I use NC for cash games. Are you saying HUSNG cartel uses NC? (I can't see why they would bother frankly as it would be like using a sledgehammer to crack a nut). Skier's tool is merely a faster way of accessing shoving charts which I understood most HUSNGers have plastered hardcopy all over their walls. Rudimentary post-flop skills and shoving charts are sufficient win at HUSNG? What supertools are you saying HUSNGers cartel use?

PokerStars

After all is said and done, when you make a decision on this issue. I suggest you make an approved can only use software list meaning no other software is allowed if not on list. This will force home made or new for sale software to be checked first and approved by PS. If not, its my opinion users will feign ignorance for illegal software use when caught if thate software is not on the ban list.

If a company wants to be on the list of allowed software, they must send program to PS just like Skier did to get approval.

I actuallly think PS already made a tentative decision on this issue already and are now are asking for input by the players to see if there is something perhaps they missed or got wrong. Either way, worst case scenario is they already made up their minds and this thread is just a farce so there wont be a huge uproar on 2+2 and other forums if they were just to announce changes.

But banning huds will help wouldnt it? No one has ever said it was a solve all solution. If a player truly knows his game and beating the game through his own device, great, no one was saying otherwise in this scenario.

Its the mass number of multiple software that allows people to get that information quickly with no effort on their part is what is irking people.

I think you have to differentiate between different types of poker games by how well solved or theoretically solvable they are:

1. HUSNG especially short-stacked are essentially solved and can be readily automated ala Skier's software or hand charts on the wall.

Personally I don't play HUSNG because I find it boring not to have to solve a logic post-flop puzzle. I find it boring to look at a chart and shove or fold. If software and paper charts could somehow be banned from all HUSNG I'd play them at a recreational "let's have some fun" level. There is no point my playing when I know pros are effectively bots and I will get crushed. But how can you ban paper charts or software that could easily run on a second computer? This leads me to conclude you have to change the HUSNG rules somehow to add unsolvable complexity. Secondly, cartels are against the spirit of the game and against TOS as regs use tools like Sharkystrator to avoid each other and maximise play vs recs. All such tools should be banned.

If s/w aids are not banned, these games will die anyway as recs wise up and refuse to play.

2. MTT's are solvable once short-stacked and play becomes push/fold. Early full-stacked play is of limited consequence on eventual outcome as blinds rise. Same comments as above. Either ban tools or watch recs walk away.

3. HU 100BB+ cash play is solvable as estimated by Claudico team at 1-3 years away to have a Nash solution. So maybe same comments as above eventually apply but at the moment substantial post-flop skill is required. Hand samples build quickly as every hand is versus the same HU opponent in a match. Well-designed HUDs+ give an edge but the player has to have MUCH more knowledge of sound play than what applies in the push/fold charts of above categories or they will overinterpret or misinterpret HUD leading to losses.

4. 100BB multi-player (6+) cash-games are much more post-flop complex and 6-max+ games are theoretically unsolvable as Nash equilibrium isn't able to guarantee winning unless HU. It also takes a lot more hands to get a useful sample on a given opponent. HUDs+ vs regs provide an edge but that edge matures too slowly to be used against recs (other players will have stacked the rec before the HUD alone has noticed!). Player observation skills are essential against recs using Pokerstars color-coding and Notes. So for cash games, I don't think banning or allowing HUDS+ makes any difference to game fairness or recreational survivability.

Hi Richas

I think that this needs some clarification. We haven't completely defeated any cartel, or in fact defeated one at all. What happened was that two of the people I work with had very good results vs cartel members over a few thousand games. Then people with an agenda to pressure us to reveal what we were doing perpetuated myths and it all snowballed from there. These myths caused people to freak out which caused more myths and the whole thing got out of control.

