dude he literally said "solvers should be banned from the get go" lol

there are plenty of things people do which make the games tougher. what do you hope to accomplish by complaining about them? do you think it'll change anything? if you used the time you spent in this thread working on your game you could have improved your hourly a little already.

here are some other things people do that make the games tougher. people mostly do it because they expect the benefit to themselves > the cost, but some other reasons apply

coaching
staking/stable
posting on forums..

governments making tax regulations/forcing segregated markets.
Black Friday.

pokerstars increasing the effective rake in many games (lol)

the internet makes a lot of things tougher/more competitive. same with poker. plenty of bad advice out there, but good advice too which overall makes most things tougher/more competitive.

I'm sure the same applies for trading, ecommerce, etc. or how to effectively farm in games like Warcraft, neopets etc.
in many cases, like poker as been mentioned it is a case of prisoners dilemma, where people or sites expect the net gain to themselves to be greater than the long term costs.

Tragedy of the Commons

Here in Slovakia, full time at McDonalds is 582 euros / month before taxes and deductions.

http://www.profesia.sk/praca/tamas/O2303438

and they'll get a ton of applicants offering that much over the going rate for restaurant work. Also to put it into perspective, it's still 10x the minimum wage in neighbouring Ukraine.

I think "harder" is a bit dependent on the individual. At McDonald's you have to do things like show up on time and be nice to people. On the other hand in poker you have to avoid donking off all your money.

This is what I mean, was too lazy to look up exact numbers for examples but considering cases like this (and in some countries people can't even get a McDonalds type job for this income level if they want to) it's not hard to see why poker is appealing and people are willing to work hard. you can virtually live like a king if you do some study and play say 100nl or 50$ mtts/sngs (let alone higher).

then you'll have people in first world countries who complain that they have to work on their game since they didn't really have to do anything 4 years ago..

most regs in poker come from eastern europe i think where median wage is smth 200-400€ a month. I think u underestimate how easy it is to make 10 bucks an hour in poker. And if someone were to study poker and take it seriously then 25 isnt that hard to achieve either imo. Ofcourse in these forums u can see tons of ppl struggling even in the microest of stakes, but thats just because they don't know how and what to study and constantly get really bad advice from other micro players.

even in New Zealand where I'm from most people would need a basic degree to get a 25/h job. that degree would prob cost 20k Us or more, ignoring any expenses (food/accom/transport/textbooks) and 3 years of study. you can spend much less money and time and fairly easily make 25. as cilderr said if you study in the right ways/get a decent coach/training site sub etc you're much more likely to succeed than if you post in micro forums here (although that's free).

Fishing would be a much better analogy.

The same reason anyone does anything that they may (or may not) regret at a later date: It seemed like a good idea at the time.

There are probably as many individual reasons/motivations as there have been coaches, but the bottom line is that they all thought - rightly or wrongly - that making videos had a positive expectation for them individually.
If you don't like some people's life choices, that's your problem, not theirs, and moaning about isn't going to rewind the clock.

i question whether or not these people making analogies to lol blacksmithing and chess (not you omgclaydol - you're cool) even play.

in the vast majority of sub economies, education is a massively positive externality entity.

in poker it's a positive externality entity basically to the point where you teach people the rules, at which point it becomes a grey area for a bit, and then a massive negative externality

by that i mean that it shrinks the size of the economy. it's more than just money going from regs to our overseer phil galfond or reg who doesn't study to reg who does study or old fat reg to young hungry reg.

it's that fish actually, yanno, learn, in a monkey see monkey do kind of way. the 60 year old rec crowd at the WSOP was only a year or two late on min opening a ton, and now even reraise light a bit (stupid 3bet clothing). and fish beget fish . oftentimes the best way to get weaker players to open up is to have other ones making them more comfortable.

also cash games get completely ****ed when too many people are playing at high skill level because it's all about having a seat at a good table, rather than the difference between reg with a 99 rating and one with a 92. here's this quote from one of my skype groups for those who don't realize how vicious the seat scripting thing is

Aussie reg: i want to play more higher. but no script and no fun playing short handed at 1k/600 with most of those regs
Israeli reg: you should get a script then?
Israeli reg: scripts make multisiting much easier also I think
Israeli reg: scanning all lobbies for you rather than u having to open a lot of tables every sesison
Aussie reg: scripts are great... unless you live in rural australia
Israeli reg: I mean
Israeli reg: script not to get the best seat
Aussie reg: I can't get top 5 waitlist with them
Israeli reg: just to get a sseat
Israeli reg: ahh
Israeli reg: ok
Israeli reg: that's not good

it's such an arrogant notion to think that fish can't learn or that you can't be chased down by literally an entire world of people who want to make money on the internet.

agree with the last 3 posts for the most part.
fishing is a reasonable analogy but not entirely appropriate as the downsides to "overfishing" are arguably much more ethically concerning. hurting the actual environment, real life ecosystem/food chain is of much more concern than the long term poker system, which is likely to be finite which people are arguably justified in trying to get what money they can whilst still possible. but both have this prisoner dillema/tragedy of commons similarity.

it's true that as people get better recs do too, but that's including stuff like the more observant/smarter ones just seeing what the good players (or who they perceive to be good players) do and randomly copying it including what they see in tv coverage (or maybe even online). but I think to some extent this is also inevitable since as theory advances, even if training sites and similar (forums for sure, twoplustwo was actually pretty solid for strat in the past) accelerate that, people get better.

whilst it's true that good regs edge over the weaker players is arguably less than it could be, many of the good regs also wouldn't be as advanced as they were if it weren't for the training sites/forums/softwares etc that have developed over time.

scripts suck but don't think it's clearly only a case of people getting too good, also a technology thing/ecosystem issue. that sort of technology wasn't as "necessary" before, but it also wasn't as available and I believe when it first came out it was more about getting the "Jesus seat" than a seat at all which it sort of is these days

finally your wording was better than mine, literally a potential world of people who want to make money on the Internet is exactly who poker players are competing with, and will continue to compete with as more people discover poker.

