Hi piranha.
Gl for your futur plans.

About moving money around from site to site and to you with a check , what would be the best medium to use.

I was using moneybooker (skrill) , but now for apparently no special reason (since poker is legal in Canada) they decide to cut the users from Canada .

Im trying to find a good trusty alternative for skrill.
Got any ( i just do not want bank transfer with them).
Thx

Ps: do you think having a HUD is essential .
If not, what is the number of table its start to be a necessity when multitabling ?
Thx and gl

how are you doing with fan duel so far? is the competition as weak as you initially thought? how long did it take to build your model for it, and can you tell us as much about it as youre comfortable with?

also awesome pool story, do you have any more like it?

1. The future of LHE looks pretty bleak to me. It's hard to imagine it gaining popularity at some point. I think it will always serve as a starting point of sorts for a lot of new players though. It's a relatively easy game to learn the basics of and comes without the huge short-term swings of a NL game.

If I were starting poker right now, I would recommend learning some of the other games. There are more players and action in some other games so assuming an equal learning curve among the games, I'd try to learn something other than LHE.

2. It's similar to sports betting except that instead of betting on the outcomes of games, you're essentially betting on the outcomes of individual players in the games. If you understood player props very well in sports betting, it would be an easy transition to Fantasy Sports.

I don't think there's as much upside in DFS as there is in poker, at least not yet. But it isn't far off either. I think a low to mid 6 figure income is a reasonable expectation for some of the top players in DFS right now.

It's hard to compare the bankroll requirements between the two. It really would depend on what games you're playing and your edge in both. I think the two are comparable though.

I'm not sure if it's available in Europe. I haven't heard anything about it. The sites I play on are only for players in the US and Canada. If it's not in Europe now, it's only a matter of time. For any entrepreneurs reading this in Europe, DFS would be an incredibly profitable business to start over there assuming it's legal. With the popularity of Soccer (futbal), it's potential gold-mine.

Thanks!

I may have talked about this earlier in the thread but..

I guess one of the bigger issues with my game relates to my personality. I'm a pretty passive person by nature so my instincts are always to take less aggressive actions. Until I fully understand the rationale behind plays, I have a lot of trouble making them and resort to "easier" options.

So I think I was much too conservative and passive in my early/mid years. And even though my results were good, I think they would of been a lot better if I had been more aggressive both pre and post flop and also in terms of moving up in stakes.

Even now if I play a game like NL that I don't know very well, my tendency is to play tight preflop and avoid difficult postflop situations. And if I do get into difficult postflop situations, I always default to less aggressive actions like calling or folding unless I fully understand why the more aggressive action is correct.

With DFS, do you think there is more money in GPP's, head to head, or leagues? Which do you focus the most on?

Hey PP,

Thanks a lot, we had a lot of good battles.

I base a lot of my betting on databases as well, though they're not nearly as big as Harabobs and likely not anywhere near as sophisticated. I actually just hired someone to help me with doing database work and with pulling information from sites - I'll mostly be using it for Fantasy sports though.

I have a friend that is a sharp sports bettor as well and almost all of his bets are based on sound logic. He's still looking at numbers but numbers that are readily available to anyone with a little digging.

I think people overestimate the sharpness of lines even for the major sports. The linesmakers aren't using super sophisticated models to generate their lines. In fact, very basic information that makes the lines very beatable - I say this with confidence because I've talked to super sharp sports bettors and they all echo this.

I think I read that Stars had implemented something regarding the seating scripts to combat the problem. Someone please let me know here if that's the case and how it's working. If not or if it's not working, I'll come back to this question.

I actually didn't have a close connection to Stars, I think a lot of people were under this misconception. I was sending emails to highstakes like everyone else when I was having problems and dealing with the same frustrations as you guys. It always seemed like I could never get a clear response on what the rules were which tilted me more than any downswing ever could. As I mentioned a few times, this played into my decision to retire.

After I made 5 million VPPs, I had Baard as a personal liaison. Even then, it didn't change things. I'd send a Skype and get a response back a few days later that typically didn't clarify things any better. I don't mean to call out Baard or anyone specifically. The whole environment was a mess and mostly related to the non-randomized button. If they could just fix that one problem, it would solve a host of other problems and eliminate all this vagueness about what's acceptable and unacceptable in terms of starting tables and leaving tables.

Ha, I don't know what the best year to play high stakes was but it was before my time. I've heard there was a period of a year or two before BF where several tables of 100/200 and 200/400 were running regularly. I think PokerSnoopy and Otter were cleaning up back then to name a couple players. More than likely, that would of been the best time. It would of been a piece of cake to make SNE back then as well given the amount of VPPs you can earn multitabling those limits.

Stopped reading 2+2, reese led me here, glad he did.

