I'm taking off my mod hat for a moment here and not representing anyone or any organization.

Carl Sampson's article in the 2/11 issue is probably one of the worst articles that ever appeared in the 2+2 Magazine. There seems to be two points to the article.

First, he wants to lose weight and work on his concentration. Well, that's nice. For his immediate family, it is welcome news I'm sure. If he has groupies, that's probably welcome too. Beyond that, why would anyone else care?

If he at least said, "I'm starting on Weight Watchers" and explained why he thought it was the best program, it might be useful in some way. If he said, "I'm using this program" to improve my concentration, then someone could think about it and decide whether it had value or not. Instead, nothing further is said about it and he shifts gears to get to his other major point.

The second point is that the way to make good money is to multi-table micro stakes on-line poker. He even goes to say, "Making $100/hour is not difficult to do in online poker and you do not need to have a very powerful technical game to do this."

Really? He implies this can be done at micro stakes because all of his examples in the article refer to 25nl and 50nl. PTR last year showed the top 50nl player made well under $100k last year in NL. At the supernova level at 50nl on Pokerstars, you get about 0.5 FPP per hand or $0.008 per hand (valued at 0.016 cents per FPP). Over 1,000,000 hands earns you $8000. Add about $4000 for milestone bonuses and that gets you $12,000. FTP rake back at supernova levels of play are about the same.

So, you have an author proposing something that nobody achieved in 2010 and calling it "not difficult."

It would be certainly possible that the author is far better than all micro players and can mass table easily, except he admits, "I have tried multi-tabling and my own personal record is twelve tables." All we have to go by that this is "not difficult" is that he makes an unsubstantiated claim he's making $35/hr including rakeback. No SN is given where people could verify that he actually makes this.

Finally, one would expect that an author could at least keep to his argument point, but no. He concludes instead of it being "not difficult, but rather "I think that over the next few years, someone is going to come forward and show us absolutely incredible PT stats that go somewhere along this avenue and suddenly parts of this article will not be pie in the sky any longer."

If this had been a book written outside of 2+2, Nick Christenson or Mason Malmuth would hacking this to shreds in the review article. I understand that the editing for the magazine is going to be looser than for a 2+2 book and there are always time constraints. However, when an author makes an article into a blog statement about their personal health goals for 2010 and can't even keep on point for the poker aspects, it should be time to retire him from the pages. I can think of dozens of regular posters on the forums who could write better, let alone more interesting articles.

I'm glad I'm not the only one who got a funny vibe from this guy. I was a semi-professional card counter for a few years before I got into poker, and I also worked watching wheels and gathering data for a professional roulette player who exploited physical biases in wheels. So I know a fair bit about advantage play in non-poker casino games.

Carl's books struck me as self-aggrandizing and implausible, but when I saw he was a regular contributor to the magazine here I thought I must have just been wrong. Then I read some of those articles, and felt the same way I did reading his books.

My guess is that he is simply a good self promoter. He certainly has gotten books published and keeps getting stuff on twoplustwo here, and he's got a website that probably gets decent traffic.

But none of his advice in terms of strategy is particularly useful.

I didn't know if it was appropriate to bring it up anywhere on the forums here, and having just gotten an article in the magazine myself, I didn't want to make bad blood right away. But like I said above, I'm glad you said something so that I know I'm not the only one who is a bit suspicious of this guy.

I have no idea who this guy is or anything like that but for what its worth he's basically made the same point in every article for the magazine for the last 5 issues.

Hi Everyone:

We have decided to take the article down.

Best wishes,
Mason

This is standard rhetoric:

"The micros are the kiddie game. Everybody is a calling station. Don't bluff, value bet, and profit."

People routinely claim that the micro stakes are beatable for 20BB/100+. Yet I find no independent evidence of this. As I've said before:

1.) the rake is brutal by online standards,
2.) the calling stations who make ABC play most profitable are rarer and rarer. Bbad players today aren't usually going to pay off your sets with TPNK anymore. (And even if they do, they aren't full stacked anyway.)
3.) the ratio of tight:loose players keeps going up.
4.) the one third-party source we have, PTR, reports that micro winrates are pretty low across the board.

just read the title skipped to your post venice and... yea that's total BS.

100$/hour is not archievable longterm at these limits.

He means a professional cheater

Winning low limit cash game that is ultra difficult. 25NL, 50NL game rakes are ULTRA high, and players are solid basically. Everybody not play loose aggressive big pot play,, crashing game by RAKE!

I think the mistake most who haven't actually played full time make is thinking that if you have $X hourly then you are just printing money.

I grind SNGs(not cash), but think this is more of a general issue.

Just because you don't have to play the game at an extremely high level to make $X an hour doesn't make it easy.

