Good luck with everything, it's an interesting project and will be following. As someone else said it takes some guts to put yourself out there like this, I hope you manage to take what's constructive out of the feedback and stay positive. Have subbed to the yt channel and may check out some of the vids on your site in the future.

Other thing to mention is that, like everything, making training content is a learning curve. Things like presentation, depth of analysis, framing of concepts, these things will refine and get better over time. Constructive feedback is good because it helps accelerate this curve, but just tearing things down for the sake of it isn't that helpful to anyone.

100% man, I'm listening to all the feedback and tweaking the more recent videos so they're higher value, both the free content and paid stuff. Appreciate the kind words and cheers for following!

21-27/10 Update - Release the Bitcoin floodgates!

Poker this week was pretty average in every sense, not much to report on there. Instead I wanted to talk a bit about something else I know very little about! For the last few weeks during workouts, walks, motorbike rides, I've been listening to an insane amount of crypto/finance podcasts, interviews, news pieces, price predictions, etc. It's basically been IV drip for 5-6 hours a day, every day. I'm caveating this entire article in the fact that I am not a trader, financial advisor, economist, and follow this space purely from a recreational perspective - and obviously I have a large Bitcoin position. I want to talk about my observations of what's been happening recently in the space and what I think is going to happen going forward.

For those who don't know, 22% of all USD was printed this year (2020). This just seems like an absurd number, even to someone who has nothing more than just a common-sense understanding of the topic. Anyway, because of this it's expected that the purchasing power of the USD will drop 10-15% per year over the next wee while. Naturally, corporations holding large cash positions on their balance sheets are looking for ways to preserve their purchasing power. Holding large cash positions in the treasury is becoming almost financially irresponsible with the increasing rate of inflation. So what are the alternatives? As I understand it there are three options, big tech stocks, gold, and Bitcoin.

The problem with big tech (which is the current preferred store of value for large entities) is that there's a lot of moving parts, geopolitical relationships, regulatory bodies, etc etc all have a big impact on the value, as well as dilution and so on. It's also not a practical way to transfer wealth as moving Apple stocks around the world isn't that straight forward.

The problem with gold is that its supply increases by 2% every year, and the more demand there is for it, the higher production will be. Over a long enough time span, your investment in gold will lose value because the total supply increases. It's also an impractical way to transfer wealth for obvious reasons.

Bitcoin on the other hand is the 'hardest' investment option of the three with a finite supply which is essentially immune to government and regulatory bodies seizing or shutting it down. It is a very practical way to transfer wealth. Your investment in Bitcoin retains 100% of its value over any time span.

We've just seen Michael Saylor (rocket scientist billionaire CEO) shift half a billion dollars of treasury assets into Bitcoin in his publically traded company MicroStrategy. This unprecedented move IMO will open the floodgates for corporate America buying up huge Bitcoin positions.

In 2017 I was on the IV drip of crypto news and updates like I am now and I feel like the constant bombarding of my brain with every piece of content on the subject helped enable me, as an amateur, to time selling off my BTC about 2 weeks before the massive crash. My intuition/gut went from being incredibly bullish to incredibly spooked out by the shift in market sentiment that I was receiving from the constant exposure to the space.

Obv could 100% be coincidence, bias, etc etc. But maybe there's something worthwhile to be said about being strapped into the cryptosphere as tightly as I have been when it comes to intuition.

Right now everything I'm being exposed to is screaming at me to buy bitcoin. I truly feel as though over the next few months and years we're going to see an absurd amount of institutional money enter the space and that covid is catalyzing this and that it's going to happen much more quickly than we'd have predicted. With global population using Bitcoin still under 1%, I think we're on the brink of a huuuuge wave of adoption. The bullish sentiment in the space currently is unlike anything I've felt over the last 3 years and IMO rivals the peak of the 2017 bull run.

Not financial advice. Just a finance rec rambling. Exciting times. What do you all think about this?



For anyone interested in what I was talking about above and wants more ^

I like Bitcoin, but I'm not hot on the high money supply = high inflation argument. Japan has been running a 2x debt:GDP ratio for a decade and still struggles to hit 2% inflation. Interest rates in the US have been near zero for that long.. still not hitting inflation targets.

I'm not sure what's going on exactly, but I'm skeptical of the idea that purchasing power will decrease because of the stimulus this year.

Yeah fair enough, time will tell I suppose!

Anybody want to get into this stuff, Google "Modern Monetary Theory" (MMT)and knock yourself out. Pretty much every economist on the planet discussing/arguing (and a fair bit of ranting ) about MMT at the mo.

Really enjoyed the more detailed delve into a common spot in the vid from a couple of days ago.

Glad to hear it mate!

Not a bad idea to buy some bitcoins but considering how high they're currently trading, I wouldn't buy them *right now*.

My 2c

I'm becoming a little confused by the content you're putting out. Naturally, there are hands where you explicitly share that they are exploit plays, however, there are other hands (such as the KJs just posted on YT )

where, you share some quite concrete theoretical analysis. Such as flop being a range bet, and then giving a host of reasons why turn is a check with your combo - neither of which are remotely close to theory, however, could be argued as good exploitable adjustments. You generally make a lot of contradictory statements/hypotheses and there needs to be clarification as to why.

