Just want to clarify on the "new regs take money out of the poker economy" view point so often mentioned here. The claim is entirely misguided IMO. The poker economy is finite and entirely driven by losing players depositing money. Three things happen:

1) New winning players make $
2) Exisiting winning players make less money than before (see posts about Entitlement)
3) As the edge between the player pool decreases, the sites take more rake out of the economy

It's not that new regs take money out of the economy. They decrease the money available to existing regs. Existing regs are not the economy. The economy is the amount of dollars losing players are willing to lose. The poker sites are ultimately taking more money out of the economy via rake because edges have decreased.

Ah yes, well said... thanks for the clarification.

it's not an accident that stars shifted to twitch streamers and having team online PROS make youtube vids

Well, quite frankly i did but he was mature about it.
Just 2 pointers:
I explained to him why the past doesnt matter rgd this entire discussion - his answer "lol, the past doesnt matter"
He wants to ridicule me and asking if i pay/subscribe to any education site and i tell him i dont pay for it but have access to accounts and unfortunately am forced to watch a video every now and then.
Not really the answer he expected so he had no further questions.


This isnt a black and white debate.
IF YOU currently play poker for a living and poker is your only source of income you can only have one opinion here.
In 2011 when vinivici started trolling handhistory thread here w bad advice (strat strat) 95% of people were like wtf you doing education is good. Now we are already 50/50, in 2 years we will be 90%.
Such a thread was unthinkable 3 years ago but slowly people are waking teh **** up
Way too late though tbf

yeah that's important issue too. I remember bringing up how bad it was when Kyyd dynamite or w/e was running a stable at a live casino. I was basically laughed out of that convo as well. if i remember correctly he ran a stable and was coaching in a smaller casino, ran private games with his horses and whales, and played in the same game a few times or thing (idk if I remember it correctly). But everyone thought he was a real good for the community etc etc.

fortunately the poker room actually took action and banned him and his horses if i recall correctly. it was a couple years ago

As you're too lazy to look in a dictionary, I've done it for you.

Stables are obv aids as well but that being said i can understand somewat if u back 20 players and get decent clip of their winnings. I cant however understand making video for 500bucks which 700people watch and u get zero of their winnings

I've followed the thread, and even though I don't necessarily disagree with the training site haters, it feels like they are demonizing a whole industry, which is meant to exist.

A training site will exist, because it generates money by subscription fees, affiliate programs and last, but not least, because it advertises the higher cost product that is coaching. Phil Galfond is not a demon that destroys your games, he is a smart guy that has won millions playing poker and then branched out in another endeavor by doing something better than other people. He is doing it with profit in mind, which is our first reason as poker players to play poker. He doesn't want to bury poker as a game and make games unbeatable as some of the people in the thread seem to believe.

My main point here is that a training site/coaching/software will always exist in an industry such as poker, whether it's available to everybody or open to specific people. Given that this is natural, the games were bound to get tougher every year given all other variables stay constant (unfortunately, the variables in our industry have worked almost entirely against it on top of it all).

From here, the only thing that can be argued over is - how much information should sites give and at what cost. You can't just expect nobody to offer a service that provides variance free money to the person that has the ability to provide it. If you do, you are probably too entitled with your profession and think the industry exists to provide money specifically to you, even after you have reaped the rewards from getting taught the game by videos/forums/coaching yourself in the first place.

As to the original question - I feel like people gave out viable strategy because they were not foreseeing the detrimental effect to their games since poker was booming and actually having more sites could be an indicator that you can learn the game, get hooked, deposit more, etc. The market was growing and getting more people to subscribe was more valuable than having a high fee for "good" videos that are helpful to regs. That said, I still feel CardRunners set the cost too low in the beginning.
Right now, the market is shrinking more and more, so the incentive to give out information for cheap is much less and less and less (higher profile) people would make videos, especially at the games they are playing in.

The latest customer survey sent to BronzeStars contained several questions about Twitch integration in the Stars client, and even asked something like "Would you like to see more Twitch training tutorials from Team Pro players?"
I thought of you and teh TimStone when I saw that.

thats real love man

You're not getting it. You and many other posters in this thread have missed the point quite spectacularly.

I never said that training sites won't exist. My point was that people shouldn't have given this valuable information away for absolute peanuts. People were receiving $200 to make a video that was giving away $200k-worth of strategy.

The training site owners weren't at fault. They were just exploiting cheap labour for millions of dollars. It's the idiots who created the videos who are at fault. And it's still happening today - guys teaching people on RIO how to use GTO-solvers for the price of a 100nl buy-in.


