Airball lets us know his true feelings about high stakes poker Player Matt Berkey

Dude talks some ****, not surprising imo.

Calling Berkey a scammer is a bit much.

Who is the guy talking about who "stole 135" at the end? Garrett?

Airball is a very good player.

I think his card sense is about 9.5 out of 10 and his technical skills maybe an 8.75, so he's not an easy opponent for anyone, full ring or HU.

It's hard to know how good Berkey is in cash games. From the limited amount I have seen of him on streams, he looks far from brilliant in decent or tough line ups
but does seem to crush or have a big edge in weak line ups. So in British/Aussie sports terms, he is a flat-track bully.

His residential coaching courses are extremely expensive IMO. Does that make them a scam, maybe, if over charging counts as scamming.

my brother in christ there's a line out of the door of ppl who would play airball at any stakes they could get the cash together for

Airball got more hair on his eyebrows than I have on my balls

I assume the above is a joke

After he’s done playing Berkey. Please play me. Please.

Note: if you’re reading this Berkey, don’t play him at HCL. Or you goin’ run into alooot of “coolers”. Ask clickr he can tell you all about his experience.

Vertucci sics his lap dog on Berkey, lmao.

Pathetic.

Nope.

I've watched maybe 150 hours of his play on HCL stream and he is very good.

He has a lot of live skills too, that many players don't have. Also, he doesn't tilt, isn't scared money and doesn't have any noticeable physical or verbal tells.

He is good at picking up opponents' tells. I know this because there is something he routinely does when facing a big river bet that most other players,
including top players, aren't doing, but should be doing.

I think he has a bet sizing tell of sorts, in some spots, that might be exploitable but only if an opponent studied enough of his hands to notice it.
I've noticed it because of watching ~150 hours of his play.

I did at first, maybe 50 hours into that 150, think that he was a splashy bad or below average reg who happened to have a lot of money to play with.
I now don't think that at all. I think he has the eye of the tiger when he is playing and plays hands professionally all of the time. The splashiness part I now think is because he wants to give action so that he gets invited to the game, and because he's confident in his post flop game against the weaker players at the table, so it's actually +EV to get into a lot more pots with them. So, how good he is, is quite deceptive. I was deceived at first myself.

Airball, Vertucci, and Huslter Casino continue to make absolute clowns of themselves. Scammer? Projection much?

Berkey is 10x the player and does more good for the poker community than any of these weasels.

Airball was casually sitting with $800K on the table last night, so there's a good chance he can afford an excellent libel lawyer.

And there are a lot of holes in Berkey's whiter than white image of being the self-proclaimed "Mr Clean Hands". I'm not gonna rake over them again, they are covered in other threads.

I don't currently see any negatives around Nik Airball. He's a good personality at the table, plays a lot of hands and provides more entertainment than most.

The vast majority of people in the HCL chat don't like him, but that's because the convention (belief) among the vast majority of poker players, players that have very limited
table talk skills themselves, and are even worse at coping with another player's table talk, is that if you talk a lot at the table, talk trash, needle, or do anything like
that, that you are a bad person! Not just badly behaved at the poker table, but a bad person. Lol at that thought process.

I don’t know who this airball guy is, but his take on Berkey is 100% correct. I’ve never understood how he finds so many suckers to pay for his trash S4Y

Funny alot of those HCL regs do this same thing....

Well you may not even know what it is that he does on the river when facing a large river bet that most players don't do. I'm gonna say that ~87.5% of all players, regardless of skill level, stakes played, winning or losing players, don't do it.

You could be in the 12.5 %.

I may have it wrong about Airball, maybe I am over rating him. I have watched as I said a lot of him, and I'm 99% a live player myself, so I feel that I have a good feel for relative player strength in live cash games. It is possible too that his game has improved a lot over the last few months, so perhaps he was a bad reg a year ago. I don't know what stakes he has played at historically, what his path up to high stakes has been, or if he has built his bankroll from poker or from elsewhere.

I am very confident though that you won't find any player in any of the HCL line ups that say that he is easy to play against, or that he is anything like "the value" at the table.

To give Berkey credit, I don't think he will be an easy opponent for Airball or for anybody HU. He obviously has the work ethic to study HU hard, on top of what he already knows about it,
and is very professional in the way he goes about doing things. Airball will definitely try to get under his skin though with table talk, and I think it will succeed. Players who appear stoic on the surface, often aren't underneath and can be easily rattled.

