Everyone needs to chill the $@#$ out and stop attacking each other.

Also, slow down so I can lurk along at a leisurely pace kthxbai

not trying to go to war ITT, but let me clarify my position, before i let this go.

mpethy, what you are saying, and calling 'winning image' has merit, and i never said it didn't.

while it has merit, it's not a universal poker truth (like Bobby Hoffs definition of 'winning image'.), and is more a reflection of your own subjective experience. (not all pros go through this, because they are clever enough to avoid it).

semantically, i think you are muddying the waters though, by choosing a term that was already taken, and giving it your own meaning and definition (maybe invent another term?). you give 'winning image' a bad meaning (ie. it's unprofitable), while the poker literature gives it a good one. (ie. profitable)

it's like coming up with a concept, and calling it 'fold equity', or 'implied odds', when those terms are already taken, and your concept is only similar in name only, but actually quite different. it's just confusing, and only hurts the discussion.
It kind of flies in the face of language itself, really.

I wasn't trying to coin a new phrase, only to describe a situation winning players will have to deal with. Also, can somebody please enlighten me as to who the heck these Hoff and Hanson people are? No offense intended to either of them, but I have never heard of them?

Sure 1/2 pros exist. I know three off the top of my head, and that's in Colorado (actually, one of them just bought a short-sale condo in Vegas and now plays primarily at the V). In Colorado, 2/5 rarely runs.

Of these 1/2 pros, one also gets disability money, and one has a wife/gf who is a dealer, so I suspect that she makes more than he does and that they are hoping to move to a bigger poker town where he can move up once she gets a dealer gig there. The other is just a young guy who is "living the dream" against poor competition and lack of BR to move or to move up. I doubt he'll last.

fish don't know a competant player when they see one.
they dont know what competance is.
if they did, they wouldn't be a fish; they would be competant.

they can't evaluate your play in the least.
even if they know you are crushing the game in the longrun, if you can't drag a pot that night, you will have a losing image at the moment. they could care less how good you are, or how well you can shuffle chips. you're running bad, and that's all that registers to them.
you can take this into account or not.
i have nothing invested in this argument, other than i want the state of the games to be better, and i'm sick of poker nerds ruining the games with their incessant poker prattle at the tables.
I figure if i can get through to a couple of ppl here, it will be worth it.
(2+2ers are prolly the biggest culprits).

Anyone thats been around live poker long enough takes what i'm saying as a given, it's so obvious. nothing i'm saying is radical, or against conventional wisdom. actually, if anything, i'm just re-iteratting conventional wisdom.
(don't talk poker at the table, SHUT IT!!)

the forum should be a place to burn off your need to talk poker, not as a spring-board to find fancy new poker concepts to fascinate your villians with at the live table.

False, if you ask them. They firmly believe they are good at poker - many believe to have "solved" the game; and they also believe they know other good players, and amazing, shocking, wow what a coincidence, what they view as competent players = the players who play like them.

They can evaulate your play if it fits into their rubric - in other words, standard ABC plays that they too would have played it that way, they can analyze and understand.

It's when you make a move that they never would have made; they simply CANNOT handle this, and it positively boggles them.

Really? Why is that?

Suppose I am perfectly happy to make 24k/yr. Suppose I don't give a **** about making more money than I need to pay my bills.

My goals are my goals, and there is no reason at all that you should be assuming that your goals are the only legitimate goals a person can have.

In actuality, my goals are somewhere between those I stated above and those you stated. If making money was what was most important to me, I would have kept practicing law. I actually am far more interested in working as few hours as possible to make a living, so I DO want to move up to 2/5+; again, not necessarily to make more money, but to work fewer hours.

you don't know who Bobby Hoff is??





do you know who Hal Fowler is?? (was)

I agree with not critiquing play at the table, but most of it is horrible so it doesn't make fish better. It does make them more afraid of being picked on, so therefore tighter, though. FE goes up, value goes down. In 1/2, value > FE, ime, so I go out of my way to be the welcome wagon chat guy at the table, and not the "if you'd made it $50 he would fold for sure" guy.

Not this. I was a huge fish when I started, but i could still tell who was as bad (or worse) than me and who was better. I could read the body language; I could see the much more consistent bet sizing, etc. I didn't know how to play back at them, so I mostly avoided them, but I could definitely tell that they seemed fearless and knew things I didn't know.

So I bought a book. It was not a great book, but it made me better. Most players stop there. Few go far enough to be 2+2 strat thread regs, but that doesn't mean they can't even tell who's good. Only serious droolers think it's all luck.

How is life back there in 2005?

If your goals are to
1] buy groceries
2] have a roof over your head
3] have a poker bank roll (downswings are inevitable).

GL pulling this off at 1/2 for more than 1-2 years, and have fun putting in 40+ hours a week trying.

*profitable*

it's called game selection.

Garick; sorry, i meant 'droolers', not 'fish'. huge difference.
damned semantics.

