1bb winners by definition are not crushers. Its like people don't even understand what the word means, or the logic is just awful. What you are trying to say is, that in todays games its basically impossible to crush higher stakes, not try and reinvent what 'crushing' means. Crushing means a very high win rate, simple. You are not crushing if you are barely winning even in tough fields.

Whats clear is that at least 90% of players have no understanding on variance. Just open up PGC and see the regs assuming their win rates from a 100k heater, when it literally means nothing. Rick is a reg fish who plays 8/2 vpip,pfr with no sample so lol at anyone claiming he knows what he's talking about.

You could play well and run like crap and still win. And if you play a nitty style like me, variance is less of a factor. What's the chance I run similarly well over the next 100k hands? How about the next 200k? I'm just curious. Do you think I'm not at least a 5bb+/100 winner in the games I play? The competition I'm seeing is very soft. I'm not saying I'm good at poker, just better than my competition. Poker was harder in 2010.

fyp.

lol, it may not have been the 10bb for each individual game but i'm pretty sure nano's hourly (including relative to stakes played) back then counts as crushing. this is a money business after all.

massive lol at games not being tougher nowadays. sure, if you've improved ahead of the curve of overall skill level increase, it might not feel like it but it's obviously objectively true.

i'd say on mainstream sites and with decent volume, 5bb+ is crushing. ofc hunting on secret mega whale apps or w/e higher is easily possible.

Yeah fair enough. I just meant if we’re using the word ‘crusher’ relative to the competition but I guess there must be quite a few 1bb winners around still, although who knows if that’s actually possible as a ‘true’ winrate

I doubt too many at all at the highest stakes that regularly run though over meaningful samples. Doug was talking about needing to ‘work hard for my 1bb/100’ around 2015 when the Negreanu feud first kicked off, wasn’t he one of the highest volume guys at 6max at the time? Fairly sure he was one of the biggest winners

I’d be interested to know what the largest sample size is of someone winning at this kind of winrate in today’s games

You sound like my sister who started trading forex, won 100k, thought she was an expert and lost it all

Your kind of attitude was ten a penny in the poker boom. Maybe if what you’re saying is true you’re playing on some goldmine unknown site full of fish, but I would advise that you exercise caution because variance the like of which you haven’t seen as of yet is inevitably coming your way

Not gonna say what site I play on though any one who knows me could figure it out quite easily but I feel like games are easier now than back in the day. I played the same stakes on pokerstars back in 2006-2011. I could be wrong of course and it's possible I just got better or I'm just an idiot who can't understand how hard the games are. Or I'm just lucky and don't realize it. All of those things are possible. I'll go with I'm just lucky.

The realistic idea is that games aren't going to get harder forever. Eventually they'll reach an equilibrium. But before that it will be soft and then get harder than the equilibrium and then swing back to an equilibrium.

Doug is a heads up player, he's actually quite weak at 6max comparatively. He definitely didn't put in much volume at 6max. I'm pretty sure Doug has been a losing poker player since he couldn't get action at head up circa 2016. Not talking trash, I've never played high stakes and I'd get my ass kicked even harder if I tried. I'm bad at poker, I just might be extra lucky, but Doug is not a 6max guy.

Quite possibly this is true. Like the old poker expression "It's better to be lucky than good". Maybe that's true of me. Maybe variance is coming my way, but quite possibly I'm just extra lucky and that's hard to quantify. Also I've gone broke more than once and been playing poker since 2003 so if I go broke, I'll do what I've always done and get a job and keep trying. =D

Good luck to everyone going forward!

i'm not saying the games are so impossibly difficult now. i think below the highest stakes winning regs still make infinite mistakes, myself included ofc. i just think you're underestimating what a joke the games were back then. most likely thing is that you improved a lot but i guess pure puck is possible.

@ sandra, i know a bunch of people in poker that have kept up 4-5bb+ over millions of hands at small-high stakes but i assume they're in the minority, hence 5bb+ as my estimated crushing definition.

Fair enough, good luck. Sorry if I was a dick

Personally, this line of thinking makes no sense to me. I don't know if the term 'crushing' should be used in absolute terms.

If someone is playing in a field of high quality players, where the theoretical maximum edge vs them is say, 4bb/100 (which is probably pushing it) and hero is achieving somewhere in that region, say 3.5bb/100, it means they have to play insanely well and some really top level poker to be pushing that edge.

In my eyes, that's what I call crushing.

Like how can we say nobody is crushing a given game that has a dynamic sum available to be won. Surely it should be relative to the bb/100 edge available in that particular game.

