This.

Almost every table will have a airball type or worse at it at least where I play but Nik is trying waaaayy to hard.

He is fluent in mandarin-even has an accent! but think he spent some formative years in the east obviously easier when fully submerged.

Nah fortunately they don't. There are plenty of bad players who are extremely pleasant.one of him at every table and I would hand long ago quit poker.

ego is a phenomenon worth studying. In poker it is amplified for many. Pre solvers, people only had results to rely on in order to boost their ego. With the emergence of the solvers, I have noticed players becoming entitled even without results to show up for and the ones with results with a solver based approach looking down on anyone not playing according to their norms.

With solvers the bias becomes even stronger, because you can always find flaws in someones game and overlook your own flaws. For the smart ones leaning towards predepositions and black and white thinking, the age of solvers unfortunately took them even further into the mindset of separation. Anything outside the norm will immediately be judged as terrible. Which is not rational but irrational.

Not in terms of scope but underlying mechanisms, you can draw the parralels here easily to racism or other forms of discrimination. Thich Nhat Hanh called that the mindset of discrimination.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6F0x...PlumVillageApp

it's amusing how adamant solver boys are about taking certain lines in soft live games where they haven't come close to running sims on those actual game conditions.

Cliff notes:
* Airball winning streak continues.
* No one is holding over him, even the pros.
* The pros are now starting to avoid him and be wary of him.

Nik Airball's winning streak continues. I think he's booked a $30k and then a $50k win in his last two sessions, now close to a milly up on HCL.

And more significantly, no one in the games is holding over him, not Mariano, not Alec Torelli, nobody.

On the contrary, these players are either actively avoiding getting into many pots with him, or when they do are frustrated by him, that he is just not easy at all to play against.
I unexpectedly had to work very late, so I did catch most of last night's stream, and he frustrated the hell out of Torelli and then gave him the needle for good measure.

Overall sample size on HCL for Airball is still fairly small, and he has overall run well, but he is closing the net profits gap on Garrett Adelstein, so IMO should start to be taken seriously as a very good player.

What I find most annoying about him is that he is clearly doing it to gain an edge.

But not in a funny way like Tony G. It’s just obnoxious. He is the bully who doesn’t get bullied back.

I wish there would be some pro to fill the gap Garret left to shut this goon up.

Cliff notes:
Airball's needles are pure gamesmanship, but very well excecuted.
Alec Torelli was clearly rattled by Airball's needling.
Airball eased up on the needling of Henry, so Henry now probably realises the needling is an act.
Two ways of countering his needling: fight back with counter needles, or genuinely ignore them, and don't simmer underneath.

Yes, it is for sure gamesmanship that he is deploying, an he is skirting the line of what is acceptable. And very little of it is funny, but a lot of it is very clever, in a tactical sense.

There are two methods of players coping with it, fighting back as you suggested and some players like Garrett would,
or ignoring it but genuinely ignoring it, not pretending to ignore it, but actually simmering or raging underneath, which is what Alec Torelli definitely was last night, he was clearly rattled by it.

I was multi-tasking so don't remember every needle, but Nik did needle Alec once or twice after hands that they were in together, but also even more ruthlessly needled
him after he lost pots, including one quite big pot, against other opponents. This all culminated in Airball's piece de resistance final needle of Torelli, which was,
"Maybe you should stick to coaching, Alec", which he delivered deadpan and with a fake air of kindness about it, but it was of course totally brutal.

Alec was up at that point and at the end of the stream too, but during the time of those needles he was upstuck from something like +$30K to +$10K.

I also noticed that Airball eased up on needling Henry, and that Henry was getting on really well with him throughout, so perhaps Henry has worked out that it is all acting,
or maybe he's known this all along.

An issue moving forwards for the anti-Airball fraternity, might be who they hate most, Airball or Torelli, and picking one of them! I personally don't hate either. It's just poker.

Not sure you've noticed, but Mike X and Airball are the two best players in the world since Garrett's retirement. Questioning that reality is unacceptable and makes you crazy.

some of you guys need to find a new hobby and log off 2p2 holy cow

I admire her candor. She could have claimed runbad and her influencees wouldn't know better nor probably care.

I'll never forget her punt on HSP. A true modern art masterpiece.

Can't embed the (crappy) video for some reason: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AE-XcoO6Ok8

she would get absolutely hammered by poker players on twitter (and elsewhere) if she claimed anything else than the truth, which is her being bad at poker.



to embed from youtube remove everything in the URL before and including the equals sign (=).

i.e.:
[.YOUTUBE]AE-XcoO6Ok8[/YOUTUBE] without the period, obviously.

Airball=donk on a heater. His non poker skills like banter and table talk may be good but his fundamentals are ****

Keep in mind that NV, Mr. Feld, and other CREATORS were FEELING THE HEAT when the investigation was going down. Rightfully so!

So what happened? A little LOS ANGELES SHUFFLE, if you will.

"Switch" the winner, and still make the dough!

NV suddenly and inexplicably an 11 game losing streak after winning at 50 bb/100 over 1000+ hours? HMMM!!!

