lol, IT2WU

I think short- to medium-term this is by far the biggest threat to online poker but long-term the online poker player pools will grow again.

Ive never seen things this way and i think that you should just quit if you see that as "canibalizing" and if you feel that getting money out of ppl trying to make a live on poker. If thats wrong from your view winning from fish is almost the same as you cant evaluate how important that money is to them, since obv addicted people cant just stop gambling. This game isnt supposed to be a nice and "correct" game, there are ppl destroying their lives while we make money out of them. The point is I dont care about them.

Ps: and seeing things my way, people who get screwed because the games got so tough they cant beat it anymore have no right to complain. This isnt a normal job where people just go claim for their rights if they feel injusticed, simply because there isnt much justice involved. There is obv to some extent, but if you cant beat the game you should either improve or quit, complaining isnt an option.

Blaming Mersenneary for ruining their lives is allowed though.

I didn´t say i mind taking their money. I´m just saying it´s not good for the games if you accelerate that process.

Whats the worst case scenario? Worse regs cant win anymore so they quit. Less regs in the game, proportion of fish goes up. recreational fish dont quit the games because the regs are playing better. Meanwhile a lot of new players start trying to make a live, some will quit if they cant but until they realize that its money to be won.

I personally find it hard to see the end of online poker in the near future. And most likely i will have quit way before (bad reg here) so i dont care either.

i am 100% confident that if you take two regs in hyperturbos, one of them with a significant edge on the other ( what does that even mean, lol, like 2%?), and give them both a great ressource to study their games, the edge for the better player will decrease.

why is that so? because the inclination of the learning curve decreases massively during the learning process. when you start out, you can become a winning player from being a massive loser in less than a month, assuming small stakes. but after that, every percentage of roi gets harder to achieve. skill level doesn't increase linearly with studying time. so while the better player of the two will probably experience a bigger influence on his skill, the huge leaks the bad player plugs will make him a smaller loser than before.

assuming you gave those books to two regs at the same level and nobody else, i couldn't agree more with you, the better reg will make tons more out of this than the worse reg, mainly because his edge on all the other regs will increase and he can either push them out of the lobby or even move up to a higher stake and get accepted there. however, when this information is released to everyone, it will hurt him more than it helps him because of what i explained before, every bad reg in the lobby will plug the big leaks and constantly sitting them to get them out of the lobby gets less profitable than it was before.

You are the man. I hate procrastinating in a Forum, but your posts are outstandingly smart. Thanks for the book, thanks to Rypac too of course.

No, it comes from the fact that I see no real evidence that they are dying in the slightest, especially if you add that the reason has to be due to poker education (and not sites getting shut down, etc). In your global warming analogy, we know global warming is happening because it is measurable. If you look at the profits people have been able to achieve at all stake levels, they have been remarkably steady over the past five years and actually increasing in general. This is while people have constantly whined about poker education killing the games. If the effect were as massive as you claim, it would be measurable. You would be able to show me evidence that poker is getting less profitable. It should be an easy case if times are so dire.

First of all, I'd also disagree with your claim about MTTs - the main event is obviously getting much much tougher. Second of all, it depends on your definition of "games worse". What I, and I think most people, mean about how good the games are, is the potential for profit if you are one of the best players at your level. Poker education takes money from fish faster, it makes the life more difficult of several classes of mediocre regs, it increases leads to certain people getting kicked off their perch and new ones replacing, it does lead to an increased number of people competing for the perch, it advances knowledge of the game...but what it comes down to, at least to me and I think most people, is "what potential for profit is there for the best regs at certain stakes in HUSNGs?" And that potential is clearly still massive. I even gave you some ground on non-ST games, but people are still absolutely mollywopping those games, too.



The last thing to bring up on this point - you're right about your general thoughts about the unsustainability of the poker economy, and how poker education speeds that up on a macro level - again, though, it implies the results of poker education will be that professional players learn to make even more money quicker at first. Again, I think your position here is reasonable (the only parts I think are unreasonable are "games are already 100x worse" type claims which don't seem to be corroborated by any facts). Given the changes that will happen to the online poker landscape going forward, I am much less concerned about this. But that's a topic for another day.

If big winners profits are somewhat steady the passed few years that means games have gotten a lot tougher. In general these big winners constantly improve their game with every session they play, and with profit remaining steady that means games are getting tougher. At some point a good player has reached its plateau and can't make any more significant improvement, while the general field will still be catching up and at that point his profit will not be steady anymore but decline.

You don't actually believe all the things youre saying do you? You can always think of arguments for anything but I doubt you actually believe all this yourself. I don't get why you would make this book. You don't have part ownership of husng.com right? If you did it would make sense since that can make you a lot of money. If you don't however, it makes no sense - how much did you get for this book? Its less then 10k, probably a lot less, you probably would've made much more just playing in those hours. Since you don't play anymore it doesn't matter for you, but if theres even a remote chance you'll ever return to superturbo's or even just play it in evening hours this becomes a bad bet for you.

Unlike other forms of poker, a single book can hurt super/hyperturbos. Super/hyper turbo's are incredibly simple and its a matter of time before they decline massively in profitability, your book speeds this up a lot.

Fair enough. I'm sorry about that. I'm also sorry about telling some random Dutch guy who texted me how to needle you in some donkament, I'm not exactly sure what he said but maybe that was out of line, too.

