fyp

this requires sites to be motivated to identify suspicious play. the major unregulated sites are not.

happy for you.

for sure

But are people playing online chess for real money?

Not that hard to get the Poker equivalent of Stockfish. I can just search Poker real time GTO and get back a bunch of options. It's all out there.

And there's no way for sites to stop it if you simply run it on your phone, where all the checks and all the scanning your client runs, can ever detect it.

Yes. Both on Chess.com for events like Titled Tuesday, as well as online and hybrid tournaments.

GTOWizard isn’t free and has a fair play checker which can identify you RTAing

well, obviously this isnt true ainec

Among other things, this would require global pools, everything being very gray again, everywhere, and easy and painless to deposit. Given what is happening re cheating, not really sure if we should have any desire for those factors to come back.

also 15 years ago there were more fish, the regs were worse, bumhunting wasnt happening as much as now, there were more (hs) tables running. Of course it was easier to make 100-200k in a year 15 years ago than it is now. In 2008 there were way more 100k+ annual winners than in 2023

Biggest economy of the world still part of the global pool (on the biggest sites) 15 years ago, providing tons of fresh fish, probably the main reason. I find it hard to believe that ok regs making 100k-200k per year would ever be a sustainable thing in the long term, not sure if people believed in it back then.

https://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/5...nished-533223/

https://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/5...94/?highlight=

2 examples of unsustainable things that used to happen

Guess i am one of the few who is still crushing at the same rate as 15 years ago then.

Why, because the absolute skill of the player pool has increased so dramatically? Absolute skill level means nothing, that's why game selection is and always has been the most important factor in winrate. I for one have never had an easier time winning, because my skill level has increased far beyond the skill level of the games I play.

All correct and this despite money being worth half (or so?) today than it was in 2008.

Your own personal anecdotes don't make the overall statement true.

And I guarantee you work significantly harder to make what you're making compared to people who made the same in online poker 15 years ago. Your skill level didn't increase by you doing nothing.

The overall statement that it is easier to make money today than 15 years ago is 100% true insofar as the games you are playing have a higher skill gap today between you and the pool than they did 15 years ago. In my case, that is certainly true.

This statement isn't necessarily true, because 15 years ago no one had any idea what they were doing, yet some worked very hard on their game to win. Go look at a bluefire poker video from Phil G from 2008, and then come back and tell me 1) He didn't work harder on his game then than I do now and 2) I am better now than he was then.

If what you're really saying is *****regs can't automake money anymore by watching a vid and loosely applying some of the concepts because the overall skill level of all games has increased to such a degree that the lower bound of effort required to beat them now is above the lower bound of effort required to beat them 15 years ago, then I agree with you.

Hahaha, nah... you won't convince him otherwise.

Reminds me of when mandatory seatbelt laws were popping up throughout the U.S., I think the late 80s. You inevitably ran into someone who would grouse about it, sharing stories about 20 of their buddies riding nuts to butts to school everyday in the bed of their dad's CK10 and still being able to tell you about it now.

Of course, it seems like there should be less of this in poker, where we train ourselves not to be result-oriented. But then when is the last time you saw an interview of the newest WSOP bracelet holder, whose only explanation for the win was "running hotter than the sun's taint."


I often wonder if it's a strictly human tendency to take one's own experience and assume its the norm for everyone. Maybe somewhere in the world, there is a red gazelle insisting to his mom, "I spent all day sniffing pee in the savanna and I'm back here now. You're spending way too much time with the Grants and the Thomsons, listening to their incessant fear-mongering about these so-called 'cheetahs.'"

GG is regulated in many markets now, eg Germany, yet as we recently saw, this doesn't help. Maybe if all players would be coming from only regulated markets, then maybe this could help. But so far regulation didn't help at all.

Wondering if the superuser thingy would be a reason sites could loose their license,due to regulators stepping in.

Saying regulation doesn't help at all is like saying the flu shot didn't help at all because you still caught the flu. This is a matter of degree; it's not black and white. Even in highly regulated environments fraud and abuse still happens, that doesn't mean we go extreme and stop regulating things altogether or don't regulate them because regulations don't stop every possible instance of fraud and abuse 100% of the time.

did you play online poker 15 years ago?

you're suffering from such intense reading comprehension and/or logic fails that i'm skeptical of your claims that you are crushing. for context, what stakes/sites are you playing?

Ya, you sure about that? Maybe read again, slowly this time.

Yep, you definitely still aren't getting it.

Yep.

I like the idea of winning players being subject to stricter playing rules while recs can just play normally. Like say a player is a proven winner they need to play on camera with special software added to PC. If thats not enough then said winning players need to get a computer from the site as you mentioned to play.

This way you dont ruin the Rec players experience. Winners should be willing to give more information for the sake of fair play for all.

Would there be a hand minimum before establishing said winningness?

It would be some sort of weighted formula. Like profit/playstyle/volume played. Not just "win 10kusd and now you need the sites computer to play". Their would need to be room for recs to spin up their account and have fun without extended security measures.

If the major pokersites wanted to take security even more serious they would share data with each other in private to protect the game. Like say GGpoker,Stars,and WPN all decided to work together to police the games with a shared database. So if J.Doe signs up and doxes on GG it runs through stars/WPN data as well so sites would have that much more to work with. If a new player suddenly shows up not on any sites list and is clearly a elite reg they can act faster on them.

Obv this would require major sites to work together with similar standards and take TONs of work. This wouldnt completely fix cheating but it would for sure help alot and it could keep online poker around for a long time.

Exactly, so being a big winner compared to daily living costs, buying a house etc would have been even easier in 2008. But with that in mind one could argue that it is easy being a big winner in Belarus than it is in Switzerland for instance. So for me i kinda set the treshold for being a big winner at making 100k+ annually. Which there were definitely more of in 2008 than in 2023.