Great post bip. It's easy enough to find people performing genuinely well above expectation in the medium term. Once you factor in biases like only starting to track when things are going well and keeping quiet when they aren't it seems there are crushers everywhere when logically there just isn't nearly enough money going into the games to make that possible.

nitpick tho -- at 3σ (1000 hours) there'd still be one of the hundred fake crushers left, wouldn't there?

FWIW - nothing wrong with heaters, embrace them.

Sorry sir but I have at least one individual known to both of us who witnessed firsthand the...ahem..."messing up" of my old data.

Cheap-ass phones...

get an abacus. problem solved.

Abacus has no memory, newb.

3 sigma is 99.7%... 0.3% outside the range.. and 0.15% is actually finding themselves on a 1k hr streak of bad beats and broken phones . So there is 1/7th of a fake crusher left.

Do you have any idea how hard those things are to aim???

Those are the guys who moved to play FT and after 2 weeks - 2 months are never seen again.

Great thoughts.
Also, not headphoning up all the time helps. If there's a player who looks uncomfortable beside you Or within earshot, make some small talk about a movie or sports or something. These people come in and feel like a fish so they don't want to make a mistake therefore they play like a rock. It's important to get people to feel like they are at a home game because that's likely where they came from.
Also, don't snap call fish as they feel diminished when their bluff obviously goes wrong. Think about it for 5 seconds or something. I see good regs do this a lot and the fish almost instantly goes quiet every time.

FWIW, you really just need to be yourself.

Don't be fake and make stupid chatter, nobody likes that.

Don't treat them like fish and put them on some fake pedestal, nobody likes that.

Don't pretend you are thinking when you are not, I effing hate that.

Don't be a douche, unless you are one, then be yourself.

Look. At your hypothetical winning players stay throughout the night, whereas the losers' seats change 2-4 times by the end of the night. So the losers might be losing 60bb per hour but it's not the same loser and the losses for the individual can be more palatable.

Let's look at it another way. We say that out of the player pool, only about 1-3% are such big time winners that their win rate hovers around 10 bb/hr. There's also another 20-30% which are marginal winners to one extend our another and the rest 65% are losers. But this only means that for every big time winner there's not 6 losing players at a table, but 66 losing players. And out of the people who lose, there should be a small percentage that has titanic losses which fuels the poker economy.

The poker ecosystem is dynamic and a lot of people here views it as static. A ton of players -winning and losing alike- move in and out of the pool for all sorts of reasons. But the reality is that the winning players are a tiny minority that plays a lot and the losing players an overwhelming majority that plays sporadically. In between there's a pool of regs who win and lose marginally who also play a lot.

Other notes:

Regarding bumhunting. Please. Virtually every reg I see bumhunts. But their problem isn't table selection, it's that they are mediocre and they don't put the work. Moreover, I think that bumhunting is a process which sorts out the overall talent in a casino in such a way that it's distributed equally along each table. Bumhunters, if they re good at it, might gain a marginal advantage, but it's not as big as it seems, because the reg who stays behind is pretty likely to benefit from the joining in of a losing player who takes the seat of the bumhunting reg.

As far as people supposedly selectively entering results at their poker journal, I don't think it's what happening. One thing they may do is selectively count their stats after a certain date. I know I consider my stats after June of last year as more representative of where I am, because at that point I retooled it drastically compared to how I was playing before. I could be fooling myself of course.

The other thing that sustains people is the idea that they re running bad. And the truth is that they may be both running bad and have leaks they re disregarding. When you re running good and winning as much as you think you would be winning, it's very difficult to take a careful look at your game and see if you have leaks. Moreover, sometimes, it does take time to evaluate your game, even though you re working at it, because you need time and feedback from your results to determine whether certain moves you re making are EV+ or EV-.

So yeah, it can take a long time until you realize you either need to fix certain things or stop playing.

Anybody else found the 1/2 to 2/5 transition difficult? I just feel like all my leaks are exposed and magnified. I'm finding that value hands don't mean as much, because a lot of people tend to drop tP3k or whatever by the river, so I'm trying to survive and win by stealing small/medium pots here or there, which requires a lot more concentration, playing suited connectors for a raise and a double barrel etc. Problem is, one mistake like a wrong double barrel can kill a session's worth of profit. maybe I'm doing something wrong? Or a lot wrong? Also, of course, tilt and ego errors cost me a lot more at 2-5...

