Hey madchens123 if your goal is to be the dumbest guy in this room/thread you really have your cut out for you, bro

Nobody seen good will hunting i guess

And they're massive exceptions.

When i see a random with a huge stack I assume they're terrible, playing every hand and getting lucky. If I see a guy year in year out being one of the biggest winners I figure he's probably one of the better players.

This is quite true of plo cash games online

now berkey is pushing back against the concept of hardwork. Not unexpected from someone who's spent his entire poker career playing brain dead whales.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdpN2YXD2Dw

I actually agree with a lot of what he says here. There are people who have an aptitude for games and theory, studying smarter, etc. People who came up at the right time with friends who talked poker and gave feedback etc.

As someone who plays 2/5, 5/10, you absolutely cannot randomly pick out a losing/break even player and "Teach them" to win through mindfulness and hard work.

You know these people, the players who check fold KK to a bet when an Ace comes, a player who wants to "bet out draws", opens JJ for 10x. And these people play 1500 hours a year

if a person refuses to apply what they learn they just fall into category 2. That doesn't mean hard work is useless.

I once accidentally admitted to knowing the birthday problem one time. I vowed on that day to never again admit i was able todo math problems.

I didn't watch the entire podcast, but I agree with Berkey. There is a non-negligible amount of people that you could literally just stand behind them and tell them what buttons to push to beat 5nl online and they would still fail. Working harder is not these people's problem.

i didn't listen to this podcast but this is 100 percent true. the human brain for most people just isn't wired for +ev gambling. we're naturally extremely results oriented, risk averse, handle swings poorly etc. There are some people who are naturally good at some or all of these things, some people who can through hard work and brute force become good at poker but overall the best most people can hope for is some small improvement. I mean blackjack has been solved for 60 years and still most people can't be bothered with basic strategy because they think it's nonsense, they know more, they look for patterns etc. And poker is infinitely more complex than blackjack.

There are also a lot of people who would be better off if they never learned poker or worked hard. they'll get to a point where they're just good enough to win, not good enough to ever make good money and many of them will stay on the hamster wheel for years trying to be pros and they will just end up with an extremely long resume gap and no money.

If you have some type of mental disability then yea hard work want help but if you can learn and apply basic strategies you can surely beat 1-2 and 2-5 if you play live. A few Years ago I couldn't even 2nl as I did dumb stuff like calling raises way to often and not 3bettimg nearly often enough. Then I read forums and books and eventually did solver work and my game improved. I'm no genius and not anything special at math. Sometimes I forget where I put the remote. So outside of people that say math is for nerds and push back against theory hard work will surely help.

Pretty much all these people would be capable of beating these games, but for most of them you'd have to catch them earlier in order to make it feasible to be able to have them unlearn the things that stand as obstacles to their learning. None of the skills are particularly hard. You don't need a high level of maths to be able to beat live games. You just need to be halfway decent at estimating basic mental arithmetic. Yes, there are some people who have never been good at that and would be very difficult for them to be good at that, but they mostly stay away from gambling / poker anyway, and I would contend that all you would need to do is get them early enough in their life anyway.

And, of course, their newfound ability to beat the games requires that they be the exception i.e. when you unfish a fish, the games become more difficult, so if you unfish too many fish, they're still a fish, just less of one.

Haha wow it's amazing you listened to what he said and actually think he's wrong.
He's 100 percent right.

Yes there are some people that would be big winners if they worked hard who are lazy.
And yes hard work may at least help some people cut their loss rate.

But most people are not wired in any way shape or form to be capable of winning at poker or +ev gambling no matter how much work they put in.

I'm not saying you have to be a genius but your brain has to work in an unusual way that isn't natural.

To make it even better Berkey was responding to a tweet from scammer Torelli.Torelli in true form the tried to twist his original statement into saying he was talking about already winning players.

A lot of people can't do this. They literally cannot follow directions and/or are incredibly inconsistent in doing so.

If you've ever tried to teach/coach someone for anything (does not have to be poker) you would quickly realize this. It has very little to do with intelligence or hard work. I don't understand it myself, but it is the way a lot of people are.

