https://twitter.com/George_ymb/statu...34253200150612

Saulo and YouMadBro had this discussion/argument on twitter.

Personally as only a 500nl reg who could be wrong, I think YMB is right the best players would have a big winrate although he didn’t need to make the case in such a rude way

My argument is theoretically if you add up all the different leaks a 500nl reg has like being unbalanced in many lines, making GTO EV mistakes, giving off timing tells, taking actions with only one hand class instead of playing their range sometimes, trying to exploit in transparent ways etc they have to be exploitable for much >10bb. Most of these a GTO bot isnt punishing at all so players winrates vs bots aren’t a good indicator. And someone like Stefan would induce even more mistakes with that style

I can’t say how much of the theoretical amount an elite player can capture since haven’t played against any but expect it to be >5bb

this implies all 500 regs are at the same level, they aren’t, some crush and some break even

Interesting discussion. Curious to hear what people think.

Solid 500nl reg at a 3 handed table with Linus/Stefan? The Solid 500nl reg get's destroyed and it's not close. -6bb/100 minimum and probably more.

Linus and Stefan would just manipulate preflop (SB limps/different sizing's for openings) and the 500nl reg would be clueless in all parts of the game tree.

Stefan beat Limitless for 13bb/100 in a HU match, the edge would be smaller 3 handed but not by that much. And Limitless is better than the 500nl guy by a country mile.

how many BB would the guy hosting and raking the match make while he sipped JWblue and set up golf matches?

less than 5

at least >5 with potentially high ceiling seems like a solid answer. Rake is low at those stakes and just the changes in ranges due to 3h/lower rake and the fact you have to play so wide 3-handed would be big adjustments for a typical 500nl reg.

Also... saying this as typical 500nl reg.

Rake structure is of course super relevant here. I think I probably have played 1 million hands of regwars and possibly more at nl400-nl40k lifetime and I'm very sure this number is above -10+ for the nl500 reg. Saolo and his entire stable which according to himself has hundreds of students cant even put together a sample of 20k hands combined lifetime sample at nl5k+ in 3 handed games.

If saolo is really confident (which he never will be because the statement is absurd) this could easily go down. Decent chance a low rake site like acr could set up tables for this challenge and he could crossbook the regs 10x and they would 100% be down.

In general the statement is just so obnoxious. NL500 regs have absurd ammount of leaks and guys like Stefan or Linus would punish them hard.

Saulo is completely delusional.

High stakes regs are insanely good and much better than 500nl regs.

Stefan beat limitless for 13bb/100 over huge sample.

I think Berri took Linus for similar numbers.

Davyjones wins at 5bb/100 in the toughest 3-4h line ups in the world.

Quite clearly these guys are going to do >10bb/100, probably more 15/100 pallpark.

Meaningless statement as pointed out.
Also this is 2024, on ps.com there is no volume at HS so you regularly see the biggest winners of the site moving down even to 500. So much so that some of them could also be considered as 500nl regs.

This.
Saulo said one of his students that played 500, I’m guessing that’s ignition? Saulos YouTube videos of himself playing are mostly 500 zone on ignition. 500 regs on ignition are probably different ability than regs on other sites. What standard are we using?

Would honestly imagine the skill difference between regs isn't that big depending on sites. I'm quite open for someone like Saulo or someone like Andrew Ivers being the best nl500 reg. Not really sure if its either of those main game, but my main point being that if you are playing on .eu / .com sites you dont really have a big incentive to play nl500 as your main game. Very possible there is more action at nl1k and if not you can also play quite ammount of volume at nl2k. Where as some people who play ignition/regulated american pools can probably get heaps of volume at 500 and not necessairly that much at $5/10 +. Assuming we are talking about top regs, the avg reg is a lot stronger on rest of world sites I'm sure however.

would get shat on

Having played Stefan and munez 3 handed for many hands my opinion would be that they would get absolutely anal bleached. It’s actually really funny, GTO goes out the window, exploitability lasts tops 1k hands at a time and if your not constantly adjusting your game, your going to be sniffing your leaks out of a straw whilst on hold to your credit company asking them for a 10 buyin shot.

Ah yeah it didn’t specify top reg so I was assuming a solid reg with what is considered to be a good WR in the games

Bit of an ironic title for his recent short upload

I regret how aggressive I was with this - but truth is I've been shared a lot of soundbites from Saulo recently saying things to this effect, that with his course you'll be able to battle the best, he could sit with the best and do fine etc.
For whatever reason, it triggers me a bit to see multimillionaires misrepresent the truth for extra $$, and it's also disrespectful to those out there battling these games to say that it's as simple as sitting down and doing fine, 500nl students could hold their own etc - especially when they likely have a genuinely good product and it's just needless to be misleading.
Since this discussion it seems more likely Saulo genuinely believes what he's saying, and I do think his content is good, his products are likely good too, for pretty much everyone except exactly the people that want to battle in HS games.

