Haha hell yeah.

Just because someone is standing on the shoulders of giants (solvers/coaches/trackers/datamind hands etc) and is technically better than his predecessors doesn't make the current era more talented/intelligent than the guys from previous eras. If Sklansky was 21 years old right now and decided to pursue poker full time, there is no doubt in my mind he would completely dominate.

https://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/1...e-bot-1830631/

I don’t understand why people kept bringing the GTO argument.

You can take two GTO bot make them fight each other and one will end up with more than 10bb/100 because it is slightly more accurate than the other one

While could it not work the same way for human ? Is there a hard ceiling to the theoretical understanding of the game for every human in this planet that start at NL500 ?

The edge for world class players won't come from playing generic theory lines more accurately than the lesser regs (although they obviously do). It will come from manipulating ranges & the tree and funneling the weaker regs into parts of it where they basically turn their hand face up. Years back it used to be that a lot of the top guys had very high IP fold to turn probe. Now why would they do that? Did they really not know that you're suppose to fold very little vs a probe? Obviously they knew, but if your opponent turns his range face up and probes most good hands and checks most bad hands then a sophisticated way of exploiting that would be to overload flop check range with low equity hands knowing you will get to play turns with perfect information. So what looks like an apparent leak is actually a really smart exploit. A bot would passively exploit that imbalance, but a world class human can go for the jugular.

Man the disrespect to Sklansky ITT and the other one is quite sad to see. You can disagree with him and his ideas but to insinuate he's an old man who's out of touch is really insulting to someone who's contributed so much to our better understanding of the game of Poker. In fact, I would say out of all the outdated poker books that were written (and there are a lot), theory of poker is still a book that holds up relatively well and that is saying a lot since the book was literally written in the 70s.

It's important to understand the comparison between stakes isn't apples to apples as midstakes is played mostly zoom and high stakes mostly 6h.

I haven't played in awhile so take this with a grain of salt.

At high stakes it's typically one weak player and 5 great players. That's a ratio of 1:5. The weak player is typically losing 10-15 bb/100 and the regs are usually making 2-3 bb/100 apiece, with the weaker regs much closer to breakeven than they'd like to think and the best regs winning 4-6bb/100. The weakest regs are probably ~0bb/100 due to overconfidence bias. Sometimes we'll see samples with a superstar reg like OTB or Linus where they'll win 8bb/100 for 100k hands or so, but this is extremely difficult to maintain.

At mid stakes it's typically a ratio of more like 1:10 regs:recs inside of a zoom pool. During the end of my time playing, you'd see a lot of variation in the quality of regs at 500z because a lot of excellent or world class players would sometimes play in the games on Stars. So here we'll have similar lossrates for the weaker players of 10-15 bb/100, but the regs will have a wider distribution and play relatively more hands against regs. The weakest zoom regs are something like ~0bb/100 or a bit under, and the best are usually 2-4bb/100. The players winning more than this typically move up fairly quickly.

In my personal case, I've played perhaps 200k hands ish of 500z for enjoyment mostly over the past several years and I ended up winning at 4-6 bb/100 pre rakeback iirc. I'd expect to win closer to 3-4bb/100 at $25/$50+. I think against excellent exploitative players like OTB and Linus, it would be difficult for an average 500z reg to lose less than 8bb/100 over a large sample, and probably closer to 10bb/100 (or more, lossrates can snowball when exploitation becomes precise). The problem for the midstakes reg is mostly one of exploitation, where as sample sizes increase the edges for the better explo player tends to get magnified, and so many exploitable tendencies they'd get away with over a small sample size (even against a great player) will get dissected as the world-beaters thoroughly figure them out.

I feel like the massive drilling of spots through GTO wizard might have made this gap a little closer though sauce, I guess if we take the average nl500 reg then yeah they probably lose at 8-10bbs, if we pick the absolute best nl500 reg who could potentially be incredibly good but really struggles with swinging money so he never moved up then I'm not sure he'd get crushed nearly as hard as 8bbs

would be nice to see this challenge happen but people play poker for money, even llinus and stefan, so they probably won't be willing to play lower for the sake of a challenge

/thread

What are you up to/pursuing nowadays?

