Thanks Randy. I was pretty exhausted that day but I think it was because we had a Halloween party at my house the night before.

And ha on Cosi. He's a really tough player that's very well balanced. I always include him in my list of toughest players I've played against because he's one of those guys that's very difficult to exploit. It's good to hear that he runs bad against people though

I'm forever drawn to pool, it's one of the things I enjoy most in life. I remember one of the old-timers telling me in the pool room once, "People leave but they always come back" in reference to a player we hadn't seen in a while. It's really true with pool, once you have that passion to play, it never goes away.

1) It wasn't so much study as it was being aware of my range in the various situations. I think people assume I've worked out all the various situations that come up at the table and have optimal calling/betting/raising/bluffing etc. frequencies but that's not the case. It's near impossible to figure this out for every situation and I'd say impossible to actually remember it for every situation when you're in the heat of battle due to the thousands of different board textures that arise. This is an area where I think a bot would have a huge advantage. You could actually work out the proper frequencies for more common situations and a bot could execute them with perfect frequencies.

For me it's thinking about my entire range when I get into certain situations and not just the hand I'm staring at. If I get into a situation against a good player where I have a marginal decision between two options, I'm going to be thinking about how I'd play the other hands in my range and where this hand fits in the context of that range. The idea is to keep my range as balanced as possible.

As an example, let's say I've opened from the small blind against a good BB with 56 and the flop is A74 and I've bet the flop and been called and let's say the turn is a blank 2.

If I think about my range on the turn in this situation, I'm going to be checking the majority of it. Check/calling some of it, check/folding some it, and check/raising some it. With a smaller % of my range I'm going to be betting for value and sometimes as just an outright bluff or semi-bluff.

So I have two primary choices to bet or check/raise (a 3rd would be to check/call and bluff rivers either by leading or check/raising). Really I think both those options are viable in this situation but because I have so few check/raise bluffing+semi-bluffing hands in my range, that this makes for a very good candidate to check/raise bluff. So I'd be check/raising this type of hand often to balance the times I'm check raising my stronger value hands. Even though my betting range now has less bluffing hands in it, I still have some outright bluffs in my betting range that I'd prefer to use there as opposed to using in my c/r range.

That's the kind of thinking I have when trying to balance. It's nothing rigid or scientific. It's just about being aware of my overall range in spots and making sure I'm balancing all my different actions with bluffs and value hands.

I'll get back to you on 2) when I have some more time. On that note I have a really busy next 3 days coming up. I know there are a lot of questions I haven't answered but I'll keep answering whenever I have some free time.

Hey no problem with that. Thanks for the other answers.


One other thing. When you bet sports, can you tell me which sports you do bet though? Only major american sports or others as well?


Also i assume all your bets are based on some math or numbers that you crunch? I assume you aren't making any of these bets based on things like fading the public, line movement or feel right? And thus everything is based on numbers such as it could be, total is 190 but you have the total at 193. Or total is 8.5 and you have the total at 7.8 etc? Also curious if you bet anything due to a very strong trend etc.

Why the move to DFS specifically, other than that it's not poker. I see the skill sets as fairly different.

I wanted to clarify something here because I think I made a jump that might be unclear to some people:

The reason I have so few check/raise bluffing+semi-bluffing hands is due to the board texture. Really I have as many c/r outright bluffing hands as I want but very few c/r semi-bluffing hands due to the lack of draws with the board texture. And since I don't want to c/r bluff air there often, that leaves me with very few c/r bluffing+semi-bluffing hands overall.

Hopefully that makes sense.

It's been a work in progress my whole life. I think I had a head start over many people in that I've been gambling my whole life and basically grew up in a pool room around people that were always trying to hustle and "shark" me or distract me when I was playing. I'd also experienced some incredible bankroll swings so I was accustomed to the variance and emotional ups and downs that go with gambling.

That said, I still was a lot more prone to tilt when I first started playing than I am now. I recall one time where I got so upset that I threw one of my couch pillows across the room. The pillow knocked over a lamp that knocked over a bottle of wine that spilled all over my carpet. It's funny to think about now but at the time I was so upset and the chain reaction I set off seemed so fitting.

I guess you could say there were three main phases of tilt I went through.