RE the general discussion - I've played some of these games (and done not particularly well, especially at the top end), but lived with some people absolutely destroying them, discussed hands with them daily for years etc.
On the flipside, I've also discussed plenty of hands with people playing 500nl, through bitB or the wider Vienna community. The difference can't be exaggerated enough - when a 500nl reg joins a hand discussion with the others, it'll generally be very hard for them to even follow what is being talked about a lot of the time, and I'm sure many regs I know will be happy to testify to this.

The difference between elite regs and MS regs in terms of how equilibrium is formed, the mistakes people can make trying to replicate it, the functions of different parts of the range, is just night and day. Saulo despite his extremely successful business has likely never really interacted with a top 5-10 reg, so I can understand wouldn't have experienced it, but equally I'd expect the self awareness to understand there could be some unknown unknowns.

A lot of his evidence seems to be based on the idea that 6 handed bots don't crush regs, but the best humans will always have a bigger edge than bots vs average regs, and less players, higher vpip, bigger potential edge in bb/100.
This disregards too that measuring strategic EV errors vs the best humans is way way different to measuring strategic EV errors vs a static equillibrium strategy.

OFC - the main debate is whether these differences in understanding manifest into edge.
I certainly have struggled to express an edge at the tables in none HU games through it, my WR has never been high in 3-4 handed samples. However, others have results that kind of emphatically prove otherwise.

Most people aren't willing to share samples, and even generating a big sample battling top regs is hard for obvious reasons, but I got two particularly compelling ones below, one from bitB at HS, one from outside at 20knl:









Obviously there is still a chance these are the results of variance.
But the population grinding out these samples is not big, the chance of a 1 in 200 run appearing randomly is low.
Add in extra symptoms and false diagnosis becomes even less likely - the ability to predict future results of other players has been very high historically, the difference in verbal understanding is obvious.

Finally - these samples are vs much stronger opponents than a random 500nl reg.

Every reg that got to the highest stakes had to battle his away up vs regs at some point.

That said, any NL500 reg would be absolutely demolished by the top regs at NL10000+. It is not even close. Not only technically but mentally.

It seems that Saulo's opinion is based on his student's winrate in 6 max vs 5 bots. For this discussion, it would be more interesting to hear 3 max vs 2 bots.

Should be possible to estimate with his dataset? Calculate BB, SB, BU winrate for his students when CO-UTG have folded. Calculate GTO winrate in the same way, and compare the numbers

The NL500 reg should improve over time when playing against tougher opponents,
so even if he is starting off as a 10bb/100 loser, he may end up as a much smaller loser.

It can be good to remember that even someone like Linus was kind of struggling at NL200.
~2.5bb/100 pre-rb over ~1.5M hands, with a 400k hand BE-stretch and a 300k hand BE-stretch later on.





Otb_RedBaron broke even pre-rb over his first 800k hands.

Seems ridiculous to compare a reg’s results vs GTO bots and extrapolate that to high stakes. The regs are going to be actively exploiting leaks that the bots won’t.

Saulo is a good poker player, and I like his content. First introduction I got from him was his RIO content, and I don´t remember anything particularly bad from it. He is not an average 500nl reg, but the first thing he should have done to just be entitled to give opinions about people that are not him, to generalize the 500nl pool, would be play 3 handed vs the HS peeps himself. Make a sample, win, then comeback and start to form a balanced view on why anyone else would be able to do the same from the starting point of an average beta 500nl reg. He can´t, because he never did it for any meaningful sample, anything he says is speculative by nature.

Him selling a course claiming this is just absurd. Even if he believes what he says. I´m totally fine with being delusional, as long as the delusional thoughts are yours and are directed on yourself and only yourself. If you have it in you, as a pure alpha male, and you direct it into an obssession, you will make it.

Regardless of who is right, if George believes it's over 8bb/100 and Saulo thinks it's closer to 2bb/100 why not just spot 5bb/100 (each side believing they have a 3bb/100 edge) and have a few Z500 students play 3handed against the world's best for a few months (effectively playing at a % they feel comfortable with). I'm sure literally every single party would be delighted to participate.

At what stakes would HS players be delighted to participate in that? I think probably too high for the 500 regs to afford.