Do you miss poker?

i agree, you'd be hard pressed to find a more influential person in shaping the game into what it has become today

but people have issues with him for 2 very big reasons

1 - a la dunning kruger he still views himself as a world class contemporary mind and is not receptive to constructive criticism - he's always right in his mind despite that a lot of what he posts now is objectively not correct/optimal etc and instead of learning and adapting, he's used to be being the thought leader and thus continues to try to lead thoughts when at this stage he should be more of a collaborator who is willing to adjust his stance based on new information he didn't consider or misinterpreted

for example, you see how sauce who's widely regarded as one of the best to ever play even prefaced his post with
despite that few here would ever question his opinion on this and he could probably get away with trolling us all with nonsense to which everyone would go "wow i had no idea that's what it was like" he's still cognizant of the fact that he could be wrong and things could have changed enough since his time that his perspective may have some issues - and sauce is orders of magnitude closer to the contemporary game than sklansky is - but he's aware enough to believe his distance means he could now be incorrect (despite that it's incredibly likely he could easily get away with being wrong) whereas sklansky, who for years now has had people openly disagreeing with him and showing their work, is not receptive to any of it

sklansky has none of that - he's always right, whether it's the correct limping with kings strategy or a political opinion of his - he's never wrong in his mind and this leads to him making a bit of a fool of himself at times as a result

nobody is saying that sklansky is stupid, you'll see conversations in which people disagree with him here yet still using terminology he coined in order to do so, he's just lost touch and refuses to believe that and that's where the conflict comes from

2 - him as a person

500z doesn't run that much anymore so the ratio of hands is not as extreme in zoom to non-zoom as before
the rake is significantly higher at 500z than HS (well maybe not if you are talking 5k on gg lol)

part of high stakes is the fact it's high stakes. if you get the best 500 grinders and they get to play 1/2 (as in $200 buy-in) vs the elite who are trying it's still gonna be significantly different than if they are playing for e.g. 1 buy-in = 2% or more of their networth

One of the rare times a post with both "Sklansky" and the phrase "21 years old" does not immediately get 86d.

I'll see myself out.

This post can be easily verified by going to cardplayer.com and listening to the 106 minute interview I just did on their podcast.

and here I was thinking mr Sklansky was adored so much was bc he isnt trying to sell any books with every comment he posts

It's the only poker book I recommend to anyone who asks me what poker book they should read. In truth it's the only book anyone would need to read on the game, because the concepts are fundamental and generalizable to all forms of poker.

Ok but the real question is what if the 500nl reg reads Skalnsky's book, limps KK vs Linus/Stefan and then BTFOs them with STO (Sklansky Theory Optimal)

Then then linus/stefan's winrate goes up even more, limping kk is a massive theory error and those guys are really good at exploiting errors. Do you think their solver brain would malfunction and steam would start coming out of their ears ??

/whoosh

It would be perfect to watch a Sklansky vs Linus vs Stefan 3 way table. Or even a Sklansky beats 500NL zoom challenge, how about 250k hands? Rakeback will be better now for 500NL zoom.

I would watch every stream, way better than watching HCL.

I disagree, Stefan and Linus have never seen such an advanced play, they'd raise their garbage because their precious little computer told them to, then boom big S clicks it back and they say "uh-uh I'm priced with my j6o" hit a 6 and call off 200 bbs as big S pots, pots and 2x pots flop, turn, river.

"Thanks for the money wiz kid"

*Sklansky has logged off*

They're left in tears running sims on GTOwizard the rest of their friday night perplexed by what just took place.

it can also be verified by looking at your post history without wasting 2 hours listening to you promote your new book

So you're saying they got to where they are while lacking the good sense to adjust to unknown or unusual playing styles

are you one of those people who can't get sarcasm? You keep giving these responses to sarcastic posts

Very little about the book on the podcast. Its mainly stories including some about politics.

Also, you do realize that if someone only offers an opinion only when they are 95% or more in their minds to be correct, the fact that it disagrees with someone who knows more about the subject need not make him the underdog to be right if that other person will offer an opinion that he is only 70% sure about. Even if the two people are equally intelligent.

/whoosh

david, i'd rather be waterboarded than listen to 2 hours of your political takes

please point to a single instance in which you conceded you were wrong about something and share it here in this thread

perhaps you have and I'm mistaken, I'm very willing to concede that I could be wrong and you have done that, just from anecdotal experience I've seen thousands of your posts and not once have you believed yourself to possibly have been wrong