disclaimer: I was not involved in any payouts discussions so these observations come from me as a player after leaving the company.

In these cases I think you should ICM chop or play. Adding the human element just adds too much knavery for me but we can just agree to disagree here.

I agree with you that the payouts are an artificial attempt to try to have your cake and eat it too. If you want to go with a wide pay table for more "winning moments" you should stick to that and reduce the rest of the payouts accordingly. The desire to pump first place, in an attempt to not lose participation, is pretty unscrupulous in my eyes and causes great harm across the player base by ramping up the variance and reducing the sustainability of the grind. Essentially what ends up happening is one winner of each tournament is happy, a percentage of extra players who make the money are happy, and then literally everyone else who participated is not happy in some way or form.

I've always felt that MTTs in general award too much to the top three and don't pay enough to spots 4-45 or something. I really strongly disagreed with the pay tables when I was able to see them because this is only making the problem worse. There's two outcomes to a decision like this:

1) Players actually prefer a wider spread of payout distributions and tournament revenue will increase
2) Players do not like the changes and tournament revenue will decrease

Stars has taken an inconsistent position by choosing #1 but then artificially pumping first. We can also see Stars is not using this scheme for higher buy-ins. In my experience this kind of inconsistency correlates strongly with a negative process. When you see the hiding of the rake display and then this attempt to mask the true pay table, I see a pattern of dubious business ethics and lack of regard for players here. Couple that with the opaque rakeback system and the Supernova Elite scandal and it's a pretty ugly. In an ideal world these kinds of decisions will have real consequences but unfortunately with big companies you often have the ramifications for decisions (positive or negative) hit you much farther down the timeline.

The irony is everyone in my direct line from Luke to Luke's boss to the head of Poker Innovation and Operations has always shown me stout moral character and a desire to always do the right thing. Numerous examples including personally processing player refunds, eating the overlay in the PCA Ultra Satellites, eating the overlay in the Sunday Million Anniversary, calculations for the server outages and DDOS attacks, and even a few cloak and dagger operations I was suggesting against rival gangs that were refused on ethical principle.

So where is this coming from? I don't know. I've actually never had a sustained business conversation with anyone calling the shots with the exception of Roger Lu. Roger is Director of Strategic Planning at the Stars Group but was always willing to cut loose and spend time with us. A true man of the people and a true AzN sensation. I suspect corporations are set up this way to devalue your individuality as a human and create an assembly line environment where you're only talking to your direct line and maybe your above line. For me personally though the system doesn't work as well when I'm managing hundreds of millions of product without being able to provide context and analysis to strategy decisions.

agree 100% on all this <3

Glad to see u crush hard Jae.
What would you say went wrong with your game in the past years at the time you had long break even stretches and downswings. And how did u approach it and fix it .
I remember you chasing the tbl back then and fire everything possible.
GL

Two last things I'd like to add:

1. Someone brought up in the MTT chat that the Bounty Builder High Roller had briefly moved times for tomorrow. It was showing as 15:05 instead of 12:30. It's been changed back but I think this might be a sneak preview that the team is considering changes and we might see some future HEAT in the key 15:00-16:00 region. If I had to guess I'd imagine the team is swamped with SCOOP/SM Anniversary preparation right now and main schedule changes are on the back burner. But things are being considered.

This doesn't surprise me. Contrary to popular belief the MTT Discussion Thread is actually monitored daily and I remember Luke had e-mail notifications set up for every post in the thread so he could read feedback while taking a bubble bath. I've been instructed multiple times to make changes based on a post in that thread in the morning and numerous tournament additions (caps, zoom HU TKO, etc) have come from player feedback.

2. One of my colleagues messaged me and added a few points about the deal tool:

1) It's hard to surface to players. Surfacing is HOT industry slang for the process of alerting players to features. It's something that providers have to always consider because even subtleties such as how you arrange items on a sidebar will affect click through rates and frequencies. Basically any time you roll out a new feature it will affect millions of players, many of them nooblords, and you need to take care to keep things simple and explain them succintly.