A few (hopefully constructive) suggestions:


@mpethy - you might consider making these threads COTMs, one per topic. That way the discussion can stay more focused and people who are interested in a topic can read/contribute there rather than have to suffer stupid Qs from guys like me or angry wall-o-texts from stampler .

One final suggestion. As someone who had read all of the Micro COTWs as they were being written, you (mpethy) might be uniquely qualified to 'translate' them to the live setting given your experience in both. Perhaps 2-3 freebees, and the rest could be part of the biz? (Trying to help you build a roll faster so that I can get front seats in the Hu4Rollz mortal combat match at 2/5 @ MGM between you and Stampler .

1/2 exists for rec. Players and for the casino. I've been in op's shoes (almost every player has at some point), but grinding away for $15/hr best case scenario doesn't make sense. I think you're looking at minimum wage money more likely. If you're a great player you have to do everything possible to get to 2/5+ (loan, stake, real job). I've been seriously considering quitting because i think my hourly in the new climate is a waste of time. I can't imagine being young and doing it for 15/hr.

Agreed, but what if as might be the case for the OP he views $15 + poker experience + poker enjoyment + ammunition for his coaching session as >> a higher hourly he could no doubt get at a non-poker job given his intelligence?

I would say 2/5+ is much more fun. Add in profit, plus a coach can beat that level on cruise control anyway so it would be the same as what he's doing now except more $. Plus there are way cooler jobs that pay in that range anyway

I just got my last post deleted because i defended myself??
and Setsy's suggestion to me deleted? what is going on here? pls, quote me where i attacked mpethy; i merely disagree with him. thats verboten??
i think i'm done here, and i mean LLS forum.

getting gagged when the mod is the one out of line (calling me insane), not me, is beyond absurd, and i will have no part of it.
GL.

Appeal to authority is not a logical fallacy, lolol.

The insane comment, for which I have already apologized, was because you appeared to be fabricating a charge that I was a loser in the 2/5 game at the MGM. Once you pointed out to me that you were not fabricating, and simply lacked elementary reading comprehension skills, I quickly apologized for my loss of temper.

Ok, APD Put me on a time out for that post anyway, so I'm done posting ITT.

Nice post setsy.

@stampler - disagreeing with an argument is fine and desirable as long as logic is provided. # of posts/greenness is irrelevant, agreed. However, in addition to doing that you are coming off as attacking the guy and being angry/worked up for some reason. Mpethy is one of the more reasonable people on the forum in terms of his willingness to see the alternative point of view and is very generous with his time in terms of sharing what he knows. From your exchange it's clear that you got even to him, which is rare. State your poker issues with what he said (I think you already did) and then just chill. You are kind of just derailing at this point. Btw - I agree with some of the things you wrote, such as about image, poker at the table etc. That's not the point. You are going overboard and are kind of on an equivalent of tilt, except with respect to a poker argument. If a friend saw you playing in this mental state they would advise you to walk away. So since the 3 of us represent like 25%+ of posters here over the age of 25, why don't we act like it and just take a break and then be civil and constructive going forward?

Yeah I definitely have no intention of telling OP what to do or what not to do, and if we were in the same player pool I'd support his decision to play 1/2, and I am a roll nit as well but from other posts I get the feeling that mpethy's biggest leaks aren't poker related but mind related (tilting, not being able to reloading to max because he tilts it off).

Fwiw I would suggest this time "in the wilderness" playing 1/2 as a time to fix this issues which are affecting your winrate while you are building your roll up for 2/5 and then be ready to start playing 5/10 once the economy starts getting better

In my best year in poker, I made 25% of what I made as a lawyer. Really, I cannot emphasize enough how little I care about making more money than what I consider to be "enough."

http://www.logicalfallacies.info/rel...-to-authority/.

^^^list of logical fallacies, with explanations, including 'appeal to authority', and 'ad-homineum' (personal attack)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment


I agree with you mpethy about the value of money.
its dirty, and if you have you and your familys' need met, thats all it's good for, imo.

I asked a young kid in Vegas recently who was carrying on about how he needs a big tourney score "why?", and he had no idea what i was talking about. it caught him totally off guard.
"well, it's a lot of money" was the only answer i got. everybody wants that.
i think its kinda sad that someone that young is resigning themselves to living their life in a casino, before they've even tasted life, and they have no idea why they are doing it.
they just wanna horde $, or buy bling, or be 'somebody' i geuss?
if they needed to pay their Moms medical bills, i would understand.

Awesome. Free knowledge that i was looking forward to obtaining has now been cancelled.

I have no idea why people would choose to try and flex their nuts in a thread like this, but thanks for ruining a perfectly good party.

I dont think its really a matter of whether or not you like/want money....its just that 2/5 plays simlilarly to 1/2, and there's tons more money on the table. So, if you're gonna grind 1/2 with great success - it's kind of like..."Why not?"

You guys are all on time outs. Go to your rooms.