This 80 page thread is sort of intimidating for a beginner like me where should I start with when it comes to watching your videos and such?

Print out the PDF from the 2010 thread. Wld be a gd starting place imo

vernerr You said you would adress it in your blog but just answer this.50nl What bankroll? Should i even attempt 50nl heads up with 1000 dollars ?

Hi guys, this lines probably get me some hate and flame, but I sent it to Verneer before as a PM - to not discuss it publicly without him having a chance to react - and he asked me to post it here so he can comment directly. I appreciate that, so here we go (I hope this won´t get the original thread derailed):


Hey Verneer,

I´m kinda disappointed about this 2nd version of your challenge and there are three reasons why (please forgive me if some of that might come off rude - I´m no native speaker!):

Reason #1 - WHY another challenge?

I already started the 2011 challenge with a bad feeling in my gut because I asked myself - what´s the reason he´s doing it? What´s the difference to 2010? Have the games changed that much? Did he get so much better that he will correct himself in certain points? Will he be specializing on FR Rush to show how to beat it? Your intro was pretty much the same as in 2010 - so I couldn´t come up with an idea of what would be different.

From all I read up to now neither was the case, you just seemed to play FR rush because a) it´s low variance (which shouldn´t really matter at the end) and b) it´s an easy way to generate high volume (which - again - doesn´t really matter unless you want to challenge your ego).

Reason #2 - WHY this rush?

Please correct me if I´m wrong - but you mentioned in the 2010-challenge several times that learning players should concentrate on their play and not on playing as many tables as possible. So, what does rushing from $200 to $10k in as little time as possible really shows? If it took you sth. in the ballpark of 350k hands that´s impressive, but what does that really help? It´s probably the volume an upcoming non-professional microstakes player gets together in ~1-1.5 years, so what does it really help to know that he can earn 10k in one to one-and-a-half years?!

Reason #3 - WHAT can we really learn from this thread?

The strategic content in 2010 was WAAAAY more dense than it´s in this year. You put up several hands, asked for questions, analyzed hands, discussed them in youtube, even made essays on positional plays and so on and so on. As far as I´ve seen in 2011 there was rarely to find anything in comparable quality.

You even went further and denied talking about adjustments you made to not letting people outplay you. WAT? I thought the reason for this series was to show players how to beat the stakes they´re playing? After having read twice (!) that you "won´t go into detail about your adjustments" it strikes me as the reason for the 2nd challenge is purely - please forgive me!!!! - ego. You obviously go mad when you´re losing and complain about running bad. If you ask me - and I´m one of the victims as well - one of the No1-reasons for struggle getting to SSNL and/or beyond is mental instability in handling variance. So, it does tremendously bad to see that a pro is consistently complaining about running bad (and I felt as if your maturity and thought-process in handling this was way better in 2010!). You mentioning that you made some adjustments to running bad (!!!) almost threw me off my chair, because how can a profitable way of playing suddenly can become badly - in a vacuum - just because you´re "running bad"?!

Summarized, if you just had named it a challenge to prove that you´re able to break the $10k mark within one year (not thaaat impressive btw. when playing ~300k hands - even moreso if you plan to have gotten it in half of the planned time ...) and donate the money, it had been a more honest and completely fine story. But you set it up as a way to help players, get them learning sth. and show them a route to take as well (as far as I´ve understood) - all that was very successfully done in 2010. From all I´ve read in 2011 though, players haven´t learned that much (probably even got some bad advice by watching you complaining about running bad) and by all certainty won´t be able to do the same (playing 200k hands within three months AND becoming better players in that time).

So, what were my suggestion instead? I had pretty much loved it if you just had asked yourself - what can a recreational player put up as volume in one year? Let´s say 250-300k hands. So you could´ve made a plan of playing 20k hands every month and just see where it took you after 12 months. You would´ve had plenty of time to do whatever else takes your responsibility and players could´ve gotten a real blueprint of how to escape the usnl within one year. The downside would´ve been that the amount of work you had with your thread would´ve been much more over the period of one year, but hey - you said, you love it, right?

I hope, you see that I don´t want to offend you or belittle you in any form - this is why I didn´t put it up in the public forum (whereas you should feel free to copy this text or parts of it in the forum with your comments - in case I´m not the only one thinking that way but maybe the only one who contacted you). My purpose was to offer my criticism in a manner that takes care of the respect you earned from me.

- Tackleberry -

For example:



Notice the bottom right hand corner - 205,704 hands, losing 11,028 Big Blinds. That's 110 BI's in 205K hands which is ~0.54 BI's/1000 hands.