2) Mobile players aren't able to talk about deals due to small screens. This is something that will grow in importance as mobile contributes a larger share of player participation.

I was very happy to receive this message because my colleague is a very high level poker products person and someone I've had a great deal of respect for while working. The fact that so many people are reading this thread makes me happy and encourages me to continue.

I remember when regulars were complaining about Daylight Savings Time in the chat. I brought this up with Luke and he brought up the point that DST does not affect every country (not all countries change clocks). This is something I wasn't even aware of. I guess the deeper point is there are a lot of considerations and judgment calls that people have to make in day to day work. This is something that makes them grow intimately familiar with their specialties and well suited to providing analysis and context for high level strategy discussions!


Hey Grammen, thanks for posting. I'm still chasing tables and getting out of line with the table counts (but less so). Reasons for my lack of success:

1) Getting away from my core identity.

2012/2013 were great for me because of the Stars TLB. Chasing the Stars TLB forced me to basically fire everything from $1.10 Cubes to $215's and I was quite nitty about playing higher. This was very good for me structurally. I have strengths and weaknesses as a player but two of my elite strengths are:

1) Being able to mass multi-table effectively
2) Using a very math-based approach to opens, open shoves, resteals, ICM, etc.

At some point from 2014 onward, after being a partner with BBZ Staking and the removal of the Stars TLB, I conflated my humble $40 ABI multi-table success with being able to swing frankfurters with everyone. Kanye: hard to be humble when you stuntin on a jumbotron." From 2012-2013 I was running hot and felt untouchable. This made me pretty cocky and kind of douchey despite being a God-fearing decent person inside.

So then I went from 20 tabling $40 ABI to 16 tabling $109+ or something including the Super Tuesday and all that. And I wasn't good enough, probably one of the worst regulars in the higher stakes games if I had to guess.

2) Reshaping my game.

After 2014 I left BBZ Staking because I wasn't happy with my personal development as a player. I do regret this decision now. bigbluffzinc was my mentor and coach for a long time and is high level enough where now it strikes me as absurd to not just trust in where he is steering the ship. There were personal reasons that mitigate this (my soon to be wife had gotten ill) but the bottom line is I put him in a less than ideal spot and he didn't "deserve" this. In fairness to me I did consider that I did make him bundles of money as both a horse and a partner.

I joined up with Wildawg and I think we had some miscommunication at the start. His background is in HUSNG and Spins and as you know these players are extremely high level and extremely kinky. A good analogy I'll bring up is when you're playing heads up and you just want to nash shove a bunch of hands like Q9s for 12bb, T8s for 14bb, etc. But HU players don't do this. They like to kink it up with limps and cagey manuevers and such.

So I think when I came on board he thought I was better than I was. And a lot of his coaching was very high level and I was not implementing it very well. So I ended up developing a host of leaks that I've ended up fixing now. Somewhere along the way one of Wilson's friends, another HUSNG/Spin hambeast, took a personal interest in me and coached me as well. This was the beginning of the turn around for me but I was still playing too high.

3) MTT Power Tools

I've always been a structured learner meaning I stick better to curriculums and I'm kind of more "square" about my poker learning for some reason. I'm not a square in the sheets or on the streets but for some reason in poker I like to play like a classic 2+2er and don't really trust my "reads" or "feel" or "street poker" knowledge. Around this time Simple Postflop/Piosolver started getting popular and it was really helpful for me to understand things better.

4. Variance

I think it's important to keep some perspective through bad times and good times. Things should have never gotten as grim as they were in 2016 and even though I'm more successful now I'm not out of the woods and I shouldn't stop working hard. Yes I wasn't one of the better players in the games I was firing but I still could have gotten lucky and binked with positive variance. In that stretch I think I had an 11th place in a SCOOP $1K with 300k up top and 140th place or something in the WSOP Main Event. People sometimes use variance as a crutch to justify continually firing games they're not +ev in so I'm not saying let's do that. But I also don't want to beat myself up too hard when things aren't going well either.