I think you need to be more explicit as to when you are deviating from theory, and/or exploiting, because at the moment there isn't any distinction. I have a sense that your understanding of theory isn't quite strong enough (i am basing this off limited YT videos fwiw) and therefore your content is more on the 'feel' side, which may confuse viewers/subscribers.

It's important that your customers know what they're getting, rather than having to decipher what is exploit and what is theory for themselves (after all, that is the very reason they pay you for your service).

meale, what do you think separates you from the good/avg regs in the games you play in?

Are you just better at everything or?

gl, keep it up man

Hey Ben,

I have learnt over the last month that I really need to be more detailed with the explanations in the videos as I tend to omit a lot of important stuff. Many of the current videos were filmed in bulk before I started receiving any of this feedback, but I can assure you the more recent ones (probably going live mid to late of this month) do a better job in this regard.

Many of the hands/videos, including the KJs hand, make it seem as though what I actually did is what I'm saying should be done every time. Clearly turn is a pretty standard bet with this hand most of the time, but because I checked which is ofc the low frequency option, it now comes across as though the frequencies are backwards.

What's way more important about this hand and I should spend more time talking about is how people are going to massively under-raise Jx on the flop, over-defend 66-TT to a turn barrel and how peoples' river leading range is going to be too face-up and how we can occasionally check some hands like this one without sacrificing any EV to allow us to do better in other parts of the gametree.

As I said, I wasn't trying to advocate for a high frequency turn check, but will mention that with nodelocking for adjusted lower flop raise freq and turn overdefence, checking KJ back on the turn isn't 'not remotely close to theory'.



In any case, the explanations are far too watered down need to be better! I will start removing some of these older videos that don't add much because I agree they don't position the information in a valuable way at all.

Thanks as always for the Feedback Ben.

I mean not to rain on your parade, but the fact you had to nodelock to reach a 30% check back frequency means ben was pretty much right, also you might want to add bigger sizings to your sims on turn in 3bet pots in position, lots of spot where you want to cbet small flop and then pot or overbet turn

If theory dictates it's a 30% check back or that betting gains us no EV, then I just think it's a bit harsh to use the term "not remotely close to theory" was all lol.

Is that 30% turn check back theory or an exploit? I still don't know what that solve is. If it's nodelocked according to your own view about the pool, it's an exploit and not theory.

Your turn strategy is skewed based on your 1/3 flop decision (which is the thing that i referring to by saying it wasn't remotely close to theory). In turn, the strand of the game tree ott that you have screen shotted should arrive with 1-2% frequency, and therefore not really worth node locking/pursuing.

I mean it's the theoretical strategy for how I think pool plays flop vs 1/3 and turn tendencies. I guess you could call that an exploit.

Not sure what you mean by saying 1/3 flop isn't remotely close to theory.

that a significant amount of EV will be lost using a single sizing of 1/3 as opposed to a sizing of half or even 2/3

theory doesn't take into account how pool plays meale, so it's definitely an exploit, it can be a totally fine exploit though, not really what is being discussed, all that's being pointed out is to be clear when what you're talking about is an exploit or theory, nodelocking is a way of figuring out the best exploit, not the GTO play

I didn't advocate for a single size flop strategy in the video, iirc I glossed over flop pretty quickly because I wanted to talk more about turn. Clearly I need to bet something on the flop with my hand, but that doesn't mean I'm therefore betting every hand in my range for that size.

Again , this is my fault really for not saying much about flop and in future I think i should not skip over/rush past streets to prove a point about a later street, even if this means blowing out the video length a bit.

Tbf though, to your point, I would submit that using a 1/3 with range simplification in this specific spot in this player pool might actually not lose a ton of EV in practice. In these games people I find are really going to struggle reaching the optimal check raise freq here!

Okay yes, I definitely used the wrong word then a few posts back where I was talking about 'theory dictating the 30% checkback'. Apologies.

At the end of the day in these vids I'm just playing poker hands and talking about what I think works, from a profitability standpoint and kind of hate having to caveat things into epxloitative or theory territory as it's all just a strategy in the end. I don't really want to have to sit down and first go through the pio 'theory' of a spot and then juxtapose it with a whole second exploit-based commentary - imo each hand would take more than 10 minutes to go over and would just end up like some zzz polker hands review which i have nothing against but I find quite slow/uninteresting when I can just pio it myself. It should be pretty obvious by now that I feel more inclined to talk about exploits for the basis of these videos and that's for the most part the direction I want to take them going forward.

When I started making these videos I would have maybe 1-2 points in mind I wanted to get across and then omit everything else. But I'm starting to think that introducing more theory stuff into the videos or at least coming up with a plan for how I can efficiently convey the main points I want to talk about without omitting important datapoints or somehow obscuring what a good theoretical approach to the spot would look like, will be a better way forward.

Yeah, what xeno said for sure. Fwiw, I get what you mean regarding not wanting to overload videos with unnecessary zzz commentary. It's just a learning curve to get across everything you wanna say in a short time frame. Either way, these are all good building blocks for your content moving forward.

Thanks man for taking the time to mention this all to me today. I'm hoping in a month or so's time the videos going out are much more robust overall and more sound from a theory standpoint without turning into a FindingEquilibrium Pio rant. Hopefully we can reconvene in a month or two regarding the quality of free content and it's in a better place.

Cheers lads!