C) MSLHE has never been a super helpful place and its past activity was unusually high (instead of its current activity being unusually low). Make MSLHE Great Again is destined to fail not only because we can't undecline the industry but also the structure is fundamentally unsound. If 2p2ers took some of the PM and IRL strategy conversations and put them online, the people who lurk MSLHE - which is probably multiple fold the number of active posters - would probably join as well.

C > B > A, IMO

I remember I got banned for a week for suggesting to raise QQ.

That was certainly a turning point for me posting.

Thank god for DonJuan and Sean Snyder.

I googled solvers since I knew nothing about them and found that there are a bunch ranging in price fro $30 to thousands of dollars. I play mostly 20/40 live. Money is no objective for me when it comes to poker. Is it worthwhile to spend big bucks on a solver? Are they user friendly?

Are you ever going to make limit video's again? I'd spend big bucks on that too.

Thanks!

This is an interesting take.

i think he mentioned monkersolver in a post a while ago. i think i might also look into this as i, from some more recent posts, might have some serious fundamental leaks.

Thanks!

I play well but I can definately improve on some lines I take.

Why would they do this when this is a possible result...

I made 3 claims. You should 3 bet JJ in Big blind like 5 ways. You should raise 7 limpets with QQ and you shouod riae AJ in the big blind when button open limps and we all know the **** storm that followes

Also you shouldn’t make some bad checkbacknwith an overpaid on flop

Are there solvers for Fantasy Football?

If there were, they would cost $100K.

Let me start with a question. Without doing research, do you know who the mods of this forum are? Do you think I'm one?
Thanks for the kind words. I think I'm close to terrible at poker at this point, so as long as you take any poker playing advice with a huge grain of salt, you're in good shape. I've played a lot over the years. The modern players are just on another level from me. I know that. I can beat the Bellagio 20 game, but if I were to sit in a game full of pros at this point, I'd be a big dog. From what I saw, the B 20 game is still good at times. Hammerin Hank hammered them. He's also good at poker.

FWIW, it seemed good to with all the people posting strat threads. Enjoyed yours and the ones BK posted, among others.
I'd say this, and basically you can trust any good player more than me... At some point, the "best" players are studying this stuff. They're looking at their default strategy and understanding the best play. They're looking at the bad players and how they deviate. Because they know "correct" poker, they understand how the bad player is screwing up better than a feel player can. Their adjustments are then better.



Is it worth it for you? No idea. If you're crushing, then I say party on. OTR15 and JonLocke and AvoidThe9to5 and DonJuan and others might crush more than you. If you want the modern way to study, people are saying it here. If that sounds fun, do it. I've sat next to OTR15 for an hour or two and he basically told me my hand, every hand that I played. Is that GTO genius, soul reading, or just really good player owning TAGfish? That's up to you to decide.

Without defending chillrob too much, I think (and I think deep down you know this) if you were to have let ***** be wrong and walked away, you wouldn't have been banned.

***** doesn't appreciate your long, detailed explanations of why he's wrong. On the other hand, many of us specifically invite long, detailed explanations of why we're wrong.

If you were to take the time you banged your head on the wall with *****, and use that on other posters; and then took the glib "this is the final result, you work out the math" answers you usually give other posters and gave that to *****, everybody would be happier.

So what if ***** gets the satisfaction of thinking limping QQ or AJo is correct? Just post something simple that makes clear you disagree and every other poster of any repute can +1 it so nobody thinks *****'s play is tacitly endorsed.

I think that you are a mod of the low stakes forum but not the mid-high stakes. But I guess I was being slightly inaccurate when I referred to "the mods", as I really meant the only mod of this forum I had interaction with related to the earlier issues, BigBadBabar. You and I have had some disagreements on the forum before, but I don't remember having any issues with your moderation.

Addressing Jon and Smarty, neither of you would have gotten even a temporary ban just for disagreeing with the owner's strategy post. I also disagreed with at least the QQ example and said so, but I did not get banned, because I did not go out of my way to mock him, start a new thread about it, talk about how his old school tendencies were now terrible, brag about how I have never read any of his books, etc.

Poker is at a point where it take a long ass time to post good strategy you can't look at an isolate spot and give advice without having to explain the ranges. There are spot where the EV between calling and raising or calling/folding are very close but solver will choose one over the other due to the overall strategy and making sure that one spot lead to max +ev on next street. I think people should focus on asking better questions

This is true, but if you took all the collective time that was spent trying to convince someone to raise QQ preflop, how many good strategy posts could have been made?