About deal popout... i agree that thecnical issue is valid point but the problem is not actually in deal popout by it self, but is more in way how payputs are, with artificially pumped first place, and because of those kind of payouts only icm and chip chop oprions are not enough imo
If payouts were as they are in highstakes the deal poput will be just fine

Again about payouts ... i am ok with paying biiger % of field the problem is pumped first place ( where #1 prize is > then #3+#4+#5 and also #1 is > #2+#3) and stupid payjumps from itm till ft

Imo ok payput would be smrh like this
Fir ex if we have 1k runers and we want to pay 23% i will give

-1.5x buy in to #230- #115 ( first 50% left itm)
- 2.2x buy in to #115- #54 ( second 50% of players left itm)
And after that gradually and propotionaly increase payjumps every table

Why i think this is good?
Because once in the money and no signifucant payjump close, players will play more chip.ev and faster trying to build stack so they can have shot to finish top 5 or bust and dont waiste their time in this mtt/ start another

This will also improve plaing experience because there will be less short stacks in play and avg stack in last 2-3 tables will be deeper ( as we can see when we compare pko dinamics vs frezout dinamics and avg stack deepth late/ft)

I agree with you here. I find GG Network has an interesting pay structure where it pays a decent % of the field but the jumps are very small just like this (and same with WPN I think). I think the ideal payout structure is to pay a wide amount of players but make the jumps quite small and still try to concentrate money in the final table.
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Poker Update: April 14th, Week 14

I didn't put much volume in this week so not much to report. I was on baby duty so I skipped every day pretty much. On Thursday I ended up attending APPT Korea and firing 3 bullets in the Main Event for around $1500 per shot. It was a pretty great structure (first time playing BB ante and I really like it) and I was accumulating quite well but just lost every flip. Did end up misplaying one hand late in Day 1A but overall I think I played pretty solid. Stamina/endurance was decent as well.

The bustout hand got me thinking about how much hidden luck there is in tournaments. I get real thoughtful when one tabling live :P Yes we can track bb/100 and ev bb/100 but there's all kinds of other luck that doesn't show up too. Such as someone opening a pot before it gets to you in the SB where you were gonna jam and run into it. Or in the APPT, I lost a flip to get to a stack size where I ended up bluffing it off in a big pot where if I had more chips I might have played the hand much differently. And then on a deeper level the time it takes you to stack chips and muck hands will affect how the dealer collects the cards for the next deal!

I'm not sure why I'm so much more comfortable playing online than live. I think part of it has to do with HUD stats and stuff for sure. The general "badness" of live players makes it tough to 3b and reshove the same ranges since they can just be nitting sweaters. Shoutout to Smille1337 who I met in Korea. Very nice/thoughtful/sharp guy who finished 3rd in one of the high rollers for 40k+ and could be crushing today/tomorrow for all I know.

Anyways, I fired up a light online session in my new apartment. Had no RSA token so didn't even play Stars.com. Ended up final tabling 5/25 tournaments or something for a +3 or 4k day but bricked both the WPN $530 and the Party $530 Phase. Finish distributions in these FT's were 1/3/4/7/7 which is decent but less than ideal.

Sunday brings the SM Anniversary which is pretty much one of the most exciting Sundays of the year. I worked quite closely on the SM Anniversary Take 2 project and getting to $10M was a real highlight for me. I remember tracking the pace every day and sending updates to my bosses. I usually end up busting these kinds of massive tournaments super early and I think the best way to approach these is to just have no expectations. I have some swaps set up and we'll see what happens.

I'll be back with a better update after the Sunday grind. Best of luck!

what you think about HUDs?

