiculous and immature

Meh.. busquet kind of annoys me more and more with his high horse philosophical idea spewing #enough

Searched his twitter to see what might have instigated this, but it seems like the chess/checkers thing was out of the clear blue sky..

4 hours earlier he was talking about i-addiction compared to land-based in casinos. I guess that started it.

Ewa Bakun ‏#igaming addiction much easier to combat than landbased, Ed Sutor
Olivier Busquet ‏@EwaBakun what is the basis for this statement? how do we know it is much easier?
Ewa Bakun ‏@olivierbusquet tracking online behaviour is easier and every player's movement is known due to technology

Olivier Busquet ‏@EwaBakun but isn't it so much easier to feed an igaming addiction than a landbased one? Also, privacy seems to remove even more inhibitions

".... A bill to allow Delaware to have two more casinos - one in Sussex County and one in New Castle County - will soon be in front of state lawmakers. That is not sitting well with Dover Downs Casino and Hotel. Ed Sutor, the casino's president and CEO, says the state can't handle any more casinos...."

LINK article from May 10, 2013

I also don't think that the checkers vs chess analogy is a good one.

Live and online are essentially the same game, the biggest difference is the information (statistics) our lack there of.

Online poker provides us with so much more information. We can check to see what our opponents mucked at showdown. We are given exact percentages of different actions being taken. And on top of all of this additional information, the hands are played so much faster that you can compile a significant sample in a relatively short period of time.

Since there is this big lack of information in live poker, there is a lot more estimation needed. What this essentialy does is make coming up with a strategy far more complex online due to all of the information available, versus more of a guessing game in live poker.

Although please note that I have totally ignored the human element and the differing skills needed in live poker.

Didn't think about this to long, and I am sure I can come you with something better, but online is more like a science where live is more like an art/sport.

It all comes down to this. If you say your kind of poker (online vs live, cash vs tourney) is easier than you need to prove it by switching and becoming a huge winner. If you don't/can't do that then you are all hat and no cattle as Doyle would say.

^ science vs art is the best analogy so far..

..there is a bit of both in both but the distribution is lopsided.

Ansky, does the game of poker somehow get magically easier if your standard reg game of 5/10 10/20 online nlhe sat live and played against each other instead ? Assuming they all got about the same amount of experience live ?

Easier for who? There are bound to be players who give away tells, get frustrated or bored playing live, and some who excel at that stuff. All the same skill sets that applied online are still applicable, but now there is an additional factor to deal with. It definitely would change things up a bit, and I'm sure the pecking order would move around some.

so, there really isnt anything that makes the game easier for anyone, just another factor to deal with and depending on how you cope with that factor the game becomes harder/easier for some? Which brings my intended point to table - Live isnt easier because it's live, it is just a different set of playerpools which in turn makes live easier(a shocker, whales,fish,generally bad people prefer to play live!!!) I once played a live game with blinds equilavence to 0,15/0,3 or so but my opponents were of high and nosebleed quality. Obviously it was a drunktard game for funs(preparty and they "had" to join in so they weren't partypoopers) but my point is that the idea of online random multiple tougher than live game of the same size is just wrong, the game the same - It is just so much easier to tableselect live because you really do not need to table select almost ever and it is still softer than a generic online table.

If WCGRider got the chance to play durrrr for 5k hands at skyhigh stakes, but he also got the option to pick between online and live on the rules that they have to one table and at the same pace, what would he pick?


What option would durrrr pick?

--

WCGRider should be well enough of a player not to become handicapped by not having a HUD onetabling at a very slow speed "live" compared to online?, but I am pretty sure he wouldn't want to face durrrr live if he got the option to play the hands online.


edit:

Or if we put it this way, if the HUD's magically disapeared over night online, not possible anymore. The games would still be as tough to beat IMO, just not as perfectly played as today in a gto-sense. The playerpool wouldnt shift much, it is still much more convenient for tough successful players to play online in their own home, multittabling. Or well, I guess games would be softer because fish would survive a bit longer, but a regtable would still be a tough regtable.