Early on in my career it was tilt due to frustration. I still didn't understand how extreme variance was in poker and I also didn't have a good grasp of my playing ability. When an inevitable downswing hit, I didn't understand whether I was losing due to variance or losing because I was playing worse than my opponents. The frustration led to anger which would cloud my judgement and either cause me to play worse or to do things I normally wouldn't do like jumping up in stakes and trying to win all my money back.

In the middle part of my career it was ego. I understood that I was a pretty good player at this point and starting developing a sense of entitlement. When I'd run bad or lose money to players that I thought were worse than me, I'd get upset and think something like "How can I be losing money to these idiots?". This was also the time where I did a lot of comparative thinking: "How is this person winning more money than me when he does X?".

In the latter part of my career it was fatigue. The more tired I got at the tables, the more apt I'd be to let little things bother me. Something like a comment in chat which normally I'd ignore would bother me when I was tired. Often I'd respond and then end up getting distracted trying to type and think. And then I'd end up playing worse and get more and more upset.

Tilt early on in my career was more the tilt I think people identify with when you mention the word. It was throwing things across the room, raising every hand, and just losing complete control of myself.

In the middle of my career it was getting very upset but not to the point where I'd totally lose it. It would still effect my game quite a bit though.

At the end of my career it was much more subtle. I doubt my opponents would even notice any difference in my play when I was upset but there were definitely subtle differences in my thinking which caused me to play worse.

Last 2 posts have been gold Piranha, thanks a ton

Do you have any bankroll requirements guidelines for DFS. What % of your bankroll would you feel comfortable firing on a weekly basis (or daily for non football), and how would you look to allocate it over various tournaments/ lineups. Like 20% spread out over x tournaments. Or something like 1% in the million, for example, spread out over as many entries as you can have?

Im very unfamiliar with the longterm variance in DFS so any suggestions/insight would be great.

Great thread so far. Thanks for the info. Jon

Would you care to comment on the state, and future, of asymmetrical range game theory?

Thanks for the super long and detailed response. Really enjoying the whole well.

I'm actually not sure if any understanding of poker is required for high level botting. The GA and NN folks may not need a poker person to tell them anything about the game other than the basic rules and what it takes to win the pot. Going that route might make the bot play some alien style and make it super easy to catch, but OTOH you might provide it some reward for taking more "human looking" lines if that doesn't cripple its WR.

A few years ago, I used an autorouter (draws the lines on a printed circuit card) that was a NN solution. Its big selling point was that it routed circuit boards in ways pleasing to a human expert. It was flat out the best tool on the market and consistently out performed tools that were 10x as expensive. Fortunately, a bigger company bought the product and stopped selling it because they made much more money on their 10x as expensive tools. As a human expert, I can tell you the NN did a very good job mimicking a human designer.

All that tl;dr to say that computer science approaches might not need much of an expert, or only need one to verify that the result is a strong player.

BigBadBabar and I were just talking about a guy who beat limits up to about 5/T for > 5BB/100, think his screen initials were JB. He was a HU game starter who used blind games to win at an incredible rate. At the time, I couldn't understand how a not world beating HU player won at that rate. We had no idea how much edge sitting out not taking that last button was worth.

So you're say that KOTH tables actually make this worse, because now the best regs get the button 100% of the time?

It has been like this as long as I can remember, if you sit in the correct seat you get the button on Stars

Thanks for the kind words Buxbaum.

1) I don't think you really can break it down in terms of equity. Like I don't think you can say, I have X amount of equity vs. this position therefore I can raise profitably. The main problem with looking at equity is it assumes our hand is going to get to showdown and often that's not the case. Also hands with the same amount of equity can play a lot differently postflop.

As an example, let's say you have two hands with 35% equity. One is 67s and the other is A4o. Even though these hands have the same amount of equity, they may or may not necessarily be profitable to play depending on how your opponent plays. For example, if you're playing against an opponent with a very high WTSD, 67s is going to lose value whereas A4 is going to gain value. Similarly, if you're playing against an opponent with a low WTSD, 67s will gain value and A4 will lose value.

The other consideration is that you're always playing a range of hands and your opponent is always playing against a range. There can be hands in your range that taken on their own are unprofitable, but collectively they increase the overall profitably of your range.

There's a definite difference between BB v SB and Button vs. Cutoff. In the BB, there's nothing that say you have to 3-bet (I talked about this earlier). On the button it's obviously important to 3-bet to try to get the pot heads up and be fighting for that blind money.