I think best is for sites to allow HUDs BUT allow players to change their screen name like 2-4 times a year... that way every one can use use huds while playing for tracking their results/stats but people who share database "cough" stables "cough" cant merge databases and abuse data to exploit specific opponents (only population tendencies) because not enough sample

Great blog and I've always enjoyed your outlook towards the game. You are able to think of things outside the box of your own personal EV and have always had a realistic approach to the game of poker with the consideration to all the different types of players playing this game. It is a game first and from your blog posts here it's clear you understand this yet have appreciation for your ability to be able to profit from it second. PokerStars was very lucky to have you working for them in the past.

Since there has been talk recently in your blog of the payout distributions on PokerStars I wanted to bring to light a small daily tournament that I broke down and analyzed today that I no longer anticipate I'll ever be supporting in the future.

Tournament is a $27 No Limit Omaha HL Six Max Hyper Turbo, $750 GTD that runs at 10:56 EST. It allows up to 3 re-entries and late registration is available for the first 35 minutes of play. This tournament minus the rake has $25.71 go into the prizepool per entry. With consideration to the guarantee, we can expect a minimum of 29 entries. Now look at the "Award Structure" allocated to this tournament. The first four tiers which fall under the guarantee or in case of tier four right on the guarantee have a top heavy allocation and then the structure just becomes super flat post tier four. I played this tourney today and it's been increasingly dying over the years and it's no wonder when Stars has these sort of eventual payouts. Many of you, including me, complain about the final post registration payout distribution, the way PokerStars hides the rake in the structure tab, but how about just how they hide the "true" payouts throughout the early course of registration. They dangle a carrot in front of the early entrants or even their later entrants expecting to be playing for one of those earlier tiers but then suddenly after the guarantee is hit it just flips itself into a totally different makeup of payout structure. Today it hit between 36 and 41 entries and the crazy part about these payouts aside from how flat they became is that the gap between 1st and 2nd payout% is actually closer than 2nd to 3rd.

I'm sorry for clouding up your blog with this lower buyin non red/blue tourney that you probably do not ever play and doesn't effect you but it stuck out to me today for issues mentioned above. I wanted to break it down since it was a smaller field tourney that has been dying over the years. PokerStars use to run two different $55 NL Omaha HL Hypers during this timeslot that actually did reasonably well back in the day. I'm sure you can find similar tactics being used in their main tourneys as well.



Entries 5 to 11 Places Paid 1 Payout%- 100
Entries 12 to 19 Places Paid 3 Payout%- 50,39,11
Entries 20 to 24 Places Paid 4 Payout%- 53,27,12,8
Entries 25 to 30 Places Paid 5 Payout%- 41,23,18,12,6
Entries 31 to 35 Places Paid 6 Payout%- 29,23,19,14,10,5
Entries 36 to 41 Places Paid 7 Payout%- 23,21,18,14,11,8,5
Entries 42 to 46 Places Paid 8 Payout%- 23,20,17,14,11,7,4,4
Entries 47 to 52 Places Paid 9 Payout%- 23,18,15,12,10,8,6,4,4

I brought this up when working at Stars. I personally think HUDS should be banned. My HUD is super in depth and gives me way too much info that a recreational completely lacks. Ecosystem-conscious sites such as Unibet and GG don't allow HUDs and Party is rumored to be removing HUDS soon.

One of the arguments against HUDS is that shady regulars can find under the table HUDS that give them a big advantage. If I was an operator I would just put in features to detect this type of stuff and then hard ban/confiscate funds from anyone caught doing this. I think this kind of hard policy will stop most of it.

Hey cneuy, really appreciate the thoughtful post. One of the ironies of me working at Stars is I never noticed any of these things as a player. I don't notice the change of rake display, I don't notice change of pay tables, I don't notice price increases, and stuff like that. The stuff I notice tends to be the stuff that impacts my in game experience.