One of these myths was that anyone using my software is able to turn into someone who can beat them with little to no effort, but that simply is not true. They have missed the months of behind the scenes work these people have undertaken including plenty of time working one on one with me. I don't think many people would think that it is unreasonable that a 1k regular is able to help people beat the 100s and 200s players. Unlike what they would have you believe, I work with people who have had good results at the lower stakes and plenty of experience playing HUSNG who work very, very hard. There is nothing inconsistent with what we have achieved and with what anyone who is intelligent and hard working who receives expert tuition could achieve. We are hardly the only ones who have risen through the stakes in recent times. Other, more 'husng.com friendly' players have done it, and from what I've been told, with better results than us.

Preflop strategies alone will not make someone crush. Let's consider an imaginary player who simply checks or folds postflop. I can teach you how to win vs this imaginary player in a matter of minutes even if this player plays perfectly preflop.

Then things went really nuts when it was discovered that I had a third person I was working with and people started to connect dots based on these myths and the whole thing devolved to where we are today. That person still has not been able to replicate the results of the other two in the spotlight. My preflop strategy is not enough without also being an expert postflop player, which I can assure you does not come easy.

My tool is simply a faster way of accessing charts, which many other HUSNGers do have plastered over their walls.

I don't doubt that some players do use Notecaddy, but I think he was referring specifically to the practice of the likes of coffeeyay/smartspin compiling and distributing population tendencies and charts based off population tendencies to their students, and husng.com selling HUDs with color coding based on said population tendencies. I also get the impression many of my opponents use sites like regz.club and other datamining/hh selling sites. I don't believe they use any supertools beyond the superhuds etc which have been discussed in this thread. Supertools? Maybe not. Super powerful? Most definitely.

edit:

Google image search brought up this for regz.club:



You can get stats like the above for any player in husng based on their near full history (I've heard third hand it's pretty accurate) since maybe a year ago? From what I've heard they have more stuff now like by flop texture breakdown, etc.

I'm not a HUSNG player so forgive my ignorance but, looking at the hyperturbo structure, players start with 25BB and blinds go up every 1 minute so within, say 2ish minutes, players are at less than 10BB effective stacks, surely well into the domain of chart-based pre-flop shoves & calls. Observing a few HUSNGs there is plenty of shoving right from the opening bell, maybe as much as about 15% of hands as a total guess.

Given these short stacks, is there post-flop skill in Hyperturbo HUSNG? Seriously? Or are you talking about non-hyper, non-turbo HUSNGs?

Check/Fold seems pretty basic! LOL. But seriously, pls give a more expanded explanation why a rudimentary postflop strat (combined with slowing play maximally for 2ish minutes to avoid play) wouldn't be good enough to weather the first blind rise and then start "perfectly" shoving with charts?

Huds make the game much more interesting playing exploitative poker instead of playing GTO vs the general player pool which would actually require a lot less work once you have a solid strategy than playing with a hud does.

However stars would lose a huge amount of regs as most of them wouldn't want to put the work in required and would feel they could no longer beat the games so would play elsewhere. Thus losing stars a huge chunk of rake in the process while practically adding 0 fish to the site. This just wouldn't happen it'd cost stars too much money.

I know lots of fish. I've never heard any of them moan about software aids, not once even though many are aware of them. You are MUCH more likely to hear fish say 'the site is rigged' because they don't understand variance and think that they should win every 60/40 flip they get into. I hear this from many of them on a regular basis but still see them playing every day. Segregation is a much bigger issue than software assistance.

I'm not sure Pokerstars representatives fully understand what Note Caddy can do as the claims are unjust imo. I could find an argument for removing badges that change for each opponent (please note these badges do not change based on any specific action during a hand, they are static once present hand starts) which as far as I'm aware still doesn't break stars new proposed TOS.

Huds/NC are pretty ineffective against fish as firstly you don't need either of these to beat fish and secondly it's pretty hard to get a useful sample on fish. What is much more dangerous for the game is sites that sell hand histories - these HAVE to be somehow banned.

The reason why we have software assistance is because of the tells we are unable to pick up due to us playing through a computer. Without software online poker would be monotonous and I'd rather play live personally.

Hyper blinds increase every 2 minutes.

