Normally I don't enter myself into these sort of things, and I don't have any sort of social media to post this on, but this one bothered me. I have several friends that have played (and lost) on Stones in Postle games. I hadn't watched many Stones live streams before this - the few I watched were when a friend was playing. I had heard the jokes/rumors about Postle, but I always just brushed them off as he was just some whale/maniac/luck box. I had no idea how often he won big until this.
The chart below is work from me (2019) and a friend (who did the 2018 totals at the bottom). The bottom line?
+$253,300 in 277 hours of play, winning in 62/69 sessions. This was over roughly a year of streams (not sure exactly where they started in 2018).
https://ibb.co/kmVwv8t
Sorry, it wouldn't load the picture in the forum properly.
This does not include any mixed games, sit-n-gos, tournaments, etc. There is a possibility I missed a stream or two - if I did it was certainly not intentional.
How did we do this? I won't speak for my friend, but I think we used a similar strategy. Essentially I would open a stream, see if Postle was playing, and look for his earliest listed/visible chip stack. That is his buy-in column. From there, I would fast forward a few minutes at a time.
Any time Postle was in a hand, or his chip stack deviated more than a few hundred dollars, I would look to see why. Sometimes he would win pots. Sometimes he would lose. Sometimes he would add-on - these add-ons were the hardest part, as the camera didn't always show when the chip runner delivering the chips. The match-the-stack element of the game allowed the game to become big quickly. Looking for swings in chip stacks - either Postle's or another players - was reason to look deeper.
In some cases (like the 1/12/2019 game, the one Joey Ingram was livestreaming and commenting on last night) Postle has such a huge chip lead, it was easy to just skip ahead in the stream and watch his chip stack grow. He couldn't add-on (no need to, and he was the stack), and no one was attempting to match him. His chip stack would just keep climbing.
Some streams (like the one above) didn't take long for the reasons I mentioned above - maybe 15 minutes. Others took longer since he was up and down in chips, he added on, or his chip stack jumped but no obvious pot won was found. This was simply a task of looking for deviations in chip stacks and seeing if it was from winning/losing or from something else. After getting the hang of it a few streams in, the process was usually very quick.
Discrepancies: Is this 100% accurate? No, I know this isn't 100% correct. Am I confident it's 95% accurate? Yes. Many streams there was little doubt what was going on. He would buy-in for an amount, win some pots with no major loses, and his final streamed chip stack was recorded. Not much room for error in at least half of these streams, probably more like 2/3 of all streams.
Hours played: This is a rough guess, but I imagine it is still fairly accurate. Basically if the YouTube stream was 4:XX, I listed it as a 4 hour session. Stones has anywhere from 0-20 minute intro, as well as a several minute marbles outro. So a 4:05 stream is probably something like 3:30-3:45, while a 4:55 stream is more like 4:25-4:40. I figure this averaged out in the long run. If you want to give him the benefit of the doubt, add a half hour for each session, but I imagine 277 hours played is pretty close to reality.
Blind Structure: This may be off. I generally used whatever the stream listed. I don't think this is super important because the 1/2/3 (listed as 1/3) usually played more like a 5/5, plus the match-the-stack element of the game made most of them play big. Once I entered this I generally ignored it, so I imagine it's not 100%.
There are several sessions in which strange things happened with the chip stacks (some highlighted in yellow, I started doing this closer to the end of this project). Basically, something odd happened and I never knew 100% what was going on. This could be inconsistent chip counts on screen, money being added-on but not caught on stream, or something like that. A few cases, he would stack a player whose chip stack was listed at $1,000, but the stack on the table was clearly more by several hundred. In these cases, if I was unsure, I always made these out to be chip add-ons.
I ALWAYS ERRED ON THE HIGH SIDE, the side that looks better for Postle. If anything, I think his total buy-ins are less than what I have listed. But if you want to give him more benefit of the doubt, add $10-15k to his buy-ins (as well as 30 hours to his play time).
Take this information however you want to. I'm just adding information for those out there looking, and I know people have asked/guessed to his winnings over the past year or so. I'll try to read and answer questions people have.