Since September of 2013:
$21,387 over 1186 hours (9.0 bb/hr) at 1-2 (99% at MD Live).
$15,792 over 647 hours (8.1 bb/hr) at 1-3 (Horseshoe Bmore).

$3,446 over 238 hours (2.9 bb/hr) at 2-5 (both Live and Shoe).

Sure, lol 2-5 sample size, and yeah, I guess I'm a winner so far... But that's still a big difference.

So ... just generic life rule #2: Don't be a douche bag?

Those games are very different. I think best bet is to keep shot taking, table selecting, and you'll figure out what's best for you.

Nice job.

One question, if you are crushing the the 1/2 and 1/3 why would you voluntarily move up to the 2/5 when you are making about $10 less per hour, especially when you acknowledge you still have leaks you need to work on?

You already have a decent sample at 2/5 and the players aren't suddenly going to get worse. Sounds like a lot of your profit comes from people calling your TPTK with TP3K and that isn't going to happen too much in 2/5. Also, at 1/3 river play is pretty straight forward whereas in 2/5 you are going to be faced with difficult decisions. If I were you I'd go back to 1/3. Yah you are a winner in the 2-5 but sounds like the 1/3 games are much more lucrative for you. Also, I suspect your variance will be much lower in the 1/2 and 1/3.

Can't really practice 2/5 in 1/2 if skill set required to max value isn't the same.

It's a small sample

why would I want to move up? Potentially more money... Becoming a better player... All the usual reasons.

As far as skill sets being different -- well, that's sort of my question. Are they? To me, it seems like they are... But maybe I'm just bad and missing value and don't fold correctly when I should? Did people who made the transition successfully think that different skill sets are required to beat let's say a weekday 1-3 game and a weekday 2-5?

No, my strategy at 1-3 did not entirely rely on people handing me stacks with worse top pair, but it was a nice pad to the win rate. Possibly worth 5 bb/hour, (obv. lol sample size but whatever) if you compare the win rates for me at 1-2/1-3 and 2-5. At 2-5, the guys stacking off with QT on a Q high flop exist on weekends, maybe... And they bust quickly. (not talking about people who soulread you for crap and call down correctly... Talking about the ones that stack off to an obvious pair of kings).

Maybe the problem is that all the best players in the room play 2/5+, leaving all the bad players in 1/3.

Because players are better in 2/5, in turn, they also make players in these games better, even the fish.

And in 1/3 game, you may actually never sit with a consistent winner or any winner for that matter.

Want to point out that horseshoe has a mississippi straddle that is utilized often from what I understand. Throws off the bb comparison.

You can be a winner with the same skill set at both games but you will not be winning anywhere near 10bbs without significant improvement. A lot more aggression is need to attain that same kind of wr.

Moving up is always hard. A new limit brings different sets of players that create new dynamics for you. It takes a while to get comfortable and adjust to these differences. Don't be discouraged. Just gotta keep plugging away and improving as a player.

I understood his post to be saying that WR doesn't necessarily remain constant as you move up AND that BR has to be significantly bigger so that it isn't an issue

Yes the skill sets are different. You can be a nut peddler at 1/3 and be highly successful whereas in 2/5 you will find you won't be get paid off as often when you hit your draws. The players are better at reading hands and picking off bluffs. Thin value bets on the river aren't as profitable and you will find yourself getting played back on the river more often. Also, the 5BB padding you are adding to your winrate due to calling stations is significant and shouldn't be discounted. And ya maybe as SuitedFours stated it could be due to a small sample size, although in live poker I think 250+ hour is sufficient to a least give you an idea of where you stand.

I'm not saying you are a bad player or anything like that and you are obviously crushing the lower limit games. But if you feel intimidated in 2/5 you should probably work on your game some more before moving up. There aren't going to be as many weak players you can beat up on.

his post was aiming to get to a definition of a 'reg'. there was nothing about who to play against in it

Don't know why this would be any different than other markets. Fwiw, 5/10 and 10/25 run a ton at Live so that keeps the upper echelon out of 2/5.

I definitely agree with the top two sentences

are the last point, t least in my room, I think there are some really good, long term winning reg/pros/semi pros who choose to stay in the 2/3 game which they crush, rather than move up to the bigger game where there are some better regs in a smaller pool.