OK, so this is somewhat semantics here - when I say how tough the games are, I mean the potential for profitability and how much the clump of best players at the stakes can make due to the landscape. Obviously, the general level of competition has improved over time, which includes the improvements of the best players. Shrieks of "games are dying/could die!" seem to me to be talking about the ability to make profit, which we seem to agree has been fairly constant over time. Which means the level of play is increasing but profit margins are as healthy as ever.

Again, this has been the battlecry for doomsday folks for years and years. When is it going to happen? People have made specific predictions with timelines, especially regarding superturbos, and been dead wrong time and time again. imo, the landscape of online poker will change drastically before we reach this point.

I appreciate such a strong endorsement, but I don't believe this is true. This book will make the vast majority of people who read it and try to make the most out of it better off for it having existed.

You missed my point, I think poker works the way that the good player's profit can be consistent because he improves at the same rate the field does. However, at some point the good player will plateau, not being able to make any significant improvement since his game is close to optimal, and the field will be able to progress with the help of books/coaching. Also there will just be a larger number of good regulars in general, and your steady profit will turn declining and keep declining. Superturbos is a special case, this will not be this profitable anymore very soon since its so easy to learn and reach close to optimal play.

What about the second part, why would you write this book? This just blows my mind, even if its not guaranteed it will make the games tougher, its not that crazy of an idea it would right - why take that risk, theres nothing in it for you, surely you wouldve made more just playing these hours.

so late to this thread, but mind = blown looking forward to this

My claim is that since profit is not even declining yet, it's a silly siren (especially given that people have been wailing it for years and it just hasn't happened), and drastic changes to the poker landscape are likely to overwhelm these effects in the next few years.

I'm not really at liberty to disclose how much I was paid unless ChicagoRy would like to make that public, I do think it's fair to say that I have no HUSNG.com ownership interest. I signed a contract back in March to write three poker articles a month to be used at the site's discretion along with the three videos a month. There was certainly plenty in it for me in that contract.

But coaching has always been a -EV proposition for me in terms of purely hourly rate. I've done it because I like it, I like the added dimension it gave to my poker experience, I liked the balance it made me feel about everything I was doing in the poker world.

btw, from your framework, any hour I spend in the future on poker is -EV: The value of a marginal hour put in at work these days is probably higher than the EV from playing poker. That's not to say I wouldn't still play poker recreationally for reasons alluded to above.

I can't wait to read your book , i love this game and i love ST in particular.
I think you have done a majestic work, the whole comunity can understand this simply reading the table of contents.
I strongly believe that you have done this because it's in your "natural teacher nature", the time and efforts that you have put in writing are not a matter of money, you have done this for the passion you have for this game.
All of us thank you for this, really appreciated!!

That said, i perfectly understand livb and H2Olga point of view.

The games are getting tougher and your book will obviously increase this process as much as coaching, training site and all the other stuff.
I think that the edge will become thinner and thinner at the mid-high stakes where more money rounds on the tables and probably more people are ready to work hard to improve their make and start make serious money.
Especially ST, as said by H2Olga, are a sort of solvable game where an avarage player can learn and improve a lot easier compared to regular/turbo games because the nature of the game is more oriented towards mathematical aspects.
Obviously the better players will have a significant edge on the average player but i expect that the very profitable players will decrease in number.
I think that at the low-mid stakes the trend will be different and the player pool is so wide that the smart low-mid stakes regulars who study and work hard will profit by your e-book more than the avarage high-stakes reg.

At the end of the day, however, i am still very happy of your free e-book!

Cheers

I'm not sure what to say to make you understand that profit will decline guaranteed the next few years... I just don't see how you don't get that. It doesn't seem such an absurd thought though right? I mean you can't be sure it won't decline, it seems like a very reasonable option. What you're doing with this book is possibly cutting off a part of your income should you return to poker, and you don't even get paid well for it. Why take the risk, that doesn't seem smart, I just don't get it.

Poker occasionally is fun! coaching is not fun lol. Do you enjoy coaching as much as playing? thats weird but I guess its possible.

i understand what u guys are saying, but dont u want the game u like (or love) and devoted so much time on it, to grow and expand

yh the gap between number 1 and 1000 will get shorten, but it will also be required more talent/natural ability, hardwork etc to reach and stay number 1

or do u prefer to be like the good old days forever, and u made like 2M profit, someone asks u how u did it, and u answer 'I found that minbetting everysingle flop on a 9max sng works because everyone waits for the nuts'

at least that wouldn't fulfill me as a career (i guess i understand if ur in it just to make money on the side and move on to other things)
and imo the asians will enter this game eventually and we better have the game well developed to crush them for a while (and im not talking about mjw's, im talking about real asians)

I taught middle school math for a semester while playing mid/high stakes poker. I'm ****ing crazy. To each his own utility curve.

this is true as long as poeple dont ruin the games by teaching them English.
Then they´ll run us over by learning all the freely available 2+2 knowledge.

Oh, also, I plan to do some serious outreach with various communities about this ebook - any particular countries I should focus on attracting to HUSNGs? It's really too bad the French and Italians aren't with us anymore.

Brazil and Russia.

so it wouldn't hurt to be 10 years in theory ahead

i can translate it into german if you want(slight adjustments like editing every "fold" out of it might happen by accident though)

Russian interview scheduled for a week from today! Privet Pokeroff!