HUDs don't "allow non legitimate winning players to win". HUDs give more information that the player has to interpret and use to make decisions. Poor players can **** up the interpretation of HUD stats just as easily as poor players live can **** up reading other player's tendencies.

Even if your bitching about "non legitimate winning players" online was correct, it's still a bull**** red herring.

live = collusion, marking cards, angling, peeking neighbour's cards, and various other things.

I agree with what you say, but we probably disagree on exactly which statement and who made it.

This is correct, and I will add that by far the most important difference between live and online poker these days is the quality of opponents you typically face. Online and live poker are mostly the same thing.

It's obvious to all non-dummies that Ansky is right. What is interesting is that there are some nuances to it. For instance I have seen some successful online guys epic fail for months on end to successfully adjust to live poker in ways that seem so basic. I have also played the exact same player online and live both in tough pro-heavy aggro games at the same stakes and seen him play borderline flawless poker online then make rookie mistakes live even though the caliber and nature of the games were so similar.

You state this like it's some kind of revelation. It makes me wonder how many other people actually think when people say live poker is easier they think it's being referred to as a different game. No. It's easier because the players on average are a lot worse. Not sure how this hasn't always been extremely obvious.

What perpetuates this unnatural imbalance?

How can it be that live players are worse players in general, and therefore it is easier to beat the live game, but good players do not flock to casinos and beat it?
It's easy money just waiting to be picked up..

One might suspect that after so many years of this being common knowledge, easier games of live play would have attracted all the "sharks" the environment could handle, and the game would no longer be so easy. But they haven't.

Could it be possible that just because "the players on average are a lot worse", it doesn't mean the game is easier to beat?

I think Dani is spot on for the most part (other than the part about people giving me chips just because they think I'm going to yell at them), but I don't think live poker doesn't involve strategy vs. strategy play rather than just hand vs. hand. I think the key difference is that in live poker in situations where you don't have great information, you have to guess better about what someone's strategy probably is.

One of my biggest skills is taking one piece of information from one hand that I saw someone play and extrapolating information in a really precise way to apply it to other situations. Because I'm able to do that, I guess people's ranges well. So while I don't have a HUD telling me what someone's check/raise frequency is on a particular board texture, I might be able to guess what it is based on how polarized, bluffy, or risk-averse I think she is based on other hands I've witnessed. And then once I've made an educated guess about the numbers, I'm still developing a strategy to counteract the strategy I think she has taken.

Against the best players, I'm still doing strategy vs. strategy and trying to be as unexploitable as possible and as close to GTO as I think necessary. Against worse players, I'm playing whatever line I think is best to maximize my gain in that particular hand. So there's an additional variable when the skill level of the players is wildly varied - whom do I try to trick and against whom do I play more straight-forwardly? And what to do in multiway pots? I think those are some of the variables that live play allows for that the tougher online games don't really.

Olivier's comment was obviously meant to be inflammatory and I have no idea why he posted it. It's simplistic and somewhat elitist to think that the skills that make someone a better number cruncher make someone a better strategist or that those abilities are "tougher" than those which make someone good live (like the ability to extrapolate, or what some might call intuition). That being said, you obviously have to have a higher raw intelligence to succeed online than you do to simply beat live just because it's much more competitive due to the convenience and desirability of playing from home and playing so many hands at once. But to be able to crush live? I'm not so sure that the best online players are necessarily capable of it, because it takes different skills.

i don't think you know what "close to gto" even means, and you don't play online poker anymore seeing as you would probably be a loser at midstakes these days.

it was a bad analogy overall, but his point was an obvious one: the minimum strategy required to win in a live game is much simpler than the minimum strategy required to beat the same stake in an online game. to play live optimally or maximally exploitable requires a more complex strategy due to the lack of statistical information (requires player to gather that info himself) and the live presence factor. but in order to beat the games you can play a really basic strategy to beat live games due to how soft the player pool is.

regards,
captain obvious