So according to your logic 0.5bb can be crushing if the maximum edge is 1bb. Why can't you just accept that some games simply cannot be crushed and stop using an inappropriate term?

If you make it to the mens Olympic 100m final you are among the fastest men on the planet, so by your logic if you win by 1 hundredth you are crushing. In reality winning by meters like Usain Bolt would be crushing the field.

You would be crushing though if you count the previous rounds competitors as being in the same field, because they’ll be well off the pace compared to the winners or crushers.

Not sure why I care really but I can see both sides

Anyway its a pointless debate. Point is OP is right, its very very hard to know the truth in poker.

Not sure if anyone cares but there are more advanced methods of estimating winrates using bayesian inference https://www.reddit.com/r/Poker_Theor...r_you_all_hit/

True winrate is not HEM/PT/H2N AIEV winrate, not even close. I'm not sure about for NL, but in PLO over 1 million hands there are players whose HEM/PT/H2N AIEV winrate is/will be 500 or more buyins above or below their true EV winrate, poker can be ridiculous sometimes, just hope you are one of the lucky ones.

or you could be a weak reg and somehow win!

*looks in mirror

helluva troll thread, A+

There are people winning at nl1k++ on stars >7bb/100 for very large samples you can see this on the current iterations of PTR. A lot of them have most of their hands in all reg lineups and their winrates would be >10bb/100 if they game selected. People like stefan11222, topkat5757, etc.

The idea that "3bb/100" is a crusher on any site is laughable. That's just someone who has tons of leaks. If you think that's a maximum winrate you need to hit the books. I've played against regs that are <3bb/100 for large samples they are without exception, terrible and super exploitable. They are also probably super confused about why their WR is so low and just think games are too tough and it's something outside their control.

surely hu and 3-handed games account for a lot of that volume and those edges, though. do you think people are beating 1k+ 5/6handed for >7bb vs all regs on stars?

In 2021? I don't believe it! Poker is dead and the sky is falling!

But for real of course the best players are going to have better than a 3bb/100 edge. Even in the toughest of lineups, even in 2021. I think it must be bad regs that can't admit to themselves they just aren't that good that convince themselves that such winrates are impossible to achieve.

Yes the real crushers are. Poker is way more complicated than anyone thinking the max edge is 3bb/100 is. No one is playing anywhere near close to GTO. Or rather they're still making tons of mistakes, even the top players have leaks, just a lot less than your average reg.

It depends on the tracked and its version number also.

those are hu and 3 handed where variance is huge theres no winrate like that in regs lineup 5-6 handed, 95% of it comes from the fishes and there are plenty evan at 1k. no reg with 3bb wr at high stakes is terrible and definetly not super exploitable, i dont know what world u live in lol. u also need to get ur arrogance in check

dude, let him live in his bubble lol, hes one of those guys that thinks high stakes regs are like some gods or legends lol. they dont evan realize most of these guys roll came from huge whales.

how often do you see a huge whale at 1knl+ on stars? look at the lobby, if a recreational player that loses -10bb/100 joins, the waiting list immediately rises to 5+. If you beat those games for 7bb you are simply crushing.

With a real good won rate (the WR op posted is no joke, but I've seen alot higher) the chances of such an extreme loss are so miniscule you could compare them to your chances of a fatal car crash. Especially seeing as smart players adjust to downswings, such as avoiding tougher games and analysing their own play more critically.

But yeah, you can't be 100%, like alot of things, but you can be pretty close. You CAN know for sure if you consider more then just your results. Identify the mistakes of others, and keep track of your bets. Confirm their expectations. Then you could really know if you're a winner. But winning over a big enough sample is enough to be sure beyond reasonable doubt.

I think this logic is flawed because what constitutes a high win rate, which is what your definition of crushing is based on, is relative.

1bb/100 could very well be crushing if that is in fact a very high win rate. If every other winning player in the game had a .01 win rate, clearly the person with 1bb/100 is crushing.

I'm sure whatever number you would define as crushing now (5bb/100??) go back in time and people would scoff at that as being crushing, because again crushing is relative

so a absolute small margin of victory (a few meters) is crushing when the field is elite in track and field, but an absolute small margin of victory (1bb/100) when the field is elite can't be crushing in poker?

I'm sure you would say that you'd need to win by more than a few meters for someone to qualify as crushing a middle school track and field event......so if your logic was consistent, then you should be saying that the state of the Olympic 100 meters is such that no one is crushing it