So dont read it!!!!!!! Dont write a tl;dr about it. Dont try to brake the balls of one of the biggest contributors to the online poker community. You want him to hand you everything? Tell you exactly what to do with each hand? Truthfully I wish he never did the first challenge. He made the games a little harder for all of us. GTFO dingleberry

Agreed. You gotta do some work on your own yo!

Plus if you take a look around the PG&C forum you'll find that a lot of them are inspired by Verneer - Is his video's, inspiration and the fact he's doing this for charity not enough?

Haters gonna hate.

It's more than enough for me! I think it's awesome that Verneer does these threads and I have learned so much from them. A big THANK YOU! Verneer

When I got Tackleberry's PM I asked him to post this to the thread. I did this for a few reasons. One, I wanted to see if other people share his sentiment - partially or fully. Secondly, I did want to address some of the issues he mentioned, but it would take a long time to do it and I didn't want to get into a long PM correspondence over it.

So, if enough people felt the way that he does, I would go ahead and address it publically. I'll still respond to some of his issues ITT. It takes me little longer than most people to compose my thoughts and get them on paper the way I like, so if it takes me a little while to fully respond, it's nothing personal

Also, losing again today ... boooooooo! Can't seem to break through $5K.

Nice thread I like the updated graphs. With that said, my only advice would be to try to think outside the box a little more, take creative lines, and bluff people harder. Then you would truly crush!

I was a very appreciative reader of your 2010 challenge. Until the middle of last year, I had only played SnGs and the strategic advice you supplied in that thread (I read someone's PDF'ed version) including the situational hand charts were very beneficial to me. So I have to admit when you started your 2011 challenge, I read it looking for that type of information. Now that you've passed the stakes at which I play, I just pop in from time to time to see if you're done yet.

One aspect of your game that I really wish you expanded on while moving up that was not covered in your 2010 challenge is blind play. I think the vast majority of winning micro stakes players (up to $50) can't come close to the loss rates that you shared several posts up (#1157). I realize that choosing hands to defend with (calls, 3-bets & even raising in limped pots) is all very situational & villain dependent, but you did quite well with a few "it depends" situations your first go around.

Look, I definitely don't think anything is owed to anybody on here though, so I can't say I'm disappointed or whatever especially after I was helped with your prior challenge. I just happen to agree that I haven't been helped during your 2011 challenge...

I wish you good luck at it though!

actualy I do partially agree with him as for the strategic content of this thread compare to last year's one

I, too, thought this thread was a bit anticlimactic after last year's epic thread. I understand that the goal was probably different this time around, and I am still following it casually.

same, 2010 thread was alot better with strategic content

For sure.

I can't wait until April so i can watch your new video that came out because the 1st 5 of the series were really helpful and ive been killing 25NL the past 2 days since watching your videos.

+1

i'm in the same boat of just checking the thread now and then to see if you have moved up or how you're doing as you haven't shared a lot of stategy

I don't see why people are so adamant about seeing the same level of strategy as last years thread. I mean, wouldn't 90% of it just be a repeat of the content? What's the point of that? Just read the 2010 thread and you will have a great base to build your uNL game off of. I doubt much has really changed from 2010 to 2011.

However, a few new strategy articles would be much appreciated by the 2p2 community if you are willing. I'm sure there are a few new concepts you've tackled that you may have missed in your 2k10 thread, right?

One thing I would love for you to write about is how you study your HEM database...I, for one, don't know too much about how to do that other than the basics...if you could talk about how you set filters to look at certain types of spots that are commonly leaking, that would be truly awesome.

+1

This would be great. I know there's lots of cool stuff you can do with it but I have no idea how to do most of it other than the basics. I feel like it's a tool I could be using much more efficiently than I currently do.

Monday's CR video is on that very topic.

Because you have played half-stack, full-stack and deep-stack during this challenge, I wanted to ask you some very specific questions relating to playing very strong preflop hands when they encounter resistance.

For the sake of simplicity, assume a single opponent who is on the button. I raise pocket kings from the cutoff, my opponent shoves. With 1/2 effective stacks, I wouldn't even think of folding. With deep effective stacks (200+ big blinds), I would look closely at my opponent's stats.

Given a random opponent, without any stats available, how deep would the effective stacks have to be before you would fold KK? QQ? JJ? AKs? AKo? More importantly, how would you go about solving the problem?

You should write that book. I have improved since reading your challenges.

+1

^This.

The 2010 thread was tuitional to a level never before seen about the micros outside paid content.

This thread is more demonstrative, showing an example of what the game can still yield. A speculative performance.