I dont really think that its entitlement. The problem is that lots of players back in the days always saw poker only as a shortterm thing. They wanted to make some money to get through college or university. And with this shortterm thinking they applied a scorched-earth policy because they didn't care about the future of online poker because they will be no part of it. Its like old people who will vote for the party which offers them increased pensions no matter how devastating it will be for future generations(esp in a system like in Germany.) because they dont need to care anymore(they might even not care about saving environment and so on). Its basic behaviour. You maximize your profits. Yes there are some regs who are offering coaching or making videos but they are so far ahead of the curve they won't be affected that much. But everyone else is probably already thinking about retiring from poker and are already grinding their remaining edge out until the time consumption of grinding doesnt add up to the profits anymore.

I already pointed out those 2 terribly wrong believes in my entry post

Just bc he was mentioned before? Where did Dr.Giggy go? Maybe wasnt that much ahead of teh curve afterall?

I mean you maximize your profits for the time you remain in the game. For example if you only want to play one more year you start making vids or coaching sessions in the morning and grind in the afternoon. So you using as much time as you can and make the most money. If you want to pursue poker as a profession forever than you obv hurt yourself longterm.

I probably wrote it wrong. I actually meant there are few guys who make vids and give coaching who are ahead of the curve but thats a minority. The rest of them doing these kinda stuff are already thinking about retirement anyway so they squeeze the fruis as much as they can and dont care about the longterm health of the games.

Beat me to it!

Add SH and HU NL cash to your list, especially HU.

habs I disagree on pretty much everything you said.

They didn't care not because they were doing more interesting things with their lives, they didn't care because they thought the gravy train was never going to end. They were young, naive and very stupid street smart wise to think it would last forever.

I would say that alot of current pros right now do not give a **** about the games/ are doing whatever they can to maximize profits now considering online poker is a sinking ship.

And regs that are teaching videos are not way ahead of the curve. tell me, where are the regs from 2008? 2009? 2010? 2011? etc etc. Where are these coaches? These former crushers?

Do you actually think they just pitched in the towel because they were tired of stacking all the money? Don't be naive. They couldn't keep up. The game passed them by, the game got way harder and poker wasn't worth it to continue playing on professional level for the potential gains.

I think the only poker players who have a positive outlook are eastern euro grinders who would be happy making $8/hr. Do you think that's going last too? Even fish complain about eastern europe players/ don't want to play with them

I never said that regs were ahead of the curve. My english must be aweful. I meant only few of them are ahead of the curve so they can afford it like Galfond for example. There are enough video makers (even on RIO) who already quit the game because their edges become smaller and smaller.

That'S what I wrote and I dont think that the first sentence is wrong. Among all these coaches and videomakers are some who are very good and don't to care about midstakegrinders but they are a minority. The rest should have stayed away from educating.

a galfond fanboy. do you think he's immune?

How is it the players fault? You can't expect 1000's of people to ignore personal gain. The sites could have changed the horrific current seating format, the sites could have removed chatting, the sites could have stopped letting people play slow/mass table, the sites could and should have done something about all the 3rd party software. Even today the changes haven't been made.

Lol I am not a fanboy. You will always find guys who are just that good that they have no problem to beat the guys they coach.

@Roger Mainfield:
I wrote that this is natural behaviour. If you don't have to care about the distant future people tend to don't give a ****. They want things now before it's to late.

But for how long?

Once again the dr.giggy example, or take nanonoko.

He was the biggest endboss who ever played onlinepoker b4 black friday and todays games at 600+ run because of him. thanks to education THERE ARE NO GUYS WHO ARE SO FAR AHEAD OF THE CURVE THAT THEY CAN AFFORD TO NOT CARE.

Currently there are 2 endboss player types. One that thinks they are invincible no matter what and a second one which is very aware that there may come day X when its GG no matter what. Needless to say that the 2nd type is the way stronger boss

This is what literally every single 2009 crusher ,video maker, and poker coach had in the back of their mind / thought about themselves.

Where are they now?

This is so idiotic. If all that existed was basic training videos, there would be huge financial incentive to make advanced training videos, and they would inevitably get made. All types of training videos are inevitable.

You own a piece of one right?

I think the answer will lie in the ROI and ROR.

If someone invests $1200 for training and they turn say a 1.2BB winrate into a 1.6 over a decent period of time its likely a result of the training.

But if it only became a 1.3? Was it worth it? Could it be due to other factors?

My guess is the cumulative ROI and ROR is next to zero - in other words, they aren't actually making a big impact on enough players.