Considered you the best LHE professional that ever played.
No other grinder with your work ethic came close to your ability, and no one who had your ability came close to your work ethic. You had fantastic tilt control AND you were actively campaigning for fairness and the good of the game.
The only other grinder I'd put on your level was old school St1ckman.

He didn't quite play the hours, but his table/seat selection was roboticly flawless, he played an A+ game, and was playing at the highest stakes.
His questionable ethics lose him some points in my eyes.
His behaviour made games break etc.

Mad respect dude, couldn't have ever came close to what you accomplished, even if I tried my hardest (which I don't heh).
Best of luck on the future with sports betting.

My questions to you would mostly be strategy related... Not sure what you want to share.

I noticed you attacked button 3bets->cbets quite agressivly postflop(if you were in the CO). Was there any system you used to figure out when to bluff air? or was it mostly on intuition? Did you intentionally bluff more than optimal to punish wide 3-bets?

sub-optimally Wide range, big pot, OOP spots are still murky for me... Both as the button and the CO, any tips for this dynamic?

I guess you'd have to define "marginal" here. If marginal means take all the hands that I think are borderline hands but very small winners like K7o from the button, then yes I think it makes an impact long-term on win-rate. All those .01 or .02 BB/100 winners make a difference long-term. If we were to assume the average reg in today's game has a .5 BB/100 win rate (this probably isn't far off and may even be high for specifically 6-max), then 5 of those hands over a 100 hand preflop stretch would be a 10-20% impact on win rate.

Your points about the benefits of a lower SD are very good ones. Also, the difference between a SD of 15 and 13 can save a laptop or two from being thrown off the balcony during one of those crazy downswings Seriously, in addition to the benefits you listed, there is a big emotional/sanity benefit to minimizing downswings that's hard to quantify but has worth. I think what you're saying has merit to some degree.

1. It's a crude estimate I came up with by looking at the typical opening ranges by position vs. what I think are profitable 3-betting ranges vs. those opening ranges.

2. We still have to consider the players left to act. I mentioned earlier that although the players after us don't cap or call often, when they do it's a substantial hit to our equity.

Hey SB,

Thanks a lot for the offer, I may take you up on that at some point. Right now I have someone helping me to automate a lot of the data entry I'm doing which is going to be a huge time saver. The more things I can get automated, the more time I can start devoting to more complex things like statistical analysis.

1. I had to go back and reread what I had wrote earlier. I think I may have misspoke or been unclear when I said we need an equity edge to 3-bet. Our range on a whole is going to require more equity than the opener's range. Not necessarily every individual hand within that range. Put another way, we need a stronger 3-betting range than the opener's range.

I never used that ".6" shortcut to determine what I was 3-betting with. It's just a quick way of determining what we can 3-bet profitably against an opening range that I made by comparing my 3-betting ranges to typical opening ranges. For example, against a CO opening 40% I think you 3-bet roughly 23% of hands from the button and 28% from the small blind. So it's not exact by any means but not too far off either (all assuming my 3-betting ranges are near optimal).

I will get to the other questions soon

Again I apologize for the lack of updates. It probably isn't going to get any better short-term either. I'm heading on a 7 day vacation early tomorrow morning and in general have been really busy with DFS. I will get to all the questions eventually though.

I think the answer to this hinges on the definition of "really bad". Here are some tendencies I think would fall into that category:

-Never folding (very high WTSD)
-Very weak value bettor, routinely checking back marginal hands on the river
-A transparent opponent who is going to check back flops or c-bet flops and check back turns whenever they whiff

Against the high WTSD guys and weak value bettors, I think we can defend more hands but not that many more. It's hard to quantify it in % terms but if I was up against these types of opponents, all of my borderline hands would turn into calls. I may even extend that to another rung of hands. Like let's say my cutoff for calling is typically Q6o and J7o, I might call Q4o-Q5o and J5o-J6o.

If you're facing a transparent opponent, that's when I think we can get away with calling most, if not all of our range. These opponents are rarer but do exist and when we're up against one, we want to play as many hands as possible with them. If they're going to turn their hands face up on the turn or even better, on the flop, then we want to play every hand since the majority of the time they'll be whiffing the flop and giving up.

In terms of 3-betting, the opponents we really can open up against are the ones that are playing fit or fold postflop. So we're looking for non-combative low WTSD guys. Again it's hard to quantify in percentage terms but I think we can add at least a couple rungs of 3-betting hands to our range. There is a push/pull consideration here in that if we decide to start 3-betting every hand, we're likely to engender more combative behavior in our opponent. So I don't think we want to overdo it.

If we're 3-betting against opponents who have high WTSDs or are weak value bettors, I think similar to defending, we can add a rung or two to our 3-betting ranges but I wouldn't go too overboard. In fact, players with very high WTSD's can actually cause some of our standard 3-betting hands to become unplayable since we're relying on a certain amount of post-flop fold equity to make 3-betting profitable.

