Lumiere...

Oh snap!

I am sure "adonis122"or any other top pros in the game will not read the book. This book is for beginners for sure.

I was just teasing you. Obviously, "all-NYC" and "all-NYC for my division of schools" is a distinction you don't really need to make for a poker website. I go into enough detail about how successful you've been and how incredible it is that you've stayed on top of the game for so long in this ebook, that I figured it was probably ok to make you the butt of a joke before its release. I'm genuinely sorry if it struck you as just purely a cheap shot, was not my intention. Well, maybe it was my intention, but I meant it as a much more lighthearted cheap shot

I would strongly disagree with you that games have gotten 100x worse and are basically dying, especially given the premise that the games are getting killed by poker education. Here's an interesting statistic:

Sum of top 20 HUSNG winners on sharkscope, 2010: $4,753,620
Sum of top 20 HUSNG winners on sharkscope, 2011: $4,651,742 (projected)

Sure, it's not a completely fair comparison, and you'll see some differences at lower stakes (for $100-$300, the numbers are 1.68m to 1.478m, for example). But those numbers are absolutely crazy to me. In 2011 we've had FTP completely shut down, Stars shut off for US players, major professional traffic flowing to fewer places, and massive negative publicity for online poker in general (it's all a ponzi scheme!). And in spite of this, all objective indicators seem to be that the HUSNG world is chugging along just fine.

How could this be? More importantly for this discussion, why would the drop in profits be so insignificant given this awful year for online poker in general if it were also the case that online poker education is destroying the games?


I just don't see any objective evidence for the doomsday calls. They come every year, they come all of the time. They were there in 2008 and they're here now. And people still keep making massive amounts of money from being the best at what they do.

(Also, my joke was somewhat out of disappointment because I got really excited when someone told me the greatest HUSNG player of all time was also one of the best high school basketball players in New York City. That's impossibly baller. But then I found some youtube clips of last year's playoffs and saw almost all white people and I was bummed).

Still, 1000 points in a career is pretty ****ing awesome and I don't mean to say the league is a joke or anything, definitely looked like some pretty good players. Career high?

I think you are the greatest husnger of all-time (by far) and you are also extremely handsome and well-dressed (I would do you for sure). However, I think your comments are valid for >500's at best. Below that, the action is as good as ever. I can tell you without a doubt that there are some horrible players at the 100's DAILY, never mind lower. Sure, this means nothing to you as 100's are beneath you, but this is real. The middle is ballooning, not so much top-heavy stuff like before. That's the change. ST's are reducing edges, players are better. You know the deal, keep up and crush those footsteps or be overthrown from the perch. That's life man...

Maybe you guys an work out a deal livb makes a vid for the site and you guys don't release the book for free. Its a win win you guys get massive exposure for husng.com and you don't have to completely kill the games to do so...

+1

great idea IMO

I highly doubt livb thinks enough of my poker thinking to be scared about what I have to say in some articles.


Here's a question for the doomsday people: If this ebook were to have a drastically negative effect on husng profitability, that effect would be fairly easily measurable, yes? If so, pick a way to measure it and make a specific prediction about how things will be different profit-wise than the way things are now. It should be a prediction that's checkable at some point next year. Make it and see if you're right.

Livb can't hate me. I send the articles he tweets to my finance brethren to argue for how legitimate some of the Occupy Wall Street complaints are. There's no way he doesn't secretly want to curl up and watch The Daily Show with me.

Ah. I was just looking at the TOC and saw "Bayesian Inference" and was like "wait, how do you explain posterior distributions to a poker player with no stats background?"

As for making this a free resource: I'm all for it. Let those who wish to improve their game get better and those who don't get left in the dust.

Yeah so that article is a good example of what I mean. It'd be pretty easy to use that article to say things like "so here's a HUD statistic you can use to imply a best guess opening frequency given population tendencies and what you've experienced, the math would work out like this", but ultimately that's going to leave a lot of people uninterested (it also has questionable real value for players who already have a decent enough intuitive sense of the concept), and it's better to talk in general about developing reads from limited information, with some real life examples, that make the concept easily accessible but advanced enough to not be a snoozefest for good players.

I'm assuming your profit numbers for HU SNGs include Super Turbos. What are the numbers for non Super Turbo HU SNG profits? Also, the total profit number is much less relevant imo than the distribution of those profits. The more narrow the distribution, the worse it is for the games. The addition of STTs is a perfect example of what I'm talking about. The sites make money when edges are smaller. The key to the success of an online poker site is the length of time that a fish can make his money last. Poker education and poker software, (HEM et al.) have dramatically sped up the process of removing a fish from his bankroll at a faster and faster clip. When you say there are no numbers to support this, have you heard of a replacement rate? Do you know what % of a typical online poker site's player base goes broke per month? Have you looked at how fast poker sites are replacing their player base? Those numbers have been trailing off pretty dramatically in the past 6 months to a year.

For the person who said this is about the real economy, where are you getting that from? This book along with all training and educational poker sites along with HEM and other tracking software have one main consequence: they make the players who use them better players. That makes the gap between fish and good players even larger, it makes the time it takes for a fish to lose his money even shorter. Of course there are still fish. Of course there are very bad players at the lower levels. But what do you think the players were like 3-4 years ago? I can assure you they were worse. How do you think that I was able to make so much money even though I was considerably worse than I am now and I would periodically monkey tilt like a psychopath and punt off 50k at a time going all in for like 100 hands in a row. The one thing I will agree with is that HU SNG play has seemed to plateau in the last 6 months to a year. People were actually improving before and now most of the improvement seems to be in STTs. These tiny edge games will become less and less profitable and eventually there will be too many players who can't distinguish themselves from each other and they will have to share profits like bum hunting cash game players do.

