So in the stream below, Thomas from Zenith Poker reviews preflop charts offered by range converter, upswing poker, bluffthespot, overnight monster/alvinteachespoker, and others.

Various people enter the chat affiliated with the above sites scolding Thomas for revealing this information for free. Thomas is very harsh in his reviews of their ranges, and consistently compares them to his own offered ranges which have a ton of different sizings/mixed sizing strategies

He claims to have paid for all these charts himself, for a free livestream that doesn't have that many views). However, he says in the video he was given some of the charts by people in his discord. He also says stuff like "if you give me the kanu ranges I'll take a look at them" and "I got more ranges coming in" as people give him ranges/access to ranges on discord. This seemingly contradicts his claim that he paid for all of them.

Thomas claims reviewing the charts falls under "Fair Use" since he is critiquing them.

Other note:

At the beginning of MMASherdog's/Bluffthespot's preflop bible, where MMASherdog displays his graph of $1.2m in winnings, Thomas says "you can get a graph like that just by cutting out losing sessions" and mocks the coaching for profit business model

who is this pimp?
dont think anyone cares about his opinion and we can let this one go

I am not a lawyer but in my world this would be clear copyright infringement.

Even though I believe a range shouldn't be copyrightable, I think that the compilation of ranges in an organized document can be and the video seems to be sharing big chunks of them to be easily screen scrapped.

it's over an hour long video where over an over documents with ranges are being shown on the screen.
Sometimes he shows a directory full of ranges where thumbnails are so big you can clearly read them from the screen.

And by going through several random points in the video the critique seems to be universal "oh. only this exact raise size? what if they play any other raise size?"
"why exactly 5.4bb will everyone open exactly this 5.4bb?".

I would be very pissed if I would be selling some pdfs and someone would make an hour long video where he just browses through a big chunk of it and keeps saying "oh, still comic sans, what a crap. let's see the font on another page"

Nice angle. Could see it passing scrutiny.

was about time someone stood up for the bs in poker coaching, everyone cutting lossing sessions and ripping people off for yrs already, wake the fk up people. props to him

I know the general attitude around the poker/gambling community is "if a sucker still has their money they just haven't met me and my friends yet" but as far as just being good for the game as a whole there absolutely should be people who call out overpriced/underdeveloped/just plain wrong content. Unlike a few weeks ago when Dominik Nitsche did his publicity stunt saying RYE ranges were trash to get twitter views and directly profit by leading people to his DTO app this guy isn't selling anything afaik. If your expensive gatekept poker content can be logically deconstructed in a short video you have no business in the market imo.

This guy is the hero we need. Seriously.

Every "crusher" sells courses for 1k and ranges for similar to that. Not only are many of their credentials and winrates questionable, the vast majority don't come out and out and say the truth to most "aspiring pros", which is this:

The vast majority of poker players, even professionals, can not become high stakes crushers. It's literally math. it's just not mathematically possible without the injection of a bunch more rich fish who can afford to lose that money.

Additionally, these courses and ranges also fail to acknowledge that post high stakes crushers are significantly more intelligent than the average poker player or just average person. A course can teach you things but if you aren't smart enough to have that deep theoretical knowledge you'll hit a limit in stakes. I remember hitting an intellectual wall in advanced highschool math, and I've felt that again in times with poker.

Pinnock is doing a service if he is calling out the ridiculousness of crazy expensive ranges.

He obviously sells his preflop ranges which you defo need because you cannot win in 2021 without having proper 7 sizing preflop strat and the obligatory limp-reraise from Hijack with AJo in your arsenal.

This guy is insufferable.

This guy didn't stand up for anything.

he didn't call them out for being ridiculous. He almost verbatim pastes thousands of ranges offering very little actual criticism.


That's exactly what he is doing. He's sharing huge parts of other's paid content at the same time promoting his own stuff that he sells.

The whole video is an ad for a platform where he sells coaching and also seems to have some preflop range browser behind a paywall.

everyone spewing the word crushing in poker is cringe af imo, do people evan realize that if u throw 200 plrs in a pool with same winrates in 300-500k hands some of them are gonna appear as crushers? now im also seeing people fighting over courses of who has the correct open frequency of a9in the CO like wtf is going on, 99% is gonna depend on how good u play it postflop.


and than u have people not realizing the entire money in poker comes from casuals. i swear poker comunity is getting dumber by the day.

that is also true

Not true, when there are so many reg battles going on at midstakes+ with such thin edges it's imperative people aren't costing themselves EV unnecessarily.

Open up Stars 5/10 at 2pm on a Tuesday and you've got 5 regs battling whilst waiting with one seat open.

Im no lawyer but doesn't fair use only cover free online content. Not pay for use content.

You can't do a Mystery Science Theater 3000 style channel where you provide live commentary during new movie releases, for example.

You can't stream a PPV fight live and claim that you are providing unique commentary.

Why would live commentary for preflop charts that cost hundreds of dollars to access be any different?

Well you are a prime example of that tbh.

my post was mostly targeting the clients of these courses and small stakes under. and those battles only work at those stakes tbh, rake allows it.

best content in poker will always be the free content, at some point people will realize this. u just have to know where to look

Copyright Law doesn't protect what is known as "sweat of the brow", which is just another way of referring to the effort/work that went into creating something. Lists of facts, compilations, data, etc aren't protected by copyright law. One of the big cases on this area of law is from a phone book company that brought a lawsuit against a competitor for copying their phone book listings (the plaintiff inserted fake names/addresses/numbers in their book as a trap for anyone looking to copy the info). The court ruled against the plaintiff.

However, what is protected, unless there's an exception like fair use, is the actual product itself in its existing form. So, you could copy the data from somebody else tables/charts/graphs, but you can't literally copy their product and pass it off as your own - you couldn't xerox somebody else's work and sell it as your own.

In this case, it would be a question of whether reproducing the charts in their existing form is a violation of copyright, because the data itself isn't protected. Criticism, commentary, parody are all forms of "fair use", so it would be a question of whether this guy is within the realm of those exceptions.

I don't see what he's done wrong other than posting a low quality rant video. I dunno how fair use works legally but how would someone criticize content without being allowed to reference it? Especially if it's behind a paywall since your audience won't have access to the material you're critiquing if you can't show it.

But I might be biased because I don't believe in IP in the first place.

A pretty good summary of "fair use", what is allowed and what crosses a line is found at

https://www.lib.umn.edu/copyright/fairuse

There are a number of factors, but in this context of posting th whole charts of your business competitors in an effort to sell your competing product into the same market seems to be out of bounds.

Just my thoughts, NOT legal advice or analysis

"Fair use" would be to use parts of the charts for something like a research project. For that you could for example highlight an area that you agree with and others that you disagree with. Even in that context, publishing the full charts would be extremely questionable, to say the very least.

Using your competitors product for your own commercial interests is so far out of left field that the only thing protecting him from a lawsuit is the marginal financial damage that also would be very hard to prove.

Just imagine Mason's reaction if somebody would publish a poker book that included the full contents of "Theory of Poker" with their own comments on the side.

Gonna guess freedom of speech makes this one legal. It’s a great thing when people criticize coaches. We just assume if you’re a coach what you say is canon. There’s no way all coaches are the same so some will suck, and some will be great.

Guess again ?

I encourage you to pirate a UFC PPV and stream that on Twitch with your added commentary and personal information. Let's see what happens.