The way it should work is that the most effort should be spent on the best questions, and little to no time on the worst questions. People then have incentive to post better questions.

Maybe, and maybe we should think about Tommy Angelo's "grey area" theory of poker strategy talk:

The things people generally agree upon (obvous bet/folds, obvious raises, obvious check/folds, etc.) we don't spend much time upon.

The most discussion is generated around questions that are close, the ones in what Tommy calls the grey area. And the thing about these is, Tommy says, is that because these points are close calls, getting them wrong isn't getting anything very wrong at all, and it isn't going to do very much damage to your bottom line.

Getting one of these things wrong is not a big deal, but constantly getting them wrong can change a lot. The reason the best players are the best is that they negotiate these grey areas better than anyone else and solvers are a good way to help learn to negotiate them successfully.

casa de babar no mas =(

I don't disagree with this at all, but it also touches on some important questions of who the audience is for this forum and what their goals are. For example, I'm pretty sure I'd beat my closest 20/40 LHE game pretty handily over time (people open limp and cold call; many of them have tendencies like semibluffing liberally on the turn and then almost never bluffing on the river; so "merely adequate" postflop play by 2+2 standards should win). I'd like to improve my winrate when I play that game and get more and more comfortable in 40/80 games in the rare times I'm in position to play them. I also enjoy poker theory on its own terms.

I'm grateful to have the chance to read the thoughts of winning players in much bigger games, some of the best LHE players in the world. But I'm also interested in adapting high-level thoughts to lower-level competition and not letting the quest for GTO distract me from optimizing. I think I can do both but it's a question of time allocation.

I have no idea if I'm above or below the median skill level of this forum or if my goals are representative of the population. The population includes both lurkers and active posters btw. IMO this "meta" discussion is really valuable.

That said if I played 20/40 more than once a month I'd probably buy a good solver.

The phrase "not letting the quest for GTO distract me from optimizing" tilts me.

If you are playing limit bet poker and you trying to "max exploit" you either don't know what you are talking about or just plain dumb is what I came to the conclusion after this year.



I know I am on heater but really enjoy poker sitting at home. No doubt grateful for being able to do this for a living

Could you explain how you reached that conclusion? Since you win quite a lot online, I'm curious: how would you compare the level of skill between online and live? (For example, what online stakes corresponds to a Southern California 20/40 or 40/80 game?)

Oh? Could you help me understand why?

What I'm trying to say is, I think studying GTO play is really valuable as a baseline (as per DD's post above) but can also be a distraction. My impression is that many 2+2 threads across all the forums focus on GTO, which is fine, but do so to the exclusion of talking about typical opponents' leaks and how to exploit them. Sometimes the conversation is both/and; those are the most valuable conversations.

I'm not trying to say that studying GTO is a waste of time. It's not a waste. If I left that impression then I'm not expressing myself well.

Keep in mind: If your RPS opponent throws rock 34.0% of the time, and isn't paying attention to you at all, your optimal strategy is to throw paper 100% of the time. Her small deviation from GTO calls for an immense departure from GTO for you. In reality no opponent is that unobservant, but we still should consider what exploitative deviations our opponent will or won't notice.

(PS: And you won't know that she's throwing rock 34.0% instead of 33.3% without a huge sample size, so it's also important to talk about how to draw inferences from "insufficient" information.)

Too long and I will get ask again so i will make it short. GTO is mix strategy regardless of what structure and game tree is already big. If you are playing exploited poker what you are saying is that you think an opponent will always do X or more than X. Since it limit the max you can exploit limited amount. You have no idea what you talking if you think you are exploited an opponent consistently without understand the mix strategy. And if you did then you are super dumb because guys are making a killing in plo/nl putting in the same X time to make 2-4X more. Also I play no where near optimal on anything except pre and flop and that only head up. It really hard to play mix strategy because you have to remember which part is always mix X amount and other are always calling or c/r and depending on board texture and action pre

"You have no idea what you talking if you think you are exploited an opponent consistently without understand the mix strategy."

You seem to be arguing against a position that no one actually holds here (i.e. "straw man argument"). As far as I know, no one has asserted that we shouldn't try to understand mixed strategies.