I only listed a few different tendencies above that would fall into the category of extremely bad. Of course there are many more and even more different combinations of them that can define those extremely bad player types. So it's about identifying those bad tendencies and then figuring out how they individually impact our hand and ultimately our decision to open, 3-bet, or defend.

wow...thanks TP...that was a lot useful information!

Re: DFS, I've actually started working myself on some tools to help automate lineup building.

Dear Mr. TPiranha,

Thank you, thank you, thank you for doing this.
It is a fantastic read.

I really enjoy your "non technical" posts and are pure gold to me. Especially relating to general thinking approach, critical and logical, forcing non auto-pilot decision making even in trivial spots and comparative thinking putting yourself in opponents shoes.

Q. How was this thinking style approach developed? I know you posted to have purchased all Poker books you could in the begginning, but am curious if you could list your top 5(10) books which helped in "non technical" but thinking aspect.

Hope my question makes sense, and thank you again sincerely for doing this.

All the best and good luck on your new journey.

You so rational!

To be perfectly honest, I'm a little confused reading this. I did just get done travelling for nine hours so I'll reread it in the morning and maybe it'll be a little clearer.

I do think we need to be thinking on a multi-street basis from the beginning of the hand whether we're the aggressor or non-aggressor and have formulated plans for the various run-outs that can occur. There are other considerations, mainly balance related, that can dictate calling with hands that may be deemed -EV strictly in terms of pot odds but actually increase the overall profitability of our calling range.

That said, when and if we get to the river and are getting a specific price to call of let's say 8-1, then it's solely a question of whether my hand is good > 1/9 times. At this point I'm replaying the whole hand in my mind from the perspective of the aggressor and trying to determine his ratio of bluffs to value hands based on how I think he'd play the various hands in his range.

One thing I'd add and this may or may not relate to what HH is saying is that I think very often in LHE, you end up in situations on the river where your opponents aren't bluffing enough to make calling profitable even in some pretty big pots. One of the more common mistakes I think people make is to just blindly call because they're getting 8-1 or 10-1 thinking their opponent doesn't need to be bluffing much at all to make calling correct. But situations come up, and probably many more than should, where the opponent is never or almost never bluffing.

Like everything else though, it's always a matter of hand ranges: determining how your opponent would play the various hands in his range based on the preflop dynamic, the board texture, the situation, their perception of you, etc. and then determining whether the pot odds dictate calling or folding based on their ratio of value hands to bluffing hands.

Haha. My wife, being a Harvard grad, was horrified to read that my Well started with "For all intensive purposes"

I of course Googled it and tried to reason with her (to no avail) that it's classified as an eggcorn:

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

I'm not a grammar Nazi by any stretch but do admit it's pretty embarrassing to start the Well with that. Oops

No clue on the Mac password. Google is your friend.

Whenever you are caught in an eggcorn, you're supposed to say that you did it on porpoise.

just put the cd in, resetup (no data is lost that way)

You write "could of" a lot too. Just sayin'.

I don't know of any sites that specifically track winnings. RotoGrinders tracks player of the year standings but it's a points based system that's determined by players finishes in tournaments. You can search individual players and see results of their tournaments but I believe it only shows tournaments where they've cashed so it's not going to give an accurate picture of their profitability.

I just talked a little bit about this a few posts back I believe. I do think you can open more hands against these player types. How many more would depend a bit on their postflop skill level.

You said "bad player" and defined that by a player that's very loose and never folds. But how does he play his made hands and how often is he attacking flops and bluffing - those would also be considerations. If it's just a player that's extremely loose, never folding, and non-combative, I think we can really open up. I think the proper adjustment against these player types is to open a lot of hands with the intention of checking back a lot of flops.

As a rough estimate, if I were on the button against this player type I might open 70% of hands opposed to my normal ~50%.

But take that same player and make him combative postflop and I don't think we can open many more hands.

My HEM isn't working unfortunately but I definitely did not win money from the small blind 3-handed. I wish I could provide the exact numbers but I don't have them.

I've never straddled unless it was one of those agreements the table made - I have no problem doing it in those instances. Aside from that I don't see much merit to it other than creating an image of someone looking for action.

I'm fairly aggressive as is, particularly from the button, so I don't think it would benefit me at this point. Flashback to when I first started playing and I was very tight, I definitely could see some merit. I can remember a few instances where one of the really loose and bad players was complaining that I don't play enough hands. I think if you have that kind of image, particularly in the eyes of the bigger rec players, it could be beneficial to do something like straddling in the hopes of getting more action from them and also keeping them happy.

With your work ethic and intelligence, why not try day trading?

lollll