I'm a big HCL fan and as opposed to many others I don't even hate seeing Airball play. That said it's a pretty far stretch to even imply he is much of a poker player. He plays super soft lineups for mommys money. He was born rich and plays against other rich people. It's how the world works, but it doesn't mean one should care much for his opinion on like, anything at all really.

I think it's been stated that he's an investor and part owner of a fast food franchise with 50 or so locations.

Thank you.

That is some circumstantial evidence then that he is not a high quality player, but it is still only circumstantial evidence.

It is still possible that someone who is independently very wealthy has a natural flair for poker, learns quickly and is also a good and determined competitor.
So the sentence above is probably where I stand at the moment.

Some more of my thoughts on his play that I have observed, are these:

(these are not exhaustive lists, just things that quickly spring to mind)

Good points: (in no particular order)

* Very good at making some tough to make, but correct, lay downs on the river.
* Very good at subtly needling opponents to unsettle them. (sometimes not done subtly at all, but often it is subtle)
* Very good pre flop. Doesn't get himself into bad spots where his last bet becomes dead money because he is sandwiched in between a raising war,
and doesn't get himself into spots where he has to (is pot odds/approx. equity committed) to 4 or 5 bet call off when flipping or maybe behind, due to ill judged bet sizings in the lead up to it.

Leaks, or possible leaks: (again in no particular order)

* He plays too fast post flop (a lot of the time). This in itself does mean that he is balanced, timings wise, meaning that you can't pick up timing tells on him.
However, by playing so quickly, particularly when calling a bet or a raise, it is often narrowing his range down, so removing some of the ability of deception.
* Lack of variation in his play. As I said, I think he is a good player and playing well. However, some players may start to work out his pattern of play if they make a conscious effort to study him.
* Too much checking and double checking with strong hands. I've seen him miss a lot of value a few times by playing too trappy against weak, tight players, players who are stations but who will not blast off when checked to or double check to. The trappy style will work better/more often against aggressive opponents, but he has been doing it a lot against weak, tight recs.

I hope this HU match happens, it should be a fascinating one.

I think he's certainly in the higher tier of recreational players on HCL alongside Double M, Ryusuke and Mike X

thx for clearing that up. its Garret he is talking about. (135k)

He’s not wrong about Berkey though, guy’s terrible at poker, loses like 90% of streams he goes on and runs a training site rofl

None of what you just said makes any sense to a poker pro.

I don’t like airball, but if you’re right, you’re right. Matt Berkey is one of the biggest pseudo-intellectuals in poker.

It all makes perfect sense.

I have not claimed that he is playing a GTO style of play, just that he is playing well.
In those particular games, playing a combination of solver approved poker and exploitative is going to make the most money.

How much of his play have you watched and how much of HCL streams have you watched?

If you have watched a lot of it then you will know that it's like a study in player types, where a big chunk of the total player pool
each have a very distinctive playing style. I haven't observed many players adjusting their playing style over the course of many months.

(Mike X is a notable exception. He used to be a total nit and was very easy to push off of hands. Now he has turned the tables. He still plays
fairly tight pre, but his coach has taught him two main things, 1. don't fold to 3 bets pre when in position, and the biggest change in his game
which he didn't used to do, 2. Check raise, or raise leads, when you are on a draw with good equity and sometimes with just back door equity, as long as
effective stacks are deep enough. He is now doing this a lot and getting a lot of folds.)

So when you are analysing what the best play is in these HCL unusual games, you should be factoring in player types, which means that you are often not playing balanced,
e.g. you are not looking at a spot and saying the solver says we check back here 75% and bet 25% and then randomise, you are more often
deciding on a non randomised action, so 100% check or 100% bet, because your opponents aren't sophisticated enough to notice a pattern in your play,
nor are you going to be able to play a big enough sample of hands against them in that same or very similar spot to achieve a high volume of small "guaranteed" GTO edges
that aggregate into a large amount of profit. So it is better to apply absolutes in many spots so that you realise your edge during that rare opportunity.

To underline the last point, there are quite a lot of players who played a few sessions and have busted out of the game, so imagine playing GTO against them
and it only realising very small profits because volume is needed against them, and seeing other players playing more exploitatively against them winning all the money.

Let’s just say I’ve watched over 133 streams and I have stats on every single one of them. I know exactly every single one of his bet sizes, techniques and plays. I’ll leave it at that until we release the evidence.