The reality is that Hyper HUSNGs are an incredibly competitive game (as you can't just sit out if somebody "good" decides to sit you) and because it is such a pure/precise form of poker,it teaches you a lot of poker's fundamentals.
Also, the having a vpip of 70-80+% preflop through limping, minraising and shoving leads to a lot of interesting spots.

Btw, purely open shoving/folding is only reasonably effective as a strategy when you are less than 8bb effective (probably quite a lot less tbh).

Your point on sharkystrator and cartels/divisions isn't quite right.
Basically, sharystrator was invented to allow regs to avoid each other (as it's quite difficult to beat the rake reg vs regs in HUSNGs ) so we all just open sat each other and waited for recreational players to sit us. This meant that to play recreational players, all you had to do was buy sharkystrator. This created longer and longer lines - a bit like how it works for heads up cash games I guess.

Eventually, people had enough of that and created divisions - unfortunately they were trying to be cool/funny/cheeky when they were created them and called them cartels (which creates a huge misunderstandings as to how it really works). From that point on, you had to prove that you were good enough to sit in a line to play. You basically prove yourself by achieving EV results over a certain amount of games.

Here's an example of how it works
http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/18...-chat-1443479/

If a player is seen as weak and is part of a division/cartel, it's actually a really bad place to be as you face a lot of reg games so these players either drop out or get kicked out (turnover within these divisions would be greater than 50%).

After a lot of early reg battles over a couple of months, the lines drastically reduced and the games were much more dynamic and profitable for the best players at each stake. People often talk about the volume drop in HUSNGs being driven by the divisions/ cartels but they were actually driven by the creation of spin n go - have a look at he HUSNG volume reduction step changes for further evidence.

I've seen this type of logic a few times in this thread ie gto is easy, almost cheating and not real poker and not related to exploitative poker.

I'm not sure if this is how people tend to think in cash games but it sure makes me want to consider learning them

What you are describing there pies is exactly a cartel and the way it operates in what should be an open market. I really can't understand how you or anyone can defend these sort of tactics, as it is simply collusion. Soft playing vs certain opponents IS a form of collusion. I'm amazed how you can't see that you've fked up your whole own ecosystem with that approach, with all of you praying on the occasional poor fker that wants to play a HU for fun and ends up being gang banged by a "militarized" (poker wise) gang, unknowingly.

I imagine Sony and Panasonic having a high level discussion on the lines of "there's no point in us competing against each other, since the profit margins are so low, so let's gang up and scare away all of our smaller competitors". That IS a cartel. And for these sort of things billions of dollars in fines have been paid. Yet you are defending it by saying "there's no point in regs playing each other, so let's gang up".

Buying hand histories yields an effective sample size for use in a HUD. Not buying hand histories means too small a fish hand sample. I agree buying HH must be stopped somehow. The problem is the selling of hand histories not the use of HUDs by players who don't buy hand histories.

In a futurist world in which bots would be completely impossible to detect and thus would really be threatening to put an end at online poker I can only imagine one solution : pokerstars online casinos

If you are a winning regular (according to some fixed numbers by PS) your only way to keep your playing privileges would be to physically go to an ps online casino. You would have your own cubicle there with a desk, computer equipement, Ps software and everything you need to grind comfortably. You would not be able to download any kind of software without stars authorisation and there would be regular checks from ps employees. Open 24/7. Of course you would have to pay to go there with subscription prices depending on your volume and stakes played. After a while of showing up everyday you would get benefits like maybe being able to play 10h/months from your home first and then 20 and so on.

This would obviously have 0 impact on the fish who wouldnt be aware of anything. Those online casinos would be implented all over the world excluding Russia obviously. Very few in eastern europe as well.
This would have the great added benefit of rebalancing reg to fish ratio as a lot of regs wouldn't be willing to relocate to a place where there is an online casino.

All the senario sounds so cool to me but I wonder how unrealistic it is

The "no point in playing each other" concept was how it worked prior to the "cartels/divisions". Once the divisions were introduced, there became a massive incentive to play each other as it was the only way you could get a spot in the division so it became a truly competitive market.
And as I said above, if you're not one of the best in the game, you get kicked out.