It's important to note that pay tables aren't hand generated or monitored super in depth so problems like this one you brought up aren't done intentionally. I do agree with you this pay table is a bit ridiculous but it's the first time I've seen one like this. It's possible that this is just an issue because our tournaments usually aren't set up to have such a small % of runners. I'll flag it with Luke + friends and see if it can be switched around.

Mike, Luke, and the rest of the team have the attitude that no issue is too small. I think this is a great attitude for operations to have and I can recall spending a lot of hours grumbling while fixing some font tags or some other small display quirk. You definitely didn't cloud up the blog and I welcome all posts like this. Wish there were 50 more people with posts/questions like you!

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Poker News #2

This is installment 2 of a personal newsletter that details industry happenings that are of interest to me. I'm writing a separate personal poker update post below.

1) Stars.COM smashes the SM Anniversary Guarantee

Operations did a fantastic job with the Sunday Million 13th Anniversary and completely smashed the guarantee by 2.26m. If you recall, last year we ran a Sunday Million 12th Anniversary on the same day as the Sunday Storm Anniversary. This was not good for business. All of us were busy with other tasks and didn't pay much attention to the SM. It overlayed for 1.2M!

We ran a SM Anniversary Take 2 that I mostly handled. It was a real sweat tracking the pace of it day to day. Not sure what it looked like from the inside but this was a super comfortable clear and I'm very happy that it went so smoothly for my homies. Nice work!

2) Stars.COM announces SCOOP

The team also released an impressive SCOOP schedule. One thing that really stands out to me is the lack of Re-Entry on most of these events. I find that admirable and keeps the series more "pure." It'll definitely cost Stars a lot of raw revenue so it's a principled stand to make the series more meaningful. I'll probably be playing my first $10K online in a very long time (possibly ever? don't recall).

3) Stars.COM Main Schedule Refresh?

In my opinion Stars.COM really needs to start pumping out changes to the main schedule. I hope the team has some time to address this. The % of rake being paid to Stars at peak hours and on Sunday is steadily decreasing for me. My whole stance on this is I think they should remove extraneous/withered tournaments and boost the prize pools of the flagships with enhanced satellite support. The current lobby is a bit of an eyesore. While I am a HEAVY grinder, my opinions actually lean recreational friendly because recs play less tables.

Quick Poker Update



Pretty wild swings in the past few weeks.

I was looking over my graph a few weeks ago since October 2017 and it looks like I hit the 200k profit goal I set from the start of the thread. September 2017 until today is about 16 months. Given I only played weekends for all of 2017 and 2018, that's basically a yearly volume graph more or less. Thread over right? WRONG.

It's been a month of swag surfin and I decided this week to fly too close to the SUN and got burnt! Shoutout to YaGotBurnt, I now realize again what he was talking about.

I went hamburglar hamburg steak guzzlin mode from April 8th. The bink at the start of the graph is 14k in the Sunday $530 Rake or Break Whale. Ideally I wouldn't have binked that and been max punished the first Sunday. But what that did was embolden me in the wrong ways. I'm going to break down each of my fires. I'm doing this mostly for myself. Writing it all down will make me feel refreshed.

BTW apologies for another post where I'm flip flopping more than Dekoichi the Battlechanted Locomotive + Tsukuyomi. Also apologies for the ugly formatting below, I took a list of the $530+ games I played on Scope and wrote some notes on each one. This kind of stuff helps me feel good about making a plan and moving forward.



Plus throw in 3 shots at APPT Korea which was a 10 as well. I think going forward I need to make a few adjustments

1) No more overlay chasing

I think max late registering to capture overlay is +ev. I've seen a combination of sick players such as imluckbox, Mr Tim Caum, nilsef, and more all do this. Some of them are probably too rich and degenning it up but I think there's merit to it for sure. Let's take the Super Tuesday for example. I entered as the 132nd player so it took an 18k overlay. Came in with 25k starting, 10bb, and 89k average stack. There were 34 players left and 15 paid.