"Airballman"? MASSIVE heater and challenges other top verified pros to heads up for mills?
Is there something "OFF" about his rise? Of couuuuuuuuuurse!

Keep in mind these 2 things as well

1) NV had Airballman on his pod and specifically asked how he suddenly came into all this money (as if NV didn't know!) What a joke! Shared roll!
NV himself mentioned that Airball played much lower stakes at the casino for a LONG time.
The sudden SKYROCKET in stakes for a man in his early to mid 20's is SUS OF COOOURSE!

and

2) This is the same dunce who met with an alleged cheating couple for 7 HOURS at a local restaurant...the night before said cheating couple
tried to pull off the biggest cheat in televised poker history. How strange!

Use your brains, folks!!

There is a possibility that some of what you have said is true, but it is pure speculation by you.

I watched the NV Airball podcast too, and what Airball actually said regarding how he moved up the stakes quickly was that he made a lot of money through his job recently as an investment banker, I assume he means he got a big annual bonus payment, and that gave him a bigger bankroll to move up stakes and he then started winning at those stakes so he moved up higher still.

Is what he said all factual, I don't know, but it is what he said.

All you've done is made accusations that are highly spectaculative jumping to a lot of conclusions, and for which you have no proof.

Sir, this YOUNG man is at the casino DAY AND NIGHT (like CUDI) and is not too far removed from HIGH SCHOOL.
He's played MUCH lower stakes for a while but suddenly can play some of the BIGGEST STAKES
in the world
WITHOUT CARE. If you think that this YOUNG man merely quickly earned MILLIONS though his "day job",
you are being
SILLY!! What else would you like to believe? Mars (Tony Tony Tone) earned his milliong as a
SNOWBOARD INSTRUCTOR?

Totally agree with you, players often lie about where their bankroll comes from and even more often are broke or worse but are still playing in big cash games or entering lots of tournaments that require a big bankroll. The latter I know one of personally, he confided in me about this but the player pool don't know it, they think he is flush with money.

Nik Airball's story is plausible. He is 26 and he might have been awarded a multi million dollar bonus, or part of his pay package could have included share options and then the shares of the company he works for exploded in value.

Your theory might be true, I don't rule it out, but his own explanation of his sudden massive bankroll is more likely IMO, plus he said it on a podcast so if he's made it up would be taking a big risk of being busted by a viewer.

I'm thinking it would be pretty rare to receive a multi million dollar bonus at 26. He would have had to land a great job and the job would have had allow him to manage massive amounts of investments with little to no real world experience. Seems quite unlikely.

My guess is inheritance/trust fund, possibly made some crypto money, or is backed.

Nick is the most obvious trust fund kid ever. Dude grew up in china, is indian, and has an MBA and job description of "Aerospace & Defense Investment Banking". Probably unlimited family wealth.

Berkey is cringe af

Not to nitpick, because I agree with the general conclusion, but according to what Airball himself said, he didn’t grow up in China.

He said that his parents made him (and his sister??) do Chinese language emersion school starting from kindergarten. He might have even said his parents created the school to do so, or maybe it was homeschool.

He said he first went to China for a semester as an exchange student in middle school, and then I think for 1 year in high school also as an exchange student.

Then he did all of his university there.


Some details might be off but that’s the gist. All of this is from table talk on last weeks Hustler stream when Handz asked him how he learned Chinese.

Berkey sucks and his poker advice is a joke imo. At least he’s taking some market share away from the elite training sites

Note sure if serious. I haven't watched alot of HCL recently but I remember Mike X being horrible. Did he suddenly get better or something?

He’s not.(serious)

Per Doug Polk Nik wanted to play Berkey heads up, he asked Berkey for dates, Berkey was like I don't know if that works for me, i have this on the 7th, this on 13th, then he went to Nik asking for dates and Nik says anytime, he goes back to Berkey and he keeps up bullshiting(paraphrasing a bit).

I didn't think Berkey was a scammer, cause even tough he mostly sold bullshit, I tought that he believed what he sold. But now a 10 or 15y+ pro refuses to play heads up vs rich kid with a couple years of experience?
Sad to say he is scum level to me now, till more information comes out. You can't have a training site and not play Airball heads up, you just can't do that if you're not out there scammming people.
At least say you haven't played heads up much and ask for a couple months prep so you don't ruin your site credibility, but this? Despicable.
Say you will play online as to put some volume and not have the results tainted by variance. Whatever you do, don't refuse to play Airball.

Curious to see what this scammer will say in his next podcast. Happy to take all this back if this dude proves he isn't ducking Airball, but **** him for selling **** he doesn't believe in.

Oh nice... thanks for the reminder. I saw that pop-up on my YouTube notifications but it was already going by the time I went there. Figured I'd wait until it was archived so I could watch from the beginning, and your post alerted me of it.

EDIT: I'm about 10 minutes in, and I need to revise my post. Like, nice, like, thanks for the, like, reminder. I, like, saw that, like, pop up in my, like, YouTube notifications... oh you get the idea.