You can see what's attainable (plus how this developed over the last years) in sharkscope leaderboards. But don't base your decision to play some format solely on that, though it's necessary obv. Yes, they're beatable and yes, the 15$ are still beatable at 8% and bigger (though much harder than years ago) for high skilled players with good game selection.
Being a "pro" playing only 15$ 9mans will be very tough, need to be very very good and grind huge amounts to get a solid income. Chances you're able to go for this right now if you ask those questions are pretty much zero, gotta study and play a lot

hey, im trying to learnin ICM by using sitngo wiz. i play 9 man turbos.

but when im playing at the bubbel the wiz want me 2 play thight. i dont understand that... here is a scenario :


blinds are 100/200 4 left (top 3 gets money)

im the chip leader whit 4800 chips in sb. the guy in bb has 4300

the 2 others have 1500 and 2700(and they have folded)


so its me (sb) vs the bb.
wiz want me 2 only push whit 6,3 % of the hands. and then hes super thight.(call % of 5,6) why do i have 2 fold almost everything here ??
i thought beeing super agressive was the right thing 2 do. i meen he will fold 95% of the times....

please help me out guys


thanx

cuz u are risking 4300 chips to win 300, having 5100 instead of 4800 doesnt increase your tournament equity by much.
You might wanna minraise instead of openshoving

ah, ok i see. ty so much making sence. so if the blinds where higher it will make sense right ?

Just curious.

Like many of you I'm sure, day in-- and day out I see many of the same names throughout the day at my tables. All doing their reg things, usually a pain.

I'd think it'd be quite beneficial for both you and the reg to compare notes occasionally. You're both obviously in the same stakes, and assuming you're both solid, you'd be able to help each other out with regards: player notes and spots against re-occuring fish and so on.

Has anyone ever got to know a reg, or became friends with them? How did you do it?

Moved to the beginner's questions thread. Last warning. Please read the faqs and stickies before starting another thread.

I seem to be getting in trouble here, I had already read the FAQs and stickies and didn't think I did anything wrong. I've never started a thread before either.

I apologise, and will lay low.

Change blinds to 200/400, 300/600 and see what happens.

I've got to know some of the regs in my games from this forum but I'd consider it a bit dodgy to contact them in games or anything like that.

Finding the big leaks of your favorite fish based on stats and filtered hands is a good excercise, highly profitable and will certainly help your game a lot.
If someone has thousands of games on your limit and runs like minus two digit ROI, you should be able to figure out how to get the best of him. Sharing notes on that isn't much valuable imho, cause it should be kind of obvious how to exploit those guys.

Imho it's also very important to analyze regs, especially bad ones who don't adapt much or at all. Finding their leaks if you sit on like half your tables with them is golden. Everyone is exploitable to a certain extent, just that good players are in a process of constant adaption against each other.

I think the thing you're looking for, sharing info, is best done by posting hands here, explain your reads and everything that goes through your head in as much detail as you can.

To your second question: I'm not friend with any other poker reg, but I'd certainly like to meet a lot of guys in real life or regularly have poker talk online. My friends have nothing to do with poker apart from some having played a few home games and like 100 hands online. Making some poker friends would be really nice
I'm living in Cologne, Germany btw.

How many sngs does the average low- mid stakes grinder average per day? Not like the super high volume guys, but the avg ones.

No strategy in the **** thread please

When I played all the time, I played 100-120 reg speeds. I would have to get up during the night to do that now but 150 turbos would hardly be pushing it.

Okay, thanks, I deff need to step my volume up then. Also, didnt mean to post in the wrong section thanks for moving it Mods.

Anyone knows and/or tested any good android software for STTs? Like Replayers, ICM calculators etc.
Not reviewing some hands on bus/train tours might be a big leak of mine

I have serious trouble on the bubble. In my (admittedly low amount of) 9player SnG games this month (mainly $7), I end on 4th place in >25% of all games. I'm not new to poker, but my prior losses made me quit about a year ago and also delete all my old PokerTracker data. But I decided to give poker another try, this time with more discipline and more willingness to learn and analyze my games.

I started a thread here, but it got locked (probably due to too high noob alert). The only real info I got was that 100 SnGs is too low of a sample rate and I shouldn't start evaluating before 500 SnG. But I don't feel like losing $1000 just so I'm allowed to ask questions here.

My problem is that I don't know which stats would be good on the bubble. Is 24% PR as CO too high or too low? Is 40% Call PF 3-Bet on CO/Btn too high or too low? Am I overplaying Ax? The hands with my worst outcomes are AK,AQ,AJ, I consider those hands good enough to call all-ins or 3bet myself. Is that wrong? Should I change HUDs on the bubble? Is 72% Fold to all-in CBets too high or too low? How good a hand do I need to entice the player to the left with >20% 3Bet on the bubble to reraise me all-in?

I tried reviewing individual hands, but with no success. When I go all-in with AJ, somebody calls me with AK. When I call an all-in with AK, the initial raiser has 55. Mostly, I'm not sure if my fatal hand is actually the reason I constantly fail. Maybe my losses are ok and I'm just not winning enough with my winning hands or not stealing enough blinds?

As you can see from my questions, I'm lost in several very different questions. So any help / advice / links to guides is very welcome. I'm eager to learn. My searches in the forum have not been successfull so far.

Finnster

I'm of no help with this, but maybe someone will be able to chime in and help ya. Sorry

Finnster, I'll make a new reply to you tonight since this one didn't save correctly for some weird reason

Hey, so there's a lot of stuff you're talking about in your post, I'll try to respond somewhat reasonably, but might just end up babbling random bits of information and advice, sorry in advance .

