I know RP and I love arguing, but the point is

I'm saying this because there are a lot of rec players who read this but don't post. It's for them. Rec guys who start playing or start taking poker a little more seriously run in trouble quickly because they try to play every hand like they see Ivey do on tv. Those guys are great for the game. They're more fun to play with than pros and OMCs, and they increase the player pool. Pros will always play, retired nits will always play. Rec players have other responsibilities and it needs to be worth it for them to play on a regular basis. If they understood that you can beat the game getting good at the common spots and totally avoiding the difficult spots (yes it doesn't maximize hourly but your hourly is still way above $0), they'll maintain and even grow a bankroll, take on the amount of risk that they want, that's good for the game. It's good for them, for the people playing regardless, in terms of player pool and enjoyment.

What?

No man...all my posts are clearly laid out and my points are very specific.

Sun will always rise...

So if you're bad, don't go for "thin" spots?

Noticed I said the same thing in 2 sentences?

Just read the the last two pages, and I agreed with all three of you but can't figure out how that's possible...

eldiesel, are you saying that when people ask a question, we should tell them that we can't give them the real answer cause they'd **** it up?

Incoming theory, the closer you play to GTO the more variance you are going to have this is all about looking for that 51% and with it comes swings. The other option is to play exploitively this means putting yourself in spots that can be exploited by others and betting based on opponents tendencies, in hopes to receive additional value.


Chances are none of us are really the best at either strategy. But my point was thin value on GTO style can be a 51% vs 49% because you are ahead of your opponents range so you bet the river. Whereas exploitively a river bet for thin value could mean trying to get additional money on the river that other players would not have.

TLDR : thin value has multiple meanings.

Why do you think arguing and being clear are mutually exclusive?

I wouldn't be proclaiming yourself the king of clarity with responses like this.

This is exactly it. If the choices were

1) avoid the spot
2) try to do well but lose

why don't you guys get that #1 is better?

I missed it, you should be clearer next time.

It's not like the "geniuses" on here have the "real answer." I know they all think they do. But even if they did, the answers are so geared towards guys who have played every week for years. Guys who are just starting to play regularly read about some advanced concepts and get overwhelmed and play too many hands and 3- and 4-bet too much and lose quickly and are discouraged from playing more.

The last few hands I commented on in this sub forum were basically "getting better at common spots will help so much more than asking strangers about a very uncommon spot against an unknown V." That's the best advice the OPs can get and no one offers that and it's terrible for the game.

But I didn't start this discussion. Someone weeks ago said you can't win by foregoing thin value spots, you'd go broke and it's just a matter of time. (It was said via a metaphor so BGP will have a reason why the guy didn't actually mean that, just like Andees comment) I was trying to explain why that's insanity. If your ceiling hourly is $X, it is completely doable to avoid some situations and only win $(90%)*(X) instead. Not only is it doable, in practice it'd turn plenty of players from losing or breakeven players to small winners. It's better for those players and for almost everyone in their player pools.

You're acting like Im saying the world is flat. All Im saying is that the tighter you play the less hands you need to get your true win rate. The looser you play, the more variance you will have and the more hands you will need. You just proved my point for me by saying if you folded every single hand (the very definition of playing as tight as possible), you dont even need to play any hands before we know your win rate).

From what Ive read here it seems that the common wisdom is that 10BBs per hour is crushing the game. Thats probably true because there arent that many winners in the first place and most bigger winners move up, but 10BBs is certainly not the ceiling, especially if you are good at table selection and play at a big enough room where table selection is an option. A lot of very good players also have very big egos and will butt heads with other good players all session, when a different player who may not be quite as good but has less of an ego moves to a different table and runs it over for much more profit with much lower variance.

You also need a lot less hands to get your true win rate if you play during the afternoon with 6 guys over 75 who never make any moves and play with their hands face up.

Actually, no. Aggression factor is the determinate here, not tight v. loose. Interestingly enough, winning LAGs actually have much less variance than TAGs with the same winrate. This is because LAGs profits are coming from a lot of small/medium pots with a lto of bet/folding, and TAGs are more often involved in fewer pots, but their profit often comes from very large pots early in the hand that have high variance after the money went in.

This is true, but is due to the fact that you have better info on your Vs range, not because the Vs fold a lot.

Check out bip!'s math on 95% confidence winrates earlier ITT. Even for a low standard deviation player, the +/- on a real winrate is huge when the sample is only 100 hours.

After 100 hours, it would hard to get 95% interval much less than +-12bb/hr. (99% interval +-18bb/hr)

Hmm. Thats interesting. Im not sure I agree but I have to put some thought to it. I think maybe my defintion of a LAG is different than yours. I dont think of myself as a LAG, but maybe Ive shifted more and more towards the LAG play you are talking about over the years.

The few weeks ago discussion I recall was someone advocating folding QQ if someone shoved AK and showed.

You can be a winning player with a basic play-it-safe gameplan, but I'm not sure what you are suggesting the role of the forums should be to serve the person executing that style. Should we have a rating system for tough spot, common spot? What, in practical terms, are you trying to say?

People want to minimize down swings, not variance. Downswings are a factor of winrate AND variance.

A top notch player may have higher variance and smaller downswings than an average winning player - solely because the top notch player's WR is superior (and the change in variance isn't as significant).

I don't agree a TAG would have lower variance than a LAG.. but I really hate LAG and TAG as terms. Mainly because a crusher is tight and aggressive compared to fish. The shades of "tight" are what get broken into lag and tag.. but that is all subjective and usually just flexing in the mirror.

(and fwiw.. some want to maximize WR regardless of variance)

Can we add this as a sticky and close this abortion down?

lol at people reading the stickies

Thank you for reading my mind and saying what I couldnt seem to articulate clearly.

How did y'all find out about my beauty pageants?

If one read the entire thread, this would be "rediscovered" several hundred times throughout.

The very root of the arguments in this thread is a very common misunderstanding of what variance means. People use it as a substitute for "downswing" and from there the conversation is ****ed.

Another overlooked aspect.. if one is not a winning player, no amount of variance reduction will reduce downswings.

Welcome to poker!

Gstandard,imoG

Next time it folds to the small blind and he looks at me in the big blind and asks "Do you chop?". I am going to answer very seriously "No, you take it.. I can't stand the variance" and give him my big blind. (In honor of this thread)

Finally got my 2/5 WR back >$50/hr after ~330 hours. Binked +3500 last night.

Too much variance imo.

Nice work, Johnny!
Bip! Your new SN needs to be 'ifoldmybbtoreducevariance'

Exactly. All one needs to do is draw an x and y axis on a piece of paper and fill in an upward moving graph with downward spikes interspersed. There's the 'variance'. Yet if you connected all the upward spikes you'd notice the upward trend, i.e. the 'winrate'. I'm a stats fish and even I get it.

I use statistics often at work and it never occurred to me that people were using variance as a substitute for downswing ITT. It all makes perfect sense now.

wait 2 or 3 days and it will come back around again without fail