There's a big difference between being in the small blind and being in a non-blind position. That quarter of a big bet that's already invested is a big incentive to 3-bet a lot of hands. You can actually 3-bet more hands profitably from the SB vs. CO than you can on the button vs. the CO.

2) Yep I talked about this in another post

3) I'm not crazy about it though I do think it has some merit particularly in the 2/3 blind structure.

I view this strategy in the same way I view the strategy to never 3-bet from the BB vs the SB. I think it adds a lot of unnecessary complication to the game that may or may not have more EV than the simpler strategy of always 3-betting or always opening for a raise from the small blind.

I think in both cases a strategy could be developed that potentially yields as much EV or slightly more EV than the conventional strategy but it requires a well thought out strategy where you're attacking a lot of pots postflop. My experience in playing against people who are using these strategies is that they don't have the right bluffing frequencies postflop and as a result aren't winning as many pots as they would by using the conventional strategies.

So I wouldn't dismiss the strategy of limping preflop from the SB but I think requires a well-thought out postflop strategy that most people aren't equipped for or haven't taken the time to figure out. For me I've always tried to keep the game as simple as possible due to the volume I played - the more areas of my game I could keep simple, the more mental energy I could expend on other areas.

4. Again I'm not sure you can break this down strictly in terms of equity. I assume you mean peeling the flop OOP in a heads up pot where we've defended from the big blind? If you want a rough number, it's 35% but there are other considerations - mainly the post-flop tendencies of your opponent.

5. This is going to be very situation, board texture, and opponent dependent. It's also going to depend on how you're playing the value and bluffing hands in your range. So again, there's not a magic equity number that determines whether you call or fold.

6. I went through a lot pre-game routines over the years. One of the problems I was running into is that I'd wake up and immediately start playing. I'm often groggy in the morning and it'd take me a few hours before I was fully awake and thinking clearly.

I tried a number of things to help with this. Anything from working out to playing brain games on Lumosity to only playing low stakes until I felt like I was thinking clearly. Without question, working out was the activity that helped most. I'd normally do about 30 minutes of cardio and that'd always help with thinking clearer and being in a better emotional state.

I didn't have a post-game routine aside from doing anything that would get my mind off of poker. Given the volume I was playing and the amount of hours I was putting in, I just wanted to do anything that would get my mind off of poker. That could be sleeping, watching TV, going out for dinner. Anything as long as it didn't relate to poker or heavy thinking.

I'm a little confused here because I was under the impression that Poker Stars charges nothing for currency conversion. I remember reading that they give you the median Forex currency rate at the point in time that you convert.

So I'm not sure if you're referring to a different site or something else.

Also I remember reading that PokerStars prohibits any form of currency conversion where they believe you're trying to manipulate the market or trying to profit from. It doesn't sound like that's what you're talking about but thought I'd mention it.

Geez I can't even remember them all. I was only on UB and was hosting but they made hosts change their screen names every 6 months or so.

My primary account was Pirahna. The hosting accounts I can remember were TotallyTilt and MegaloManiac.

Yeah you praised that scammer a lot in the regs thread I recall. He actually had a team of thieves living together using that same strategy 24/7. Funny thing is that so many ppl think they are HU experts. I have played quite a few of them on eurosites and I'd say the best are mediocre and the worst couldnt beat a 50 cent game. Yet they sit up to $50/100 stealing thousands from recs and regs on Stars with an avg session of 7 hands or something with a mandatory button start. /Derail

Tony, any pool hall early days degen stories you'd like to share please? Excellent reading so far.

I just thought he won 3x what I did. Nobody ever said "he's cheating and here's how" until much later.

I was at the casino with a bunch of friends from the pool room playing blackjack - we often would make trips up there with a few hundred to a few thousand bucks in our pockets. I had lost all of my money, I think it was around 2K. I went to one of my friends and asked for 100 bucks (it was pretty routine for us that whoever was winning would lend money to the people that were losing).

At that point I walked over to a $100 table and tried to back-line bet a Russian guy that was playing. It was funny because he immediately shook his head no that he didn't want me playing behind him. He had been playing behind me a few hours before when I'd lost all my money. So I immediately said, "Come on, you were just playing behind me" and insisted. So he let me play behind him and we won almost every hand together. I think I left the table with about 900 bucks.