Nevertheless, we are where we are now. Can't change the past. I am just baffled at the sheer stupidity of all these video makers and why they thought cheaply educating people was ever a good idea.

Yes, nanonoko is a fish these days. People need to open their eyes and realise that sponsored pros are usually losing/breakeven players. There are still many idiots who believe nanonoko is some sick 24-tabling crusher, but that hasn't been the case for at least 5 years now.

I saw the graph before it was deleted. He was playing at 36/31 VPIP/PFR. How can anyone be profitable playing that style in today's games? No wonder he gets crushed so hard.

nah those arent his true 6max stats, just his overall stats across all games (hu/plo etc).

seems like a lot of confusion on some basic stuff here

training sites arent owned or run by micro, small, and mid stakes players. the high stakes nosebleed pros were/are making videos and stuff but were also flat out telling you they arent giving away some info... they didnt want to ruin "their game" or "their profitability". they wanted to help you with your game. aka damage the games and even more so of anyone who doesnt sign up that you play in

the high stakes and nosebleed guys used their name recognition to build the training site. then they exploited players who were ******ed enough to pollute their own games for peanuts. the coaches trashed their own games and made peanuts while the guys at nosebleeds made all the money. the coaches were/are suckers. yes theres always going to be another sucker, it doesnt mean youre not a sucker. when money gets taken out of the game by people not in the game, i call it rake

the coaches did get something of great perceived value though. as we are all aware, a smart 20 year old knows absolutely everything. except when they are being exploited in exchange for someone jacking their ego off with there feet. then they are clueless

a big problem here is poker ability has a ceiling. it takes time to get decent, good, great. as you get better it becomes harder and harder to make incremental improvements. eventually players are only capable of making tiny improvements or reach a virtual ceiling. imo a good analogy of this is building the worlds best racing bicycle. once you have developed the technology its much easier for others to duplicate and reverse engineer. in looking at the cost, technology, and performance of bicycles it goes something like this. for $500 you get a solid bike that wont fall apart. 1k gets you a bike that performs twice as good. 2k gets you a bike that performs 50% better. 3k gets you a bike that performs 10% better. 10k gets you a bike that performs 1% better. similar with all forms of racing i guess. training sites stick everyone on a more expensive bike a lot faster. from there, edges are smaller and more challenging to achieve

In the world of poker we have

good enough to be playing on their own BR > staked pros > people who can't beat the games so coach.

To a future employer those 3 things respectively look like:

probable deluded gambler < someone recognised as a good player by a staking business < an expert who trains other players

so if people are exiting poker then coaching and "publishing" training materials probably makes a lot of sense.

this is a great theory but if the vast majority of videos are produced by high quality players (at the time of release) then would any of your post be relevant or accurate to the topic of this thread?

Plenty of people are thinking of exiting poker at some time in the future.

hopefully its the same number of people thinking of exiting life at some time in the future

Fun fact: the biggest driver of the downfall of the poker economy the last two years is fluctuations in exchange rates with countries with highest fish/reg ratio

everybody has to exit life at some time in the future ldo

So you think if a training site starts at $200 for subscription + $500 for signup fee and offers $1k per video for midstakes reg, a lot of people will not just start pouring good information for the sites, thus making the games much harder much faster? Also, you think a video by a random 200NL reg "ruins" the game as much as a video by Sauce?

Aren't a lot of the owners of these sites US based?

In a way it's hard to blame them doing what they have done.

You're missing the point again buddy. Look at the title of the thread. It shouldn't be about whether the training videos hurt poker or not; it should be about why people did it for so cheap. Your points are obv correct but stop derailing the thread.

U can mention the bike analogy here as well. Sauce obv "ruins" it more but by a tiny fraction. Both guys will enable an nl10player who is struggling to become significantly better/improve wr/move up

great post. manages to hit on some of the dynamics between training site czar, mid class grinder, and fish, and why it's not a coincidence that the guys who hate training sites the most are the ones in the middle. but like in a lot of economies, if the middle class is big and doing well, it's probably a good thing.

also a great post. it's an order of magnitude worse in DFS where a lot of news sources have branded the grinders as cheats and touts offer much more entertainment value/casual conversation value than poker coaches.

it's also why i felt physically ill when taylor and krantz parlayed their celebrity into making a documentary about the glory days of poker. and thats without even mentioning that while they were monetizing it with their own investments and those of other HS elite (durrr had 100k), they wanted microstakes guys to buy a bunch of mousepads on kickstarter. oh, and phil galfond left you a voice mail for 300 bucks, so theres that.