I obviously understand why HUSNG.com exists and why this book was written. It's a business and it's trying to make money. What I resent is the dishonest idea that it along with all poker education websites haven't made and will continue to make the games much tougher. Obviously they have and they will. It's a disingenuous marketing ploy to suggest otherwise.

How well did ESPN pay you to give hand by hand analysis (very good analysis I might add) at the live coverage of the main even this year? Id say that was about as much strategy as Mers is giving here to the right people and those that can apply it appropriately.

Much of the money to be made in HUSNGs has gone towards superturbos as fish have made that more of their preferred game, that's definitely true. I don't think the decline of reg speed and turbo action is due to training sites.

You're right that it's the distribution that matters in terms of how profitable the game remains - I'm open to any factual metric that you would use to test whether the games are significantly less profitable than they were a year ago. I think looking at the top 20 by stake level certainly shows that the opportunity to make a ton of money if you're one of the best ("at my limits...at my limits...") is absolutely still there. Especially considering what you might expect those numbers to be given everything that's gone down this year.

We seem to agree about certain things regarding this - part of your argument is that the existence of tools like this helps the most talented and hardworking players make more money from worse players, and in fact take it from them unsustainably fast. Hence, and correct me if I'm wrong, you're saying poker education is good for good players in the short term, but dangerous in the long run because the fish will run out of money and there won't be enough replacements coming in. I think it's a reasonable position. I'm just super wary because I've heard the same calls without evidence for years and years now that we were on the brink of the games dying, as derosnec alluded to. I've been told I can't make ST videos because there was a window of months where the games would be profitable and after that it was all over, and people like Serkules just continue to lol to themselves and chug on with ridiculous ST winrates over massive samples. Not to mention myself, it seemed like the more videos I made the juicier the games become for me (never did figure out whether this was just people respecting me for no reason or me actually getting better...hmmz).

Poker education makes the games tougher for people who don't continue to work at their games. All the better that something like this is free and there's no barrier to access the information. I firmly believe everybody who devotes some time to reading and thinking about this ebook will be better off than if it had never existed.

^^^ Meh, not saying one is bad or not. I actually really enjoyed the coverage a lot. I just know there was a lot of criticism about it at the time, much like this. Sounds like a case of the pot calling the kettle black.

No that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that poker education speeds up a player's learning process. It requires significantly less talent and hard work to become good when you have a teacher, coach, training site, helpful book, etc. I am of course not implying that someone can become good without working hard, but you are profiting by making the process of improving easier. That's the value your book theoretically should bring. By definition, making the process of improving easier is bad for the games. It's good for the people who get better, but bad for the games overall. I don't know how to make this point more clearly. Your book is making the games worse. It might be miniscule, but it has that effect. Btw, online poker is intrinsically an unsustainable model, poker education simply speeds up the process of it breaking down. Your wariness seems to come from the fact that that people have been telling you that games are about to die, but they haven't totally died yet. That kind of reminds me of climate change deniers. Every snowfall proves the earth is not warming? This is a slow and gradual process. There are countless examples of how games have gotten worse, how action has dried up. You seem to imply that because games are not dead, that means they're not worse. Online poker isn't going to fall off of a cliff. But Dario Minieri was the best hu sng player like 5 years ago. He was 8 tabling and playing 6 different players at a time, some ridiculous massive fish. Now the fish in the games are regs lol.

I acknowledge that my live commentary would also fall into the category of making games worse though I think it's considerably different because live tournaments aren't dying, they're getting bigger. There are other reasons too but I'm going to sleep, its 8 am here.

Finally, Mers my only issue with the bball comment was that you seemed to imply that I was being dishonest on my website. People say many things about me on here and that's fine, it comes with the territory and I've earned many of those comments. But I wanted to address that comment because it came from a respected poster and I thought had to do with integrity. Also, I wasn't trying to pretend like I was Kenny Anderson in highschool, Class C is the Private School class, like you said, bunch of rich white kids....

Last comment because there may be some confusion about something. I'm not making a value judgment on profiting by making the games worse through poker education. I'm making a value judgment on doing that and then at the same time denying that you're making the games worse. That is either insane denial or dishonesty, either way, that's what I have an issue with.

Livb out....

Lol at this

Is that a level?

You do know that despite the country with the largest online player pool in the entire world being banned from their site stars just broke the record for most ppl ever in a mtt and their is a $215 $10 million dollar mtt coming up right?

Not at all. I am not saying they are not increasing.

It is the way he justifies it. When Mers gets paid to train poker players it is so wrong, yet when he does it its fine because it is mtt. That does not make any sense.

WP Good sir.

Livb does have a point.
games are still profitable for the winners but i´d like to measure how much influx of money actually goes into the poker economy,because i feel the top 20 profit nowadays from cannibalizing regs who won and moved up instead of fish.

So while there will be people who have more success because of this book each of them will take (most of)his additional profits from people who try to make a living of off poker, which does not seem like a positive thing for the games. And just because those people are not as talented(motivating oneself to work really hard is a talent imo),they are not incorrect when they complain.


Overall i´m gonna try to devour every crumb of pokerknowledge that falls off of merse´s table, but i do not feel too positive about the future of onlinepoker especially since one market after another starts to close out foreigners.