I am new here.. it has great info but is it still up to date? It seems all the great posters are gone? Is it relevant? Where did everyone go?

All the cool people left and have been replaced by GTO hoodie/headphone wearing robots

whered they all go?

To learn GTO and get sized for a hoodie.

Lost interest in the game.

Lost interest in giving free advice. Started or joined a teaching website.

buncha crap

Please explain ....... or are you not responding to my quote?

that they left.. poker should be a community, helping others..giving back

Mostly in 2003-2009, the "good" posters agreed with you. The more players, the more fish. Then Black Friday happened. The well went dry. The fish died off. ((All this is easy to see if you played back then...... the games were easy. Even I won and advanced to playing 200NL and slightly above.))

Then it really started to affect their earnings because everyone was getting better in a shallower pool. The "real" players saw their edges reduced. Adapt or perish. So free advice dried up as well.

Sounds like YOU need to step up and make strategy contributions in 2+2. Without really new blood learning and contributing, yes.... the forum will cease to exist in any form related to the Glory Years.

Joins in March 2023 and complains all the good posters have gone.

You just lurk for years and years without signing up?

Unfortunately with the rise of social media forums are slowly becoming less and less used. Coupled with whatever was said before in this thread we will likely never see the forums like they once were

I will always remember fondly past 2+2. But yeah now its just good for the latest gossip and even its missing that now

Uh, not exactly. 2+2 functions as a community, where some posters give back and help others come to different levels of understanding.

But poker itself? Part of the reality of poker that's important for a beginner to understand when learning to be successful is that poker is at it's core a predatory game. You succeed in poker by learning how to take advantage of opponents' mistakes. Hence learning to be a predator.

don't tell the gto groupthinkers that, poker's all about not making mistakes yourself, remember?

The cat is out of the bag.

If you want to know what happened to this forum, go read the GTO donks who took over the Tournament Poker forum. You will discover that you actually don't deserve to win at all because lol sample size.

This holds true even if you have won consistently throughout a sample size of over 10,000 tournaments using what is more-or-less an exploitive strategy. If you won it was a fluke; if you lost it was because you don't understand ranges, period. There are no other reasons worth discussing.

If you have a significant range advantage on any single hand, you are required to execute a fist-pump all-in, regardless the state of the tourney, your chip-stack, or what two specific cards you actually hold. If you get cleaned out doing this it is not because you are a Donk who just spewed off all of your chips; actually you made a strong play and only lost because the Villain was a fish who didn't understand the power of your range advantage.

Any variance from this dogma will be attacked and ridiculed. They will mock your ideas without countering them and will say you are wrong but will not say why; instead the will literally say that if you were smart enough you would know. They will even defend the idea that true poker knowledge only comes if you remove the gambling aspect altogether and reduce poker to a mathematical problem. One of the mods actually said that.

While it is true that many of the creative thinkers in poker decided to monetize their ideas, and others are keeping their ideas to themselves or have just quit poker altogether, it is also true that the forum is no longer a place for discussing tournament poker strategy; rather, it is a place for Those Who Think They Know to deliver lectures, and any thoughts or discussions unrelated to GTO are unwelcome. And that, in a microcosm, is what happened to the Tournament Poker forum.

A couple of random thoughts of why this forum is the way it is.

Online poker and live poker are different games.

Low stakes poker and high stakes poker are different games.

Different games require different strategies for success.

Similar to sixfour, I tend to think discussing GTO at low limits is LOL, because it only works if the majority of your opponents are also playing GTO. That doesn't mean it's not important to understand at least the basic concept. If I'm playing 1/2 NL live (I prefer fixed limit HE and mixed games myself), the reality is, 5 or 6 of the others at my table didn't drive an hour to the casino to fold preflop, and 1 or 2 of the may have some understanding of position. If I see one player who is playing GTO, I don't tangle with him/her. The leopard doesn't pursue the big male in the herd, he goes after the weak calf.

With respect to live tournament play. If you play 10-15 live tournaments a year for five years and your honest bottom line is positive, you are BY DEFINITION a winning tournament player. Now I'm a math guy. I love data, I love stats. I fully admit that this winning player cannot statistically demonstrate to 95% confidence interval that he/she is a winning player. I get that. But in the real world, cash in the bank > data.

Fairly newish to posting on 2+2 but been around other forums and different forums and most forums now days have fairly low activity.

Agree with sixfour, Kurn and I'm living proof that micro/low stakes in 2023 is still pretty easy to beat just playing ABC straight forward poker. All those old Harrington, 2+2, Dneg's and other good books of that time hold actually very well in 2023. You certainly don't need to learn and even bother for a second with GTO. Which at the end of the day in micro stakes you have to adjust anyway and most times you make adjustments from table to table. Some 2nl and 5nl can be pretty wild and the job at hand is beating the table and players in front of not some GTO theory.

Probably good to know a bit of GTO if you plan on going higher then low stakes as I'm a huge fan of being knowledgeable on poker/different styles. I'm currently looking at 1.5 bookshelves full of poker books. So yeah good to have some extra knowledge.


Cheers!!!