Don't play on UB so don't have any experience against him. On Full Tilt he does bizarre stuff, in no way do I think anything to do with cheating though. I think people underestimated him as well. That combined with people underestimating the amount of variance in poker in general makes a decent heater.

I don't think he is cheating. He does some really bizarre stuff that makes zero sense, but I think he is just on a big heater. I wish he would heater vs someone else, but w/e

seems like black swan/outlier >>>>>>>> cheater at this point

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWC_WZ7gd6g
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CpEOE...feature=relmfu

The dubztep

Seems doubtful he heatered for 200k hands against regs only at UB.

If this is inappropriate to post here, go ahead and delete it.

Looking for a stake at 25/50+

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/13...-stake-992961/

the whole wanting to change tables/logging in logging out and acting like a tard in chat is probably an effective strategy to tilt regs. Top that with making some weird plays, play some hands OOP and it just might mind**** a decent to good reg enough to make him misadjust and play badly enough so your OOP leaks and weird plays get compensated royally.

I think this is much more likely then him being some kind of super hacker cracking into full tilt or whatever. I played some people on UB that i thought were cheaters who ran pretty good and played weird, and looking back on it it def caused me to misadjust and play badly enough for me not to have an edge. Or only a small edge if they were actually bad enough.

When I was reviewing the old thread I thought this was the most likley explanation as well, seeing as many people thought it was more likley he knew what cards were coming than what people were holding. The evidence for this was somewhere between very shaky to barely credible in terms of hard proof, but there were some aspects that didn't smell quite right.

Again I have 0 experience with the guy. I just saw that the last posts in the thread disucussing him had several ppl. feeling strongly that something was up without renegging on those views. I watched him play for a bit yesterday and it really doesnt seem likley that he is cheating in any way right now during this current run unless he has some crazy well thought out plan to make it look like he is not. Everything that has ever happened with this can be explained by

-the funky stuff he does having a bit more merit than people give him credit for
-him running really well over a large sample of hands

Still, i just thought it should be brought to people's attention given the suspicion that seemed to exist. Doesn't seem neccesary at this point but you cant be too careful these days I suppose.

Just curious whether the NVG thread about this 18yo Portuguese wonder-kid is legit or not.. I don't have the patience to sift through pages of NVGtards squabbling.. certainly seemed like the early on DIH post cleared it up but the recent posts seem to say otherwise like he's joking or something.. (again, NVGtardom could be the culprit of that..) Just wondering what the deal is cuz it's a pretty stool cory brah if its true.

i think it's legit. a while back (>1 year) he found my IM contact info and introduced himself as a then ~16 year old kid that had done really well. he asked if i would consider doing coaching and also wanted to apply to make videos at CR. i told him he was too young for either of those things, wished him gl, we chatted every once in awhile randomly.

i talked to him a few days ago...story seems to check out. it would be a pretty elaborate and frankly well planned out lie if it's not true. i'd say >90% it's true if someone asked what i thought.

i've never played xblink but i think the point chipchip made above about random **** tilting people is very true and rarely talked about. against the right player i think it could account for a significant edge and potentially make him a favorite in a match where he'd be a slight to moderate dog otherwise.

getting a little OT but one of the reasons i think i did well against prahlad way back when is because he was often tilted when he played me. i had a very tight stop loss and even stop win strategy. i felt so much better booking a win that i noticed that even if irrational it had a meaningful impact on my mood so i did everything i could to book wins if it was remotely possible.

it got to the point where prahlad would realize that when i got up there was a good chance he wasn't getting even. i think this caused him to play slightly worse/more gambley in those spots (which i realized and adjusted for) plus also generally not play his A game when he saw my name at the table. this type of strategy also unintentionally saved my ass against the superusers as i never went off for a big number against any one player.

people should also observe the way ivey books wins/losses and his general personal management strategy. i don't think it's an insignificant part of why he's the winningest player in online poker.

professional players, imo, overestimate their ability to control their emotions and underestimate how important gameflow/momentum can be. not saying xblink has some revolutionary tilt strategy and people go out and just hand him money, but it might be worth having a coach look through sessions w the guy and see if there was some subtle tilt or w/e. gl

knowing some of the ppl who have played him, and seeing some of the hands (played on UB at nosebleeds), i think it is WAY more likely something fishy was going on when he was playing that high over there than it is that he either consciously constructed or stumbled onto an unorthodox winning strategy

Always amuses me when people use this as a reason

Would make it a sick nick choice, amirite?

this.

also ppl seem to be forgetting that he had an earlier stint on ftp (i think like 6 months ago?) and pretty much got crushed iirc.

edit-looks like xwink lost over a million last night...

Well really I am just trying to be objective in my analysis. As I said numerous times I have no personal experience with the guy and don't even play those games so I don't don't think it's kosher to come in throwing wild accusations without trying to think about/make the other side of the argument.