Making money at the game requires a lot of things from you that don't involve strategy.

Beating 25NL and 50NL games are not ultra difficult. Sure you aren't going to make $100 an hour or whatever was advertised in the article that started this thread ...... but those games are very beatable. If you aren't beating them you just have leaks. If you are beating them you probably still have leaks. I beat games higher than that and I have leaks. There are people who beat games higher than the ones I beat and they have leaks.

Pooruser, one of the best 5/10 nl grinder online recently dropped to 200 for unknown reason(fun, challenge whatever)

From his PTR, his hourly is about 175-200$ an hour. + maybe 25-30$ rb

if he cant do more than that at 200nl, i doubt some wannabe live player could ever make over 50$ at 25 or 50nl..

let's say 7.5ptbb is atainable, 12 table is only 850hands per hour. so thats tops 55$/hr + 10-15$ in rb.


As a 150$ an hour winner at 200nl, thats the max id expect to make myself if i ever had to rebuild from 50nl and the player are extremely worse at those limits.

Also you have to factor that the more hours you put, the lower your winrate goes. If i put in 5hours perday, my winrate would drop by 30% for sure.

Interesting i think he went over the top.

I play 9 tables 50nl ipoker 60% rb. I rake £38 per 1k so lets say i max table which is 16tables so lets say now we rake about £65 per 1k and 1200 hands.

Lets assume im pretty good and beat it for 3bb/100 ( i consider that very good 16 tabling )

Im getting £48 per hour rb.

£18 winrate.

£64 hourly rate which transfers to $102.

Even cut the winrate in half which is more realistic and we get pretty close. Im sorry to say but the guy is not far off with what he says.

your calculation make absolutely no sense, especially the per 1k and 1200 hand

I have played 200 with 70% rb and rakeback is about 65$ per 1k hand. so you're telling us the rake and rakeback is bigger at 50nl on the nittiest network with less RB?

Ok i wrote that about 10mins after i woke so i will just double check my figures but trust me i have huge samples to go on.

Rake per 1k hands = £38
60%rb = £22.80 per 1k hands
100 hands =£2.28

I play 750 hands in a hour 9 tables
83 hands per table x 16 = 1300 approx

Winrate = 3bb/100 this is obviously fictional and we have to just assume that he can win at this rate.
£1.50 per 100

Ok so now we have £2.28 + £1.50 = £3.78 per 100 hands

£3.78 x13 = £49.14

Approx $79 an hour

My first calculation is a bit off sorry about that i just confused something somewhere.

Its still a pretty sweet hourly rate at 50nl though you will admit.

I'm 100% serious.

Nothing we did is any more legally dubious than counting cards at blackjack.

But sure you can only obtain a "lol sample size" for a "lol edge" doing that?

50pound nl is not 50nl, its close to what 80$nl? rake at 50nl is a lot lower

No it is 50nl simple saying its $80nl is fine but its not its 50nl and it attracts the same level of players.

I understand that dollar tables are most common but its irrelevant. If i beat £50nl for $80 a hour im still beating 50nl for that rate.

Anyway its not worth arguing over really neither of us are the ones claiming to do it.

tipp86 are you saying this winrate is something you could theoretically achieve, or have you already done it over a significant sample?

If it is the latter, care to share any PokerTracker/HEM stats/graphs to back it up?

Because I would have thought that despite what your calculations seem to show, a $50/hr winrate at 50NL over a significant sample size is a little unusual. Perhaps I'm wrong.

Jesus NO i thought i stated that enough times for people to understand.

But if you want my thoughts on how achievable what i wrote was i think i could give a could accurate explanation.

My win rate last year was about 2bb/100 but it took a massive down swing in Jan so im at about 1bb/100 winrate now. Ok my 2bb/100 was over a 300k sample so its not a bad sample il work with that for the moment as there is a decent few guys on ipoker who are 50nl regs wiith that winrate.

I personally 9 tabled so that worked out at about £23 an hour 9 tabling with a 2bb/100 winrate. Thats $37 an hour and trust me im not very good i wont claim to be.

I could not 16 table but there is guys who can and im pretty sure some can do it at least break even. That is £30 per hour which is nearly $50. Im sure there is some guys who are very good and can win playing tha many tables so it may be realistic but anyone who can will just move up levels and move down tables or whatever.

If you find any flaws in my theory il try answer them. Im not saying i could achieve anything but i think it can be achieved and would have good facts to prove it.

The article is ridiculous obviously but from reading this thread I am pretty surprised at how much one can make only playing 50NL, it's a good amount for sure.

i thought this was implausible too but then i read this book called 'the secret' and everything became so clear to me.

nice thread. I love constructed critisicm