Technically 3. 1) I don’t try to pretend or I don’t pretend instead of I don’t try and pretend 2) is instead of Is and 3) the obvious one you allude to here in your quote.

Actually 4. No period at the end of his sentence.

No doing random **** does not take more intelligence. Understanding theory is more than just memorizing and regurgitating.

neither

Which has nothing to do with what I said. Figuring out strategies to crush games you play without much guidance is not doing random stuff.
Lmao@ thinking that's what crushers 10-20 years ago were doing.

well for one he's constantly using the same words and phrases. He probably says I framed this or i framed that 10 times an episode. He also argues by moving the goalpost

Lol. Landon is a gen z kid so it’s perfectly normal that his mannerisms annoy you. I’m sure you’re not alone there. But he seems like a genuinely nice kid who just loves poker, so I feel bad for piling on him when he botched the Perkins challenge.

I never disliked Berkey but I thought he was sort of a bum. Coming around on him though. From what I’ve heard, he can get pretty wordy but I tend to agree with what he says when he’s not talking about advanced poker strat.

It's random in the sense that until solvers showed us what good poker should actually look like we were all kinda just throwing darts in the dark trying to figure out what worked. A lot of the stuff the old guard did while it worked has been proven to be incorrect. May main pushback is against the idea that learning theory and pop stats and coming up with you're own exploitative strat is somehow easy.

we kind of were, although not completely random it was entirely trial and error, constant readjusting to different player profiles

When was Super System published, 1979 ?

I don't know how you can write "A lot of the stuff the old guard did, "WHILE IT WORKED", has been proven to be incorrect". It worked, so how WAS it "incorrect" ?

Good poker "should look like" stacking chips and cashing out a winner. That is the meaningful metric. If you don't do that with regularity, you are not playing "good poker". That was true even before your "solver" was created and sold.

I don’t think it was trial and error. Certain basic mathematical principles of the game were clearly evident and didn’t require PioSolver or other software to figure out.

Landon seems like a good kid and it's clear he's highly motivated. He's not that bright but is doing the most with what he has.

sure but it was still a lot of trial and error, I would know I was there, and I was friend with other very successful regs too, and it’s how we all operated, some stuff was obvious like playing wider ranges from btn than co than hijack etc. but it was still mostly trial and error, hell I remember for a while we’d open like 80% from the btn in 6max lol

whenever people use words like correct and incorrect and it’s always related to solver outputs, otherwise any playcould be correct exploitatively

He seems perfectly nice.

Listening to him talk is like nails on a chalk board.
I can't imagine how many games he's ruined tanking with his gto play and boring guys to death with his table talk.

GTO isn't optimal in any live game worth playing.
Online sure you need it. High rollers absolutely.
"Proven to be incorrect" is quite the stretch.
It's incorrect in tough modern lineups not in the actual games that were available back then.

I didn't say it was easy either- I said it requires less intelligence. It definitely involves a lot of work.

Yea these people were playing so bad. They made huge GTO mistakes all the time. Can you imagine that they pretty much folded everything versus 4bets?? They should have been jamming A5s some percentage of the time against Johnny Cowboy's 4bet range to make more money back in the day.

we didnt fold everything at all, remember sometimes i was jamming hands like 66 or KQ because we were not calling 4bets, we were either jamming or folding, but the jamming could get pretty wild

simplest examples i can think of are the old school ideas of protection betting and needing to bet larger on a wet flop. TBF i use to think just the same but if you look at a solver it usually does just the opposite. For example 3bet pot UTG versus UTG+1. If the flop is A85 rainbow and OOP checks IP either bets 20% or checks but it mainly bets. If we use the same situation but the flop is rainbow solver will check at a similar frequency but mixes bet sizings between 25% and 50%.

Did old school players really bet larger on wet flops? I cant recall that being a strategy ever. Old school players big sizing flaw was rigidity, just betting the same size on almost every flop (normally 2/3 pot). I definitely remember some kinda logical but ultimately flawed and unbalanced arguments like "bet large with an overpair on a wet board for protection". But even then its not as if that concept is that far off the GTO concept of "bet large when I have the range advantage". Its about pressuring weaker holdings/range, the timing of when to do it and when not to just wasnt as refined back then.

Anyway this whole "the good players of the day played bad because they would lose hard to modern players - therefore modern players are better" is a silly argument. Back in the day the players who were crushing were pretty much the only players who thought about the game on a higher level. Most people on all tables were purely level 1 thinkers. When 90% of the people you are playing against think at level 1 with some slightly better players playing at level 2 you just identify those players and play exploits accordingly.

Trying to construct GTO ranges for poker back in the early 2000s would have been a massive waste of time and energy, hence no one did, not even the best at the time. Exploiting the fish (and even the "better" players were exploitable fish to a high level player back then) made you so much more money than trying to create a super balanced strategy against the 0.1% of other players who were playing at a really high level. Of course as more and more players learned to play more strategically sound, GTO understanding has become needed to do well in the games. But in the old school it would have been redundant.

yeah back then I was essentially using 1 size per street, not overbetting ever, except maybe river occasionally when all in was like 110-120% pot

my 3 barrel sizings looked like 66% flop, 80% turn and pot river

against specific fishes I would occasionally block bet river to induce bluff raises but other than that river size was almost always around pot size

the idea was so that I wouldn't have any sizing tells and then I would sort of adjust frequencies based on reads, the frequency adjustments could sometimes be quite extreme but it worked

I didn't bother reading any other replies, but thanks for the laughs OP

Berkey be dum, chek dis oot
hold on a sec
test
test
test
wtf?

Why does this bother people? Why do you care? I don't get it. Do you need him to have a PhD and smoke tobacco from a pipe? Lmao

I used to hate Berkey but he has grown on me a bunch. Although a bit too wordy his strat talk and hand analysis are pretty solid.

Every time Landon starts talking I just want to shoot him in the face. For christ sakes the only reason the pod isn't unlistenable is that he doesn't contribute much. He really sucks the life out of the whole thing. I'm sure he is decent at poker but he seems developmentally disabled or something

JFC i wanna root for this dweeb but i just can't

I raised at least 50 small river block bets in a row over a couple of years live- many in hands I was going to give up on. It was such a glaring tell back then that they had a medicore at best hand and were trying to get to showdown cheap so I'd shove it down their throats.

Once I ran into quads and I maybe got called 2-3 other times.

Another good one was someone with a flush draw would check call the flop then lead turn with your exact flop size -again you stuff it down their throats.

When you played with the same people a lot you could pick up a ton of sizing tells. There were guys would would only raise super huge pre with aces bc they were cowards and wouldn't want to run into AA with less than aces but also "it's better to win a big pot than lose a small one"

There were other guys who for example might 10x pre with Jacks to "take it down" but rasie less with qq or kk and even less with AA.


If you could transport gto players to games 15 years ago they would win a lot of money. But they'd also leave a ton of money on the table being a slave to trying to replicate the solves.

It you took away their modern knowledge and tools w lot of them would be lost in the woods.
Of course the ones who are actually smart would figure it out.


Things change and strategies change in all games and sports.

Until very recently pitchers threw way more fastballs than other pitches when behind in the count. A fastball was almost a guarantee on 3-0.

Today pitchers actually throw more off speed pitches when behind in the count,and while they still throw more fastballs than anything else 3-0 it's not nearly as lopsided as it used to be.

Some hitter from 1995 wouldn't be stupid for often guessing fastball on 2-1 even though it would probably be wrong in 2023 against most pitchers. He was playing in 1995 and an approach best suited for 1995 is what made the most sense for him.