I walked over to another table with the winnings and played all the way through the night on my own and walked out of the casino with 27K in cash.

A few days later I went back to the casino myself with 27K and was playing anywhere from $500 to the table max of 6K. I don't remember much from this session aside from there was a table full of people, I was sitting in the 5 seat and couldn't lose a hand. When I left the table I had 110K in chips. I went over to the casino cage with the chips and they brought me into a special secured area where they counted out the 110K in cash. I put the 110K in a paper bag and went up to my room where I slept for several hours and then took a limo home.

I believe it was about a week later and I returned to the casino with a Nike bag that held the 110K and all the same friends (plus a few new ones) and started playing again. This time I started out playing 6K a hand and immediately went on another heater. At one point I think I won around 16 hands in a row. I was playing heads up vs. the dealer and I remember looking at the shoe and it was about 1/4 gone and I hadn't lost a hand.

At some point, I started playing 3 hands of 6K which was the absolute max that could be bet at Foxwoods. I must of played for about 8 hours and I think I had one losing shoe. When it was all said and done, I walked out of the casino with 450K.

I was so reckless with money back then that I can vividly remember throwing $500 chips to anyone and everyone that was near the table. By the end of the night there were people 3 rows deep watching me play. At one point one of the casino managers came over and made people move saying it was a fire hazard.

One of the things I remember most from that night was the expressions of the pit bosses and managers. They were absolutely sick like I was taking their own money. There was one guy in particular that couldn't even stand up. He was bent over and supporting all his weight with his hands against a table.

In typical Tony Pirone style at the time, I walked over to the casino cage with a black Nike bag over my back and asked for the 450K in cash. I don't remember all the details of this but they talked me out taking all the money in cash saying it was becoming too much of a burden for them to constantly count all this cash at the tables and at the cage. So I left that night with 100K in cash, a check for 300K, and I left 50K in credit on account with them.

I'll get to the rest of the story when I have some more free time...

I'm glad you are following your heart and living life on your terms, most people continue to play games they don't enjoy just for the money, and while it is nice to make great money, at the end of the day whatever makes you the happiest also is the most important to your well being.

I haven't played much 6max over the past bunch of years as I moved over more to PLO, but I have a very profound respect for your work ethic and game, you deserved all the compliments and winnings that came with the hours you put in. I've always enjoyed the blog, and wish you the best of luck in DFS.

I am curious if you think there is potential for more money to be made in DFS than poker. To myself, it appears DFS is in it's infancy like poker used to be, with mainly novices simply using their intuition to think they are winning w/ no concrete studying or preparation behind it. Those going in to work hard seem to have a very bright future granted the government does not step in and give the ban hammer. Best of luck TP.

Are you saying that if forced to answer his question, you need roughly 35% equity to peel out of position, or that you tend to peel 35% of the time out of position? (not even sure there's a stat for this)

Blackjack story continued...

I don't remember too much of what happened after I left the casino the night I'd won all the money. I know I was in a limo with all my friends, at some point we drove to New York City, but everything else is a blur.

At some point I returned to the casino with my friends (and even more new ones) to play again. I remember a lot from this day. When I walked into the high stakes area of the casino, they were expecting me. I remember the host or receptionist being pretty nervous and saying, "Forgive me I'm a little disheveled today". I think I remember this because it's the first time I'd heard someone use the word disheveled in speech.

I had heard from people that there was separate high stakes area on the 8th or 10th floor where you could bet 10K a hand. At this point, I had no intention of stopping and had my sites set on owning the casino. So I insisted to the host that they let me play in this private high stakes room. She said she couldn't authorize it and called the casino manager down. He came over and basically said he couldn't get me into the room. After arguing and insisting that I be let into the room, he told me if I put 300K on account with them, that I'd be let in.

At that point I walked over to the cage deposited the 300K check I had and then came back expecting to be let in. The casino manager made some excuse saying it would take time and needed to be reviewed and he couldn't let me in. This was probably the point I should of just threatened to walk out but being a degenerate gambler, I just wanted to get to the tables.

They had a private table setup for me with a dealer I'd never seen. I walked over with my 100K in cash and after about 45 minutes of the dealer counting my money, I finally was ready to play.

