TGM, a solver, some nodelocking and making notes if/when what he says is not accurate anymore.

Think this is way too harsh. You may not mesh with his personality or teaching style, but he´s got some pretty good material. I returned to dabble in poker this year after a yearslong layoff and needed to get up to speed a bit with new developments, better info on GTO etc. and found his (free) mterial on Youtube to be the best out there. Got M. Acevedo´s book on GTO-theory, but it´s too dense and filled with too many tables to my taste, PC makes a lot of good points and breeds understanding on a more basic level. I consider myself decently theoretically schooled from back in the days, played up to 3-6 NL 6max and 200$ HUSNG´s succesfully during the boom, but had trouble beating 0.25-0.50 NL upon returning with my "old playbook". Haven´t paid a penny for anything Carrot-wise so can´t speak to if his course is worth 1K, but I think he is actually a spectacularly good teacher.

I think the key point I would make is that like many coaches, Pete Clarke puts out a lot of freely-available content. His podcast, Twitch streams and YouTube videos are all free. This should be enough for someone to get a good sense of how much his advice can improve their game before they buy recorded online courses or personal coaching. Some above imply that your only options are looking at win-rate graphs, student success rates or getting second opinions from top players. I disagree. After watching a good few hours of him you should be able to evaluate whether he can help your game. Sure, a complete beginner won't be able to but I think they should get the basics down long before they consider more advanced courses. The fact they are at a level where they can't evaluate it is proof it would be mostly wasted on them, anyway.

I find his highly opinionated approach entertaining, find him a likeable guy and have a similar sense of humour, but your mileage may vary.

What I love is his way of describing the logic of poker verbally. My frustration with a lot of alternatives is how much of their content is really just reciting and talking you through solver outputs. He clearly spends a lot of his life in Piosolver but that doesn't mean all his fans are going to learn best from seeing little else but the results of his solves. I've spent a huge number of hours in solvers this year that on reflection now look wasted because I didn't understand GTO theory nearly well enough to do much with the results. He's very good at explaining the theory as opposed to just talking you through the answer key. Only now am I beginning to understand that answer key.

Would I pay for the coaching at £250 an hour? Doubt it. I play at 25nl/50nl and I feel as if a lot of other gaps in my knowledge need to be filled first. (But if someone is playing much higher stakes and has reached the end of the road with the course material, I can see the appeal.)

On the other hand, would someone playing thousands and thousands of hands a month at 50NL be smart spending 20 buy ins on a solid 30 hour course? I think they often would.

I've never had coaching but personally, I don't think any poker coach or content creator deserves this much credit or blame for how their students do. Even if he gets everything right, the vast bulk of their students' future success will be down to their own study, understanding and practice. It's a bit like a fantastic personal trainer: even with the best advice and training in the world, their client is the one who needs to do all that work to get to their target weight, body/fat percentage etc. But if what you're asking is: "Does his content lose value above 50NL?" I would say definitely not.

hi

what abaut BluftheSpot Academy poker

das someone has any review?

is very expenciv is worth?

Bought is as well. It is OK

Anybody have Grade E of Carrot Corner? It is wort it?

I bought it, and it is good, but not providing you with detailed MDA analisys like coaching stables. 8/10

Can’t stand that carrot man who is the textbook example of the Dunning Kruger effect. He makes a lot of bad plays and has some big misunderstandings of how poker works but doesn’t question whether should even be a coach when he is a loser at 200 zoom (but still plays it for content to give the impression he’s a reg at that level). Just waffles on and on trying to sound clever or thinking he knows everything, which is the opposite of every genuinely strong player I’ve heard who are humble and aware of how much they don’t know so always looking to learn

Last week saw him go on for 10 minutes about a river raise spot that is the most glaringly obvious raise to every half-good player as though he’d discovered General Relativity

Do you have any techniques/tells to weed these types of guys out?
How do you know if someone is just chatting garbage vs someone who knows what they are saying?

You really can't know by definition, this is why you need to look at results above everything.

It's easy for a student who knows much less than a coach (yet the coach is still clueless in a lot of spots) to post good reviews when a lot of the topics discussed aren't fully understood.

It's basically coaching by obfuscation. A lot of coaches that are very small winners in the games use this tactic to make a great income.

I think it would be hilarious to get a world class player to go undercover and get 1 on 1 coaching with some of these charlatans, then post the video on YouTube explaining everything the coach got wrong, but it will probably never happen for a lot of reasons.