If this guy is cheating in some manner when he plays high stakes, he has done a ton of stuff to make it look like he is not. Part of the reason this caught my attention is because last week I was bored and re-read through some of the old AP/UB threads when those scandals were developing. As I said, this guy running a couple standard deviations above the mean and being better than people give him credit for is all it takes to explain everything that has happened with him.

The thing that stuck out to me tho was that his account of how quickly he ran up his role made it much less likley that someone could sucessfully develop a funky unique strategy that is in fact much more effective than most people were giving him credit for. The other thing that I found noteworthy is that it seemed likle sucessful specialists in different game formats (PLO, NLHE, HU SNG's, LHE) chimed in and thought something was up with this guy. Again a super heater across all formats at this time right after the scandal broke would natrually create a lot of skepticism so that's not proof, but there did seem to be enough suspicision that he should have been on people's radars.

Anyway when you combine all of that with the fact that these heaters were/are taking place against many of the world's best players and unique things like constantly changing tables, showing hands way more than anyone else, etc...it makes it look more sketchy. It was just a perfect storm for me in terms of re-reading those old threads, listening to the Travis Makar phone call where he talks about different kinds of cheating that occured on UB that were right in front of everyone's noses through some security hole that was later fixed post scandal. As I said and will keep saying, I don't think there is anything that is conclusive at all right now so i'm trying to be totally open minded. There just seem to be enough funny little things that I thought it deserved a forum other than NVG.

If people who have played him think this speculation is not appropriate please just shoot me a PM. If I was a legit player and random tards started accusing me of cheating I would be beyond irate. But a lot of you guys who played him on UB seemed to think a big piece of evidence against him was that he only played on Cereus. So that makes interpretting another seemingly crazy run on FT pretty interesting. He did drop a ton of $$$ back yesterday tho. I have no personal interest in any of this beyond wanting to make sure the community is clued into the situation and that no one is being taken advantage of.

Gabe

Looks like a story that a U.S. poker player who was playing on betfair, or whichever Euro room was being used, concocted. It'll be really helpful when withdrawing they just link to a large thread on 2+2 so their story "must" be true. I see a lot of potential holes in the story but honestly I don't care enough to give an entire analysis.

iunno to me it seems paranoid to think the story is fake, people that have talked to him vouch for him being real, why would anyone be suspicious?

Without going into any specific details read that board from start to finish keeping in the back of your mind that he's 18 and Portuguese.

^^If you actually bothered to read it you'd know the OP was not written by girah but by DogIsHead. You are talking nonsense. Tis the season for conspiracy theories it seems.

Speaking of outliers, since no 100% agreed upon strategy has been credited with beating hsnl, how can we know that some of the winners over 300k hands are not outliers? I suppose I was two years late to the party but the ideas in 'Fooled by Randomness' are fairly intriguing.

You cannot be an exceptional dentist without any skill, purely relying on luck. (ground-breaking, I know).
You can beat Sports to a 20% roi over 1000 games being lucky.
Two exceptional handicappers can pick two different sides of the line in an nba game with both considering themselves to have an 8% edge.

Sht happens!

Also, wp CTS!

Okay answer a couple of questions for me:
1. Why would a non wealthy Portuguese kid be in an international school which is expensive?
2. Why would a non-wealthy Portuguese kid continue playing when he racked up a 5 figure/6 figure bankroll??? You should know someone poor in Portugal is much worse off than a poor individual in the U.S.
3. Lets say he was in school on some type of scholarship? How would he have had enough time for his studies/live his life and then play poker

last point: I think you're underestimating what someone would be willing to do for 1.6m and the story is beyond dubious

Edit: "I look up from my desk, and there’s a board suspended on the wall. I made it a year ago when I was 17, when reaching the top of the poker world was still just a silly fantasy. On this board there are four pictures cut out and pasted… a crisp green million dollar bill, a picture of a WSOP bracelet, a screenshot of Durrrr sitting at Rail Heaven, and a photo of a little house in Hawaii."

WTF?
a house in hawaii... what does a kid from portugal now about hawaii

those are all completely absurd questions, and keep in mind i haven't read the thread or know anything about it.
but the bolded part was just my absolute favorite.
A) wtf are you even talking about.....is hawaii some mythical place only the rich whisper about in their country clubs after 5pm?
B) the irony of you assuming the ignorance of "some kid from portugal" and then using "now" instead of "know".

really well executed level....at least i hope.

none of those are absurd questions.... You would figure that a kid from Portugal would dream of Monte Carlo not Hawaii... Hawaii would be something a U.S. based individual would think of...

Just stop, JP.

This "Trade Blinds?" thing seems stupid to me.

Am I getting angled when I sit at someone's HU table, they see their hands and say, "Trade blinds?"

I feel like I'm getting angled here, but would I seem like a douche declining? It's their fault for posting, right? They'd prolly just grim me out of spite.

I guess I'm just asking how the "Trade blinds?" etiquette works. Seems like a ******ed practice to me.