So first of all, the problem is that 100, 500, even 1000 games is nowhere near a big enough sample where you're going to know if you're a winner, loser, b/e player, whatever. I've had stretches of like 2500+ games where my EV line has been like -8%, just absolutely gross, and obviously my long term ROI isn't -8%. So yea, that's the biggest thing, your sample isn't anywhere near big enough where we can give you a lot of specific help just based on your database/finish distribution/etc. Like you said in your 4th paragraph, you think that you might be kind of running bad in card distribution, and that's definitely certainly a large possibility. Just gotta keep playing and trying to improve all the time, obviously.

WRT all those stats you laid out, it's hard to say, and I myself don't play 9mans, but it sounds like you probably overplay hands on the bubble and you probably call too many 3b's, even when IP. From the limited 9mans I have played, I've noticed most players (at least at the midstakes), especially regs, are quite tight with 3bing, and also are pretty tight on the bubble. There's some absurd bubble factors in 9mans, and if players aren't shoving super wide in the spots they should be, you just can't be calling that wide at all. I'd suggest to run lots of hands in either in icmizer or sng solver, messing around with the shoving ranges and see how that changes the range you can call with, and vice versa.

On top of that, I'd suggest to get a subscription to a training site so you can watch a slew of videos on the games that you grind, just so you can get an idea of what a reg thinks is 'standard' in many situations. I myself have never used a training site before, so I don't even know which one to suggest to you, but do some research and figure out which one you think is best for you. That, combined with reading threads on here and also maybe watching and railing some higher stake games, should definitely help out.

Android poker apps tested for now:

2+2 app: rocks obv ^^
aScope: bad, lacks a ton of sharkscope functionality
Hold'Em Poker ICM Study tool: lolbad, it's an ICM quiz-mode with ******ed ranges which can't be changed

Then there's an app called "PushFolder" which can just deal with cEV, so useless and some bad (cause static, no function to analyze hands) ICM split calculators.
Replayers to be tested. Nothing of study use found, sigh.
Anyone got an idea?

Finnster, to give you an idea of 9man turbo variance just use the tool "ROI simulator", should easily be accessible via forum search, there's also a youtube manual to it. Variance is a whole lot bigger than ppl think it is (which is a good thing, for keeping all kinds of fish and mediocre players in), though not nearly as scary as in hypers obv.

I know you'd just love to have a number of when a sample can be called significant, so I'm suggesting a kinda arbitrary 4k sample before drawing any conclusions. Obv on the lowest stakes which have no superbad rake-structure, as long as you aren't confident of beating any limit.
For your 100 hand sample it's pretty easy to run -xx% for a +xx% player and vice versa.

hey, i have played some 9 man stt sitngo`s and i am using sitngo wiz to improve my game. when im playing stt sitngo`s its ICM that figures out what moves i have to do, and i understand that.

but when im playing mtt sitngo`s its chip equity instead. and its a huge diffrence ! why? in one cenario it was a push ageinst 2 guys. had like 12 bbs left, and 2 tables still active. the chip equity told me 2 shove 80 % or so. if i switced over to ICM(if we pretend is was a stt instead of a mtt) it was a 6 % shove. i just think its so strange the diff is so high.

please help me out

ICM is just an algorithm to convert chip value into $-value, taking stack distribution, relative blindsizes, payout structure etc. under consideration.

A program using this algorithm like SnGWiz can just calculate for you, what you should do to maximize your EV in a decision (mostly used as push vs fold) within that algorithm AND given ranges you enter. So there is unfortunaely no way it can tell you what to do without putting in own work on range assessment.

Also it is missing some relevant factors, doing in tendency some over- and underestimations of the $value of certain rel. stack sizes, but this is more advanced and to begin with it's a good idea to get a feeling for what are good shoves/folds in certain situations you had in your games.

For the questions why cEV can vary so much from $EV take the following exaggerated example to illustrate:
You're on the bubble of a 9man in the bb and after posting you got one single chip left. CO, BTN and SB have completely identical stack sizes which are obv all way bigger than yours. CO shoves, BTN calls, SB calls. You got AA.
What do you do cEV wise? What do you do for max. $EV? Which of them is the better choice and why is that? (Let's abstract from their ranges completely since they're is not relevant in this special situation, just to illustrate)

thanks jdawg and LeaksSuck, I know my sample size is still pretty small. But I see it this way: The smaller the leak, the more games you need to be sure that it exists. And I believe I have a big leak on the bubble. When I posted in this thread, I had roughly 100 SnGs played, now I have 200 SnGs played and still the same: ~45% of the times where I enter the bubble, I lose on the bubble. That is no small leak.

In addition, why should I not start analyzing my play style right from the start?

My problem is that I don't know how to improve as I don't know where I should be looking. When I look through my statistics, questions come up like "am I raising often enough from CO in 4handed bubble play?". So if anyone knows of a good tutorial on how to analyze game play (especially SNG bubble play), I'd be happy to know.

Yeah of course you can start out analyzing now, but not on the basis of some "200 SnG co raise 4handed" stats. This is useless, also for a bigger sample, cause you don't aim at finding some %pfr or whatever in a highly generalized spot, when the decisions depend on a lot of factors which change. Might be correct to shove 72o, might be correct to fold KK.
Taking out specific hands is better
The way to analyze bubble play is mainly like "take hands you played, guess ranges, ask others, repeat."

Say a 40 buy in 9 max blinds 200/400, it's on the flop, 2 players, and the pot is 10k, stacks are 15k, so both players are pot committed. K9o to hero, jto to villian, kjt raindow flop. Villian bets 2k, hero shoves on top.

Hero is getting 40% equity and villian is 60%, ev is about 5k and 15k. (i rounded) Even though hero is getting positive ev, because the villian is getting more than double ev, is it a bad play hero makes?