18k overlay/132 total players is $136 per person. But 92 players have busted so that's not correct.
18k overlay/40 players left is $450 per person. You have way less than average so way less of a chance of capturing this sweet money. This is also not correct.

Maybe the best method is to do 25k/89k * $450 and that will model your overlay capture %. This might severely underestimate your actual chances of mincashing though.

The point of all this isn't to "figure it out." I think overlay hunting is a low ev gamble because the most likely outcome with 10-15bb is busting out early + brutal. And if you're not an absolute sicko crusher you shouldn't be trying to flip 10-15bb stacks for $1,050. So I'm out of the overlay hunting game. From now on I will only max late register tournaments when there's at least 20% prize pool in overlay.

2) Cutting out some of the bad fires

I think I used PowerFest as an excuse to just fire everything since all the buy-ins on Sundays added up to so much and I played my way out of it every time anyways. This Sunday I finished 16th or something in the $109 WPN Warmup with 36k up top so I decidedly did NOT play my way out that day. I also won a $55 on Microgaming for 3k and a $66 on WPN for 4k and still finished stuck 5k+ or something.

Now that PowerFest is over I need to rebuild for SCOOP so I'm going to cut out some of these questionable fires.

3) WPN

WPN's a weird site. I've been absolutely ravaging WPN this year but I have to admit prior to this heater I was even entertaining some rigtard conspiracies on this site. Even in the $530+ I find the regulars doing a lot of "bad stuff" that people on Party/Stars don't do. Yet the ability scores for the HS tournaments are insanely high and the site has unlimited re-entry. I have a few theories about WPN:

1) The elite regs are beating up on the soft fields in all but the nosebleed games, pumping up their ability scores everywhere even though they're not that good compared to Party/PS
2) There is something sinister going on with stables, tickets, house players, etc
3) Bots are all over

I had a similar feeling with PokerDom where I wasn't sure how fair the games were. I think with WPN I will hedge a bit. I will skip on the smaller field high stakes stuff like the $1k 70k and $1k 100k I fired two bullets in today. I will continue taking notes on players and play the $530's and $1k's that I think feature whales or soft regulars. Right now they're running their 420 High 5 Series (lol) so I might keep firing a few shots. In general I feel better about taking shots on WPN than I do on Party because the games are softer.

This.

My entire grind is 'peak hours' and during the week, I'm paying more rake to both Winamax and 888. Granted, I'm a bit more anal about game selection that most, but the largest operator (by a significant margin) should still be getting the lion's share of my rake. The fact that they aren't is noteworthy IMO.

About HUDs: it really doesnt matter if your HUD is super in depth with ton of stats etc when you dont have hand sample for those stats

One thing we also need to not forget is that HUDs ( talking about data traking software here) is esencial for catching bots, colusion etc... if there is no data that players can investigate/analyse it will be wild west out there ( we all can witness that most if not sll bots/collisions are detected after players report it)
And we can all see daily how competent/willing/efective poker sites are to detect and ban bots/collusion

I really think that elegant and easy to implement solution to this problems is alowing screen name changes ( u have one account but you have different screan name that u are alowed to change it 2-4 times a year)

I think a larger issue is that the punishment does not fit the crime. If there were harsher penalties, there'd be less cheating. Let's say a player uses bans software, creates a bot, or finds some another way to defraud others out of their money and gets caught. What happens next?

At best, the money is confiscated and the player is banned. Hooray!

Well, no, not exactly. The account is banned, but nothing stops the player from opening up a new one and starting the scam over again. Except this time they're smarter about it, and keep less money online, lowering their own risk. But that's best case scenario, from what I've heard/read the player is often allowed to cash-out which makes no sense to me. It'd be like if police officers let bank robbers to keep their heist and told them to just not return to that specific branch. Obviously that 'punishment' fails to provide any type of deterrent and the perpetrator is free to roam about the community in search of another target.