I immediately hit an incredible bad run of cards, I believe I was down over 100K in the first hour of playing. I continued playing and continued losing and was down around 250K. At this point I left the table and walked to another one with my chips. What I remember most about this is a bit boss practically running over to me and reprimanding me about leaving the private table they had setup for me. I remember thinking to myself, I'm betting 18K a hand and they're worried about me switching tables?? This was another point where I should of just walked out of the casino.

I continued losing and continued table-hopping. After about nine hours, the dust cleared and I had lost around 420K of the 450K. I was in a state of shock at that point, not really understanding the magnitude of what had happened. I had been winning so consistently and for so long, that I'd forgot it was even possible to lose. At this point, I quit, and headed back to the room with a few of my friends (all the others had vanished). I think I slept for about a day, woke up in a fog, and took a limo home.

I'll finish this story later when I have some more time...

Hurts to read that, idk what i would have done after a loss like that.

Great reading, thanks for the well!

What do you think about raising limpers, what things you consider when deciding raising a limper in different positions. What do you think about raising limper with the hand range you would normally raise in that position. Is that too tight? What hands go up in value against 34/5 guys and what type of guys do you prefer raising 55/13 guys. Is it all about their wtsd stat?

Thanks for sharing your Blackjack story. If that had been me, I do not think I would be able to share that story and relive the pain. Thank you.

Part 3:

There wasn't much more detail to go into about the actual blackjack story. The remaining 30K or whatever it was, I proceeded to lose over the next several months making several trips to the casino.

Every time I went to the casino over the next several years I was always chasing that 450K. It didn't matter how much I was winning, it was never good enough unless I could get back that money I had lost. I can recall at least six different instances where I ran a relatively short amount of money up to at least 40K and in every case I ended up losing all the money by the end of the night.

Losing all that money at blackjack had a devastating effect on me. I went from king of the world (at least my little world) to being dead broke and having no realistic way to make anything near what I had lost. I became a drug addict and was severely depressed. When I say severely depressed, I mean severely depressed like it took every ounce of energy in my body to even get out of bed. My weight dropped from 165 pounds to 135 pounds and it wasn't uncommon for me to go two days without eating anything but a hot dog or a couple of cookies. It was a really dark time in my life where I just slept, did drugs, and felt totally helpless and hopeless while my life spiraled downward.

I'm not really sure when or how I snapped out of it but eventually I did. I've always had an innate confidence in myself and I never stopped fighting. I don't believe in suicide so that never was an option. Slowly but surely things in my life started improving and by my mid-late twenties I was working two jobs. For a frame of reference, the whole blackjack incident happened when I was 22, the period of drugs and severe depression was from about 23-27.

The blackjack incident doesn't haunt me at all today. It's an experience that almost killed me but ultimately made me a lot stronger. Looking back on it, it seems like another lifetime. I barely recognize the person I was back then.

It most certainly motivated me with poker and still motivates me every day. I don't take anything for granted. That experience put me on the edge of death, it's hard to imagine falling any further than I did. So I'm grateful for where I am in life but am always aware of where I could potentially be. It's an incredible motivator for me to work as hard as possible, be disciplined, and make the most of my ability.

I do still play blackjack on occasion today but rarely play pit games. There was a period in my early 30's, early in my poker career and when I had gotten over the huge BJ loss, where I took blackjack very seriously. I was counting cards, playing very disciplined and hitting casinos all over the country.

I had a really good run the first year or two I was doing this and then I started getting a lot of heat, I was banned from playing at Foxwoods and Mohegan on separate occasions and noticed I was getting a whole lot of attention every time I'd sit down in Vegas or anywhere else.

At that point, the hard part of the game wasn't counting cards, it was trying to do it in a way that would take heat off of me. It became a lot less enjoyable and I often felt paranoid that the casinos knew what I was up to. It got to a point where I'm not even sure I was playing a break-even game because I spent so much of my time doing -EV things to try to throw the casinos off track. This was also around the time I started making significant money with poker so I decided it wasn't worth the stress for the relative small amount of money involved.

I still play a few shoes here and there when I'm at casinos but it's nothing serious and I'm happy if I'm playing a break-even game and enjoying myself.

My wife enjoys some of the pit games so I will play them from time to time as well. But it's just to have fun - I might walk over to the roulette wheel with her and blow 100 bucks over the course of an hour.

/