Bert Blyleven is more accomplished a pitcher than Sandy Koufax. He's nowhere near as good a pitcher.

I'll be more specific. Dnegs is the better poker player. I've explained why this is obviously the case in an earlier post.

If Negreanu should happen to win he should offer to play Polk 4 of 8 Game Mixed. Negreano picks the 4 games for the first 12,500 hands and the loser picks the 4 games for the second 12,500 hands. This is going to take quite a bit longer than the present match.

A while back, I worked one of our baseball games, and a bunch of kids were taking turns at providing the radio call. I think it might have been an audition thing for the student station. One of them went something like this:

First pitch is a strike, count is 0-1.
"We are underway with a first-pitch strike. McChesney has outstanding command of his fastball today..."

Second pitch misses outside, count evens to 1-1.
"Really having trouble locating his pitches, looks like we're in for a long day if he doesn't straighten that out..."

Third pitch gets fouled off.
"There is a science to pitching to contact, and he has clearly mastered it."

Fourth pitch goes in the dirt.
"Breaking ball misses low, and he's obviously still struggling to find the zone..."

Fifth pitch gets fouled back to the screen.
"Showing great movement on the fastball, he has the batters handcuffed..."

Sixth pitch misses just high.
"The count goes full. He's really getting himself into jams and having to work his way out."

And so on. Bear in mind, this was the first at-bat of the game. If the pitcher threw a ball, the commentary was about how badly he was struggling. If he threw a strike, we heard gushing as to how good the pitcher looked.

There was also a point later when the pitcher gave up a hit, and immediately the kid on the radio suggested we might soon see some activity in the bullpen. (Our guess is that he had heard these types of insights while watching baseball on TV and he was now parroting them for his tryout for the station.)

Anyway, a four-hour poker session is not as small an increment as a single pitch is to baseball, but indeed, the attempts to make big-picture analysis after each round does remind me a little of that cub radio announcer.

Funny, I've generally avoided baseball analogies because so few people follow that sport anymore, plus we have international posters who don't know it at all. And here I'm making back-to-back nods to my favorite sport.

Not sure if I'd go that far. Sure, Blyleven put up bigger career statistical totals simply because he lasted twice as long. But Koufax still accomplished more in what was essentially a five-year run than Blyleven did over two decades – in particular, the three Cy Young awards and the number of times he led the league in various categories.

But I think I know what you were getting at: a long sustained career versus a shorter one with much higher peaks, and who would you rather have on the mound at their respective peak. In that case, pretty solid comparison.

Gotta agree with others, Negreanu vs. Polk is pitting a successful, veteran all-around player against someone who was the best (or at least one of the best) in one specific part of the game. Negreanu is sort of like a Ichiro: renowned at every part of baseball except for being a power hitter. Polk is like a Mark McGwire: his career rests almost exclusively on being a power hitter, but for a while, he was the champ in this regard. And now they're going head-to-head in a home run derby.

Exactly. DN accepted the challenge for a reason. DN used to have an offer to play anyone HU any game as part of a promotion for Wynn. Once DN learned to play HU NLHE with the current GTO knowledge, he became a tough opponent for Polk.

lol.

So, afterall high rake is good.


(if you get 100% back)

That's because these kids aren't stupid. Never underestimate the value of actually doing something = realizing potential = putting theory into practice.

There's a more to it than just knowing theory, putting it into practice is a huge part. Actually playing the game. That's why the little kids constantly jump to conclusions. And people who score in finals become heroes. Variance yes, but there's more to it. You have to step up your game when it matters. Same in life.

Reminds me of the chess thread, where some people said they could reach GM status, if they just put their mind to it, when simply having enough raw brain power to be able to proces a GM level game live, is 0,00001% of people, let alone knowing enough about chess.

So you have long term theory / preparation / predictions on one hand, and then practice in the other, where variance is decided by luck but not 100% equal to the entirety of the 'second hand'.

McGwire the cheater? Maybe use another person

Are they playing today?

Yes

DN doubles five hands in with AA>KQ on J73K2. DN four-bet it pre. DP led flop 6K or so into 20, then checked turn and called AI from DN on the turn.

DNegs continuing to eek away at Polks advantage.

As I wrote the other day, DNegs learning the solver algorithm has completely evened this match.

And I say that as someone who watched Dnegs play all summer and who I thought was horrible.

Yep, like Sammy Sosa.

Kevin Rabichow just said on the GG poker stream what I have been saying about the solver.

Just learn it and it is abc robot poker and even's everything out.

Doug just happened to jump on that years ago before almost everyone.

Now everyone is learning it.

Going to make poker very boring.

That KT vs 98 hand was impressive with the running 7s.

Also Lynne from Live at the Bike was a commentator today.

Always liked her. Partly because I think she looks like my wife.

if the challenge had started with the last few sessions, this thread would have been completely insane

Hard to decide on whether to root for a full dnegs comeback or a dnegs partial comeback where he punts 6 buyins at the end to throw it. Both have a lot of potential.

On the other hand, dnegs getting just pounded into the ground is guaranteed good content, as we've seen.

Tough calls.

you challenging doug next?

You should have this on auto like Mason has “best wishes”. Literally every single post you made in this thread either started or ended with a variation of this sentence.

We get it, you watched him play.

not to pile on but he actually didn't. He made it clear in his HU course that his approach involved carefully examining each node of the gametree with MDF and overall combos in both ranges in mind and adding bluffs until his vbets for each line were balanced. Or something like that. He wasn't the 'solver before solvers existed.' He just used a combination of MDF, equities, and logic.

That's why in public comments he remarks on why the game has become boring with solvers. Agree with him or not, he did in fact work that **** out on his own without knowledge of GTO.

While I agree with that in the sense he wasn't the first, he was still ahead of 99% of the solver crowd that use it now today.

well you can bet either side of it. you can get polk at 1:11?

(1.08 odds) so $100 returns $108 think?