Yeah, poker writer can't write and knows nothing about poker. This is the standard formula to get clicks, post trash about people. I am an acquaintance of Dani, and he is a strong high stakes player and is relatively cautious. It is easy to lose 20 BIs in PLO, particularly playing the best players HU.

This is like writing an article about a famous person and including their correct birth date but then talking **** about them that they can't possibly know about. Yes, there's a fact or facts in there, and no that doesn't make it not gossip.

Berri and Dani have played a decent amount of hands together, if one is going to disregard Berri's profit as just variance then I guess you're going to do the same for the likes of Ben86's profit in the HU PLO days etc.???

It's really not unusual for a poker player to have a 30 or 40 buy-in downswing. I remember reading a paper about variance awhile back. (I tried to google it and couldn't find it, maybe someone else knows it?) The gist of it was 1 million Game theory optimal players playing 1 million random hands each. Think of it as 1 million Ivey, Jungleman, Hotz etc, whoever your idol is. The shocking part was the number of them that failed. Fully 40k were net losers, and several thousands suffered massive catastrophic losses, way more than 30 or 40 buy-ins. Think of that. Thousands of Phil Ivey, Fedor Hotz, Dani Stern losing everything, over and over. It's like if Motzart only every had a ukulele, and he gave up music because he couldn't tune it.

It may be libel to post a headline "losing bigger than Gus Hanson". I guess that site is willing to do anything to attract attention, even in a negative way. They must be pretty low budget, as they can't be paying their writers much. It would be fine to do an article on his losses, but stated in a more balanced way.

Quick question for the math wizzes about variance.... if 30-40 buyins is acceptable PLO variance between two heads-up beasts, is the same true for NLHE?

I remembered this quote from Dwan about the variance in his Jungleman match:
I get that the prevailing view (eg, from Polk and others) is that Dwan was getting outclassed in the challenge.... but I'm wondering whether 30/40 BI is still a broadly acceptable swing for NLHE, over 20k hands?

Btw, it looks like Stern has played abt 10k hands this year... but it's not clear to me how many hands make up the 40BI diff between him and Berri Sweet...

Having worked for a lot of different publications I can assure you that many of the people writing tabloid fodder get paid a lot more than the serious journalists. Not saying that's the case here of course just that whether you consider an article high-brow or low-brow, balanced or unbalanced, this is absolutely no reflection on how much the media owner is willing to pay for it. It depends what they want from you as a writer.

As for libel, I cannot imagine under what circumstances that would ever be an issue. I'm not defending the title, I've admitted to it's shortcomings already. I'm just saying it's nowhere near specific enough to call it libel, especially when you read the content. Dani is losing more (per hand) than Gus did at Full Tilt, he's also losing more than Gus this year. I didn't specify a timeline. The title maybe misleading but it's not inaccurate when taken in context, specifically the context explained in the article.

He should go back on strike against pokerstars imo

I am sure that some people get paid really well for tabloid fodder. These specialized sites don't generate huge revenue and often hire college students and people from low cost of living countries at low rates. That publication has one article per virtual issue and the quality of the writing is poor.

It is pretty low to put a headline like that and then content to use technical issues to make sure it isn't legally libel.

Let me try to further help clarify for any future writings.

i.e. Player A loses a bunch of buy-ins to Player B.

> Player A is getting humped really hard by Player B
or
> Over the most recent 20,000 hand sample size, Player A is down 22 buyins to Player B


It is important to understand that the "scary numbers" you speak of are somewhat irrelevant in the minds of those battling at high stakes. Instead these professionals think in terms of buyins/big blinds as their preferred units of measure as opposed to aggregate dollar amounts.


i.e. Poker player sits down with 50 chips at the poker table.

> poker player sits down with 50 chips and equates each chip to 1 steak dinner he could buy, or 10 chips = half his rent, etc.
or
> poker player sits down with 50 chips and equates it to 50 units which he is going to use that to win the most money possible by making the best decisions.

One of these mindsets will lead to higher +EV decisions and thus some disconnect will arise between those who can not grasp the difference. Best of luck.

Hey Lioncub, if you wanted to insult somebody's poker prowess wouldn't the GTO way to do so be to compare that person to Gus Hansen ???

Nooooooo all players are in agreement, winning is based on skill....losing is based on variance.

isn't 1.5mill 15BIS if they played 50/100?
How's that even significant in plo lol

I get it XS9, and good analogy - the point I was making earlier (and I only used 'humped' in a quick post when I was pissed of, I wouldn't actually write that way for publication - although I also admit I didn't realise the HUPLO variance was so high.) is that regardless of how you look at it, it's a lot of money.

22 buy-ins down may be relatively little in HUPLO, but $1.3 million is a decent chunk of most players bankroll, even if they are backed and also rich themselves. I mean, Bill Perkins could lose a few mill and not even notice it. Isildur lost, what, $4 or 5mill very quickly back in the day with that Hastings stuff and was almost bust. So, for how long do you accept it's just variance before you pull the plug? I know, I know, it varies!

Only if they buy in for 1000BB and I thought my maths was bad!

15 buy ins at 50/100 would be $150,000 - 150 buy ins would be $1,500,000

Not sure what publication you're talking about tbh. But ok, we'll leave it there.

Is losing 150 buy ins "just variance"? I wouldn't have thought so, even for a game as swingy as PLO.

Absolutely not. I was just pointing out that the $150,000 at 50/100 is variance but $1,500,000 probably isnt.

The number of buy ins lost is insignificant. The amount of $ lost is not. Playing for that kind of money in 2017 factoring the state of the games is straight up degen. Also I had to laugh at guys saying Dani is staked- I have no idea- but I think it's absurd to think anyone would stake Dani to play a person like BERRI.

Regardless, the article shouldn't have been posted. Such a waste of time and is not news worthy.

You can't have it both ways. It's either significant money and not a great idea (which makes it newsworthy) or it isn't and it isn't.

lol what? It being a significant amount of money does not automatically make it news worthy. This is worse than tabloids. I can't believe you're being paid to write this garbage. If they had been playing multiple tables, for long, frequent sessions then ok I could behind it. But all you have is someone lost 1.5m, boohoo not news.

Didn't he acknowledge that in the first paragraph of the article?

Once again, the person you're arguing with didn't write it.

It's totally fair enough if you didn't like it. We publish 3-4 articles a day, some are strong, some not so strong.

I would say that in this online highstakes climate losing $1.5m in a relatively short space of time is quite unusual, certainly for a player who only plays one game.

Also, BERRI SWEET and supernova9 DO play multiple tables for long, frequent sessions.

At the end of the day though, it was just one small article I did to showcase our functionality and it was a bit clickbaity. I must've written several thousand HSDB articles over the years so if I get flamed by a few people for one of them I can live with that.

Perhaps you'll prefer the delightfully uplifting piece I wrote this afternoon on Charlie Carrel misclicking into a $1k PLO8 SCOOP event and going on to win it?

I would but this headline could mean a min cash over there. "Charlie Carrel Accidentally Registers for $1k PLO8 SCOOP Event & Wins"