The gang bang example is as a result of table selection tools (and is exactly the same issue people face in cash games) - NOT as a result of the divisions/cartels. Divisions/cartels actually means that regs play each other a lot more than they otherwise would have.

Also fwiw, any gto play is something that hyper husng players apply against reg players.

I'd recommend checking out this video for more information (and raise a bit of money for charity in the process).
http://www.husng.com/content/beating-recs


I don't want to turn this thread into a massive cartel/division chat but happy to either chat offline if you are genuinely interested or perhaps use the $60s link I posted above.

No, perfect GTO play is a practical impossibility and is really hard to learn to approximate (taking for most of us IMO several years of hard work for 100BB cash games).

GTO is strongly related to exploitative poker as the better one gets at GTO the quicker one can detect non-GTO play and rapidly exploit it. So the better one gets at GTO, the better one also gets at exploitation.

100BB post-flop play is very different to 25BB post-flop play.

That is collusion and against the TOS so why isn't PS banning sharkystrator and everyone that uses it?

to add a bit of a twist, Sony and Panasonic set up a cartel rule: to enter the cartel you must buy some amount of Sony/Panasonic products. hey look, we are even transparent!

#freecandyvan

Table selection in cash or HUSNG based solely on hands you have played yourself is legal.

Table selection in cash based on datamined hands played by others is illegal. HUSNG selection based on third party queuing in sharkystrator is similarly a clear violation of TOS as the table selection is not based solely on playing against each other but is based on an implied reggyness based on licensing sharky.

I thought PS created spinngos to try to make the player pool anonymous but sharkystrator colludes around that too, doesn't it?

Pokerstars have had a different view on that in the past - maybe they'll reconsider...

I watched a few hyper HUSNG and with rapid fire play there seemed about 10 hands before blinds went up but only about 4 hands if one player maxed out his time clock. 4 hands doesn't take much post-flop skill before shoving begins.

It's a different tool - called spinwiz - there are no divisions in that game atm so the lines are getting bigger and bigger

Opinions here have mostly been biased:
-someone like Timstone wants NC banned bc he uses PT4 and doesn't have it
-losing regs want it banned because they believe they would be winners otherwise(unlikely)
-NC packs seller want it allowed for obv reasons

Under the current rules I've been around 6-7bb winner and a successful coach for the last years so if there would be a bias on my part it would be to keep everything the same as it is.
I am also advanced in most of the software available now including NC.

However:
Stars have to draw a line in how powerful a software can be considering they keep getting stronger and stronger.
I don't believe it affects a rec so much in practice because they usually have a low sample for most of the stats to be effective. Only in rare circumstances where there is a large enough sample.
It affects some recs as a scary thing when they hear about software like that and may prevent them from playing but again, not so much in practice.

And the line should in my opinion be around here: You can show a basic hud like hm2 does but more than that is too much.
For example a hud shows you a fold to 3bet stat and you kind of know if you do the math that 70% is too much but you are using your judgment and math for it.

But when you see a badge that shows you should 3bet someone because combining fold equity preflop+fold equity from his call and fold to a cbet would make it a profitable move that crosses the line.

What does an actual bot do assuming he doesn't click the button itself?
Tells you to call, raise, fold basically. And what badges and stats like that do is they tell
you the same thing.
You see this badge-> you fold, call or raise.
If it's a stat that shows you his fold to 3bet, his call 3bet and his fold to cbet on the flop then I would say that is acceptable, because you actually need to check 3 stats and combine them yourself then decide what is enough and what isn't.
But when a badge tells you YES/NO it acts too close to a bot. It is game advice, it tells you FOLD/CALL/RAISE in a clear way based on the badge there.

P.S: my example was for notecaddy since there has been a lot of discussion about it here but obviously all the other software that cross the line in the way mentioned above should not be allowed.

And in Spinwiz licensed players queue separately from PS anonymous queue meaning that either you pay for spinwiz or find yourself battling regs all day? That doesn't seem fair.