I think most good poker players are likely pretty good at strat games in general. I'm an above average (but by no means great) chess player, and alot of the better players in my 40/80 game are also pretty good at chess. I know some poker players who had a background on magic the gathering or scrabble. I think if you teach a poker expert gin rummy, they will very quickly excell at it. Backgammon and poker has some crossover too.

I think there's a common element that strat games share (especially ones with mixed skill/chance). If I had to play Scrabble against one of two unknowns and the only info I had was that one was a winning poker player, if I was playing for money, I'd chose the non poker playing opponent. Of course without betting, I'd chose the poker player since I think I he's likely to be better at Scrabble and if there's no bet, I'd want a challenge as a chance to get better at Scrabble. Ok weirdly long tangent. Tldr; strat games are cool. All of them.

I think of the work it would take for me to get halfway decent at Scrabble, and I think, "no, that's not for me." I mean, I could easily learn the twos, but beyond that it would be a grind of rote memorization. Likewise for chess. And for golf (not a strategy game, that one that calls for lots and lots of practice on, e.g., one's swing, putting, and so on).

I've been willing to put the work into poker because even the beginning effort provided immediate return, long before I was any good at it.

You're damn right about Scrabble. I'm pretty well read and have an above average vocabulary, so I thought that alone would be an edge. My first and only attempt at playing competitive Scrabble showed how wrong I was. I got my ass handed to me by people who probably have a generally lower vocab then I do. They've just memorized words that are particularly useful for Scrabble.

I liked passing Scrabble as a kid, but as an adult about the only people I have met who like to play it are those who once played competitively and memorized all those ridiculous words.

That seems not in the spirit of the game and ruins the fun IMO. I have a better vocabulary than 99% of people who haven't done that. Used to do lots of crossword puzzles and tutored for the SAT. If I don't know a word, then it's almost certainly too obscure to be one allowed to use. I would only play now if the regulation dictionary was a fairly small one without bizarre 2 letter words that are never used irl.

Scrabble experts especially bug me with archaic words. Alot of them play words that nobody's used in conversation for hundreds of years, and the only people in the world who know them are English professors and Scrabble experts.

Qat.

Yeah, **** scrabble.

Curse words don't play bro, you just forfeited your turn.

za is short for pizza!

Where did you find that chart?

And what does "mm" mean, apart from as an abbreviation? Pretty sure those can't be used.

Millimeters. You can use abbreviations for metric units and other measurements.

Has that always been legal? I thought that kind of thing wasn't allowed.

Hasbro.com rules say abbreviations not allowed.

mm
n 1: a metric unit of length equal to one thousandth of a meter
[syn: {millimeter}, {millimetre}, {mm}]

It appears in the dictionary itself (unlike 'Mr. ' and 'Etc')

Idk if it was always allowed, difficulty keeping track of the rules is half of why I gave up Scrabble in the first place.

Hope mongidig picks up Scrabble so he can stop tilting me by using "peal" in lieu of "peel" in every post.

Fwiw, memory isn't that important in chess until the master level when opening theory starts to really matter. As far as tactics, there are maybe 20 common patterns that you need to know which is doable for anyone. As far as positional play, there are maybe 20 concepts that you need to learn to apply at the table. Solve a bunch of chess puzzles for the tactics and read a good middlegame book for the positional play and you're good to go.

Endgames require some memorization for sure, but chess games tend to be very one-sided at the club level... very few balanced endgame grinds. And when it happens, your opponent will be just as clueless as you.

And as far as openings, you can just play stuff that isn't very common and is hard to screw up. Hikaru has broken 3000 on chess.com countless times with intentionally terrible openings like the bongcloud... 1. e4 and 2. Ke2.

Memorizing openings is good, but it's better to me prize a few and seriously study them then to rote memorize the first few moves of all of them without seriously understanding them. The openly openings I use are e4 and byrds, Roy Lopez, and QGD and they're good enough for me. Also endgame study isn't all that necessary imo because so much of the time somebody resigns before the endgame.

Thats when I lost interest in chess, when I was losing too much positional value in the opening that my superior skill couldn't make up for in the mid game. I also peaked compared to my peers at like 3rd grade, which is when the family that was running the chess club at my school moved to a different city.

I was still good enough to be top 5-10 or so in my grade level in the state through middle school with very little study, but didn't really pick it up again until high school and the internet and playing on pogo before getting really into yahoo chess and their ladders. My cable internet was great for dominating 1/0 games.

Haha, I forgot about the dial-up vs. cable massacres online in the old days. I am awful at fast time controls. Yet for some reason, I am a beast at mass multi-tabling poker online and always make my play within 5 seconds in NL even if the situation is messy.

Pope was a chess prodigy? I never would have guessed. You are a true renaissance man!

It depends on whether you are using OWL or SOWPODS.

Looks like I'm not going to be playing tonight, so here are the results of my first full month of not chopping (also includes three sessions from January):

Total: +$1069
Big Blind: +$732
Small Blind: +$746
Hourly increase/decrease: +$7.75/hour

Notes:

-I started tracking BvB spots on January 26th, but didn't start separating positions until my third session of tracking.

-I will post my results, good or bad, so this is not a brag post - just pure transparency and curiosity.

-I figure six months of full-time play is a reasonable sample size of hands - not a good one, but a reasonable one. Anyways, I did some rough math and figured it would take 15+ years for me to have a similar sample size of BvB hands from live play so by no means do I think the data I ever present here is proof of anything.

-In addition to all the reasons that led me to this decision, not chopping is decent prep for WSOP - especially for the 3k 6-max. Even if this a minorly -EV decision, I think the experience of always playing BvB is invaluable. It either gives me an extra edge in WSOP fields or closes the gap on their edge.

-I realized about halfway through the month that I was playing way too loose from the small blind against loose players in the big blind. I was probably only folding bottom 15% and the bottom of that VPIP range just does dreadful OOP against loose, sticky players.

-Also realized I was probably defending the big blind too light. Some of these people are playing so tight from the small blind that I feel like I shouldn't be defending so liberally.

-I haven't employed a limping strategy from the small blind because it feels bad, but when the big blind is loose and passive is it something that makes any sense?

-

Wow, uh, good luck tracking that accurately.

It’s not that hard. Doesn’t come up a ton unless we are short-handed. Just write a note after a BvB hand. There are probably a few hands where I took out too much rake not realizing we were briefly 6-handed or something, but it’s really not complicated lol.

Number of hands?

I’m not doing that. Just keeping a running tally of each position after each hand and then converting to a spreadsheet after each session. I’ve never tracked per 100 playing live anyway so that kind of win rate expression means little to me, plus I might not be alive to see the long run of this anyway.

I made a rough guess that I play about 15 BvB hands per 8 hour session.