I think it is unfair to call Pete Clarke a charlatan. He's teaching 25nl guys basic theory and how to think about poker. He has never claimed to be a high stakes crusher, but I guarantee you that he is worth the price to someone struggling to beat microstakes. He's been a Run It Once coach for years, so it isn't like he is some fly by night coach. Live streaming and nailing every spot while explaining everything is pretty tough. If he coached some random chess player with no poker background, he would get them started on the right path.

Like I said in this in this thread, Upswing has released worse courses for the same price, and not many people would call Doug Polk a charlatan.

Charlatan might be too strong a word but doesn't he charge 250/hr?

If he was honest that’s he’s a mediocre 50-100nl reg who can take even lower limit players up to his level at best I would agree. But he sells himself as some expert poker master which is absurd and charges prices matching his deluded view.

And Doug Polk was one of the top HU players with impressive results. The carrot can’t even provide a graph showing he’s breakeven so that’s why it’s fairer to call one a charlatan but not the other

I sympathize with this reasoning and I think there is some truth to it, but there's some nuance, I think.

IMO, what separates Clarke from players who play very very high stakes is that the guys playing nosebleeds have an extremely razor-like perception of miscalibrated frequencies, probably some insanely granular study habits, and just overall things like photographic memory and being built different psychologically. Like in chess, the best best best players in the world don't necessarily have an intuition that is miles beyond other good players... it's just that Magnus Carlsen memorized every national flag in the world when he was four years old.

These traits that separate the best players from Clarke are not often teachable. So, hiring a coach who wins more does not necessarily translate to the student winning more.

By contrast, someone like Clarke who clearly has a strong enough foundation in the game that he can beat 200 zoom or whatever, he's going to be a good teacher simply by virtue of that being his only job.

Also the hours and hours of talking about and thinking about lower stakes might come in handy for people playing lower stakes. A 10knl reg might have overall forgotten population tendencies at 50nl. Or maybe not forgotten, but be less finely tuned to the population tendencies.

So, personally, I don't think what stakes the coach can beat tells the whole story. I would say it's something like (How rare their knowledge is)x(How well they can help the student internalize that knowledge). Clarke is probably like (B)x(A+) there, whereas another coach might be (A+)x(C-).

An example in practice? The Kanu study course vs the Uri Peleg study course. Kanu was playing higher than Peleg but the Peleg course is worth way way way more imo because he's a good teacher and Kanu is a dreadful teacher.

Is Clarke worth the money? He's very expensive, so I'm not sure. But I do think the coach's profit playing does not map on perfectly to how much a student might benefit.

I guess one other strike against Clarke is if you're going to pay 5k for coaching from him, you could just join a good CFP instead. If they take 30% of your winnings for two years and you play 50nl, it's tough to say which would be more expensive in the long run.

So, those are some thoughts. I'm saying this as a coach who currently plays.

Have you seen both the Kanu and Uri courses in their entirity?

I have and Kanu’s is a total waste of time. Was produced when solvers were new and coaches thought spending all their time looking at the optimal flop cbet size was the way to use them.

Uri’s is a great course. On it’s own won’t make you a crusher but gives a good framework to think about poker and some good exploits against different leaks

Peleg yes, Kanu no. I don't think Kanu suddenly becomes a great teacher in the second half, though. :P

Uri is a decent course, Jayser is better and the new Metagame course is also excellent. Uri is a solid third place imo

So you've spent 10 grand on Jayser's course and 2.5k on the Metagame one?

Interesting,

Why do you think the Uri course is better?

I really enjoyed the Kanu course and found it a good introduction to working with solvers.

Uri uses more analogies and speaks in a more captivating way. I also found he had a very fresh perspective. Again, I don't know if the Uri course is strictly better, but I do think he is a better teacher.

Agree. I bought every premium poker course ever released and those of Uri are my most favorite one.

not sure if serious but if you are, just wondering how did your game improve because of the courses? if at all? were you a losing player ? or a winning one and your bb/100 went up after all of these courses? never bought any but mostly study on my own. just curious if its worth it at all if im already beating stakes im playing for a lot.

+1 Uri here too

I play mostly 10/20 live and .5/1 online now. So for me it is insane to not spend 50bb (1k) for a access to way of thinking of elite players. I'm sure my hourly increased by 5bb++ after going deeply threw all the materials.