I was going to watch that video if it wasn’t longer than a minute but saw it was an over an hour, people watch that stuff?

Anyhow are we really saying that the average person can’t learn poker and are always destined to live a life of poker misery by raising JJ 10x for eternity?

Poker players seem to have weird viewpoints where they overvalue their skill sets and this seems like one of those times.

Hard work will always pay off. As long as the person is motivated and the they are being trained correctly.

It's easy to confuse working hard and working smart. Lots of very untalented nits made a lot of money in the early days of online poker just by playing their 10% vpip very aggressively, not tilting, and following the credo 'no set no bet'. That's not working smart, that's just working hard. It's possible to be one and not the other. It's possible to be neither, which a lot of these people are, but obviously, where both are available, you do both, and anything that's meritocratic will reward you.

I was working under the assumption that working hard didn’t mean people were being trained how to cut their lawn with a pair of scissors

Yes I'm saying most people couldn't be taught to be winning poker players. It's not rocket science but the skills needed largely go against the way most people are wired.

Hard work is worth a lot. But everyone has a ceiling with whatever skill you're talking about.

One of those times confirmed into the record

If I get the chance I’ll check out the hour podcast with the breathtaking take of “It’s not enough to just work hard, you also have to work smart, oh and you can’t be an idiot.”

We all have a ceiling but the discussion was about beating 2-5 not 25-50

I definitely agree with borg here (and, by extension, with Berkey, the horror). I'm a former pro and I'm good friends with a guy who is long time slightly losing rec - and it's really fascinating to me to watch how his brain works in regards to poker.

He is a very smart guy, very succesful professionally and an avid go player (apparently pretty good, though I can't judge that), he also knows a lot about poker strategy and had a decent amount of coaching from established teachers. Regardless of all that, it is just not possible for him to apply the strategy due to how his brain is wired - fear of losing a big pot, boredom from folding pre, wanting to see what his opponents has.

These emotions are just stronger than the rational part of his brain. My favourite example was him flatting J8o from a small blind and then denying that it happened. He was not lying, his mind simply did not acknowledge doing something that was so obviously incorrect.

Vast majority of people is wired like that and they simply won't get good at poker. There is a small minority that is risk-prone, they are much easier too teach, and then there are those who started training early enough to either tune down or rewire these emotional approaches, but most of the long-time, risk-averse recs are not capable of applying the correct strategy in the long run.

Ok then I'll say no I don't think most people could beat 2/5.

Neither does Torelli who totally backtracked after getting called out on his original tweet.

To add to what Tutekszy said- I know plenty of people,even people good at math who just can't wrap their head around ev. Even when they can actually calculate ev there's just some disconnect about making the +ev play and still losing that doesn't click.

People are still gonna look for meaningless patterns. They're still gonna feel shitty when they lose and tilt when they run bad. They're gonna think they made the right fold if their draw missed whether or not it was a good play.

Basically even if someone was able to look up the correct play in a certain spot every single time a lot still couldn't win.

There's something about gambling especially active gambling that makes most people's brains go haywire even if they understand the math.So much about casinos is designed around this.

I have a friend who is an accountant who one day saw me have lose 100 dollar match plays in a row in a casino. As I was leaving I didn't complain about my loss and when he said something about me losing 400 Dollars I said I wish I had a whole stack of those match play coupons id sit there all day. Even when I explained the math of them being worth roughly 200 dollars total,which he agreed with

"But you still lost 400 dollars "

Again of most people who play blackjack can't even be bothered to use basic strategy when they play even though they even allowed to use a basic strategy chart when they play then no k don't think you can make most people winning 2/5 nl players.


The easiest part about poker is learning how to play hands at least competently. It's all of the other stuff that's difficult in poker for most people.

Ok well maybe I'm gifted in a way because I have zero problem not getting emotional and not giving a crap what happened in one particular hand. I just try my best to make correct plays. I sorta play poker like golf. Meaning I try to be as balanced as I can with a few exploits . I don't get into the whole meta game thing.

if you never get into meta game with recreational players you're missing out

Im with Berkey and a lot of you on this one 100 %. I will also say that the amount of people who can't beat live 2-5, no matter how much work they put in, is not a small amount of people.