There needs to be harsher penalties. We're talking about fraud and theft here, in the "real world" these are offenses that land you in prison. But apparently in the world of online poker, instead of jail time all you get is scorn from the more upstanding members of the community.

This I find interesting. I have cut Winamax recently because it's too much 6-max which is hard to multi-table. They're doing a fantastic job in terms of market share though so it's not my place to hate.

HUDS related to bot-catching is a good point. I think teams are beefing up their game security though and bots are less of a deal but very worrisome for the future I agree.

I have a variety of stats that converge quite quickly that recreationals have no access to. It's a huge information edge and completely unfair. It makes no sense to me actually why a professional, who is already better, is allowed access to a tool that gives him/her an even larger edge.

Why is there so little discussion (on any site) about just building a HUD into the software (and then banning ALL third party HUDs aggressively), something like JivaroHUD with a set group of features most commonly used, so everyone can choose to turn it on or off and therefore no one is unfairly taken advantage of?

It doesn't necessarily help or hurt with the bot issue, but I believe that can be taken care of by the sites if they really desired it.

yea that is true, but any rec can buy tracking software and will have access to hud/stats too so from my POV is fair game + to be totally honest and real here the stats we all use are mostly vs regs... when we face random recs we just put some color tag and some note and that's it, we almost never play vs them again

the real issue and problem imo from hud's/database is sharing HH/database from teams/ stables

If all you have is your own sample HUDs are next to useless in MTTs. Will actually do you more harm than good. The only situation in which a HUD can actually give an unfair advantage is if you share databases. Unfortunately that's probably standard practice in all stables.

Exactly, for me it always blows my mind thinking how some people can make millions through stealing from others in poker (botting) and in worst case scenario lose few thousand. I can't think of any other industry where you stealing so much money would not get you in trouble.

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About HUD's - I think banning HUD is only reasonable if you have a very strong bot/cheating detection system. Otherwise it will do more harm then good because player will not be able to report gto bots. I think most of you have seen the issue on Winamax where few Spins GTO bots were operating for a year or two and literally took millions from ecosystem. And if players would not complain/show how close to GTO they players, they would probably still be printing at this moment. And there were many cases where players report a big group of bots with similar stats.
Also how well most sites are willing to investigate each player and look what programs are running in the background? It's easy to detect public HH converters, but what about custom ones? How many sites are willing to put so much resources in investigating each player? I personally think only Pokerstars could enforce no huds policy. And on the other sites honest players will lose EV while a smaller subset will have custom ones.

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Well, it depends how you use your hud. If you check fold to river probe stat is 0/1 and you decide to not bluff because you opponent will never fold then of course it will be more harmful than useful.
But if you play in smaller stakes high fields MTTs and you mix sites, you won't know if players are regs/fishes most of the time. With most basic HUD preflop stats you don't need a lot of hands to categorize players. For example 40/5 after 80 hands will tell quite a lot about the player.

Thanks for the discussion guys keep it coming.

GGNetwork is the only site that's broken ground on this. I agree with you I think this would be a great feature but it's not feasible. It's not that easy when you have a complex feature set like this and it's almost impossible to satisfy everyone. I think it's probably better to not even try given how many you will disappoint. But these are the words of a loser.

I don't agree with these takes. I have a HUD with my own sample and it's extremely useful to me in MTTs and gives me information on players that a rec will never have. The human mind is not built to process how tight/loose someone is playing over 80 hands but a HUD can break it down in detail.

Good post. I agree with this. I don't want to tie together game security with HUDS. I think all sites need better protocols for better cheating detection. Stars is the only site that's really on it and Patrick claims Party has made great strides as well.

The more we talk about it I've changed my position. Let's keep our precious HUDs since they help ward off knavery And boy do I love my HUD. HUD HUD HUD I love HUD.

Poker Update: April 21, Week 15





It's been a rough week and honestly I'm forcing this one through even though I don't feel like posting. I alluded to this in the post above but I felt untouchable around April 8th. Binking 60k in 8 days will do that to you. That Sunday I fired pretty much everything and then played my way out of it with the Rake or Break $530 +14k. I also finished final 27 or something of the huge $2K Party PKO. Playing live changed something mentally for me and when I came back online, I didn't hesitate to throw in nosebleed MTT's even when pure overlay chasing.

One week later, stuck 20k, and I've done some reflecting:

1) It's important to realize when you're running hot and that not running bad is also a form of running good. I know pure logic people will cringe at that statement but it's like what Phil Hellmuth said. "If it wasn't for luck I'd win them all." The best regulars run ev bb/100 so high that they'd rather just have normal luck than extreme good or extreme bad. Well they'd choose extreme good first but you know what I mean!

I'm running noticeably awful this week to the point where the moans are starting to come out and I'm getting scared to see turns and rivers. Now that I notice how bad I'm running, I wish I knew how hot I was running a few weeks ago and factored this in when deciding to take shots. Honestly I was completely oblivious to how well I was running.

2) For me, the marginal utility I gain from adding a nice cash here or there from a bigger buy-in is far outweighed by the negative emotions I feel from a downswing. I remember back in the day people always talking on PocketFives being proud of winning a $109+R or being considered good by their peers. I never cared about any of that stuff. I just care about the dough. Even more now because I have a baby to feed.

3) Almost all of the losses are from $530+ and this would be fine if my run average/hot/super hot was continuing at my bread and butter games. But they're not. I've hit a stretch of negative variance in all of my games and I should have factored this in.

4) I've gotten better at handling this stuff. I remember when playing for bbz I just went off and played Diablo for a month straight or something and watched Netflix. This was in 2013 when we were printing.

Through it all I'm still excited for Sunday. Going to PIO some spots that have been giving me trouble and get back in there on Sunday. I was Triple Crown hunting all week so I haven't taken a break yet. I will rest after Sunday for a few days.

Results

Not much to write home about. I have a few wins here and there. Distributions are fine but skew a bit on the lower side (Avg. 4.32 finish). And I'm wasting my wins on the smaller stuff. The close calls this week have been

14th in WPN $109 with 36k up top
17th in Saturday $215 KO with 19.5k up top

Like I said above, I'm mostly done chasing overlay. Will still fire some of the better margins.

EV Analysis

EV has been okay this week. Running at 6.76 this week and actual is 4.81. 8.9m chips below and I feel each and every one of them. I have taken a lot of rough beatz this week in higher stuff and lower stuff and it's getting to me a bit. I will need a break for sure after Sunday.

Will also need to do some red line maintenance I think I'm falling back into some bad habits and the red line is taking a nose dive. WWSF is also 2-3 percentage points lower than it should be.

Best of luck if you're grinding Sunday!

“I don’t care about that stuff”

“I was triple crown hunting all week and haven’t taken a break”

UFKNW0TM8

lol good catch was thinking about that as I was writing it. Due to my addiction of WoW and mobile games I am a sucker for personal achievements and badges. GL today since I know you'll be grinding your favorite day (one time?)

Nope skip 9 days in a row rip

Maybe able to play Tuesday again. Gl to u tho

Yea obvs this is true no one ever said that HUD info is not valuable... the points i was trying to make are
- any rec can buy tracking software and use HUD (is not like huge price tag) and from my POV is fair game for all
- the problem with HUD/ database is when people (regs in stables) share their databases and they get 100 times bigger hand sample in small time frame (1-2 months) and use that sample database to analyze, run reports to figure out specific exploits vs other regs and in that way they are getting unfair advantage (that imo will be significantly reduced/taken away if pokersites allow 3-4 times a year screen name change)

impact of huds on winrates would be lowest on mtts vs all other formats of nlhe imo due to dynamic stacksizes icm pskos etc etc so I don't think that's such big issue.