20/40 Half Kill mix Holdem.

*PF*
Villain raises HJ QQ
CO LAG whale calls.
HERO 3bets BTN w JJ
Blinds fold.
Villain 4bets / cap. All call.

*Flop*
K86

Villan cbet
Whale folds
HERO calls

*Turn*
K866

Villain cbets
HERO calls

*River*
K8662

Villan bets
HERO calls.


Villain range 99+, QJs+, AQo+, AJs+, on river.

QJs+ per 9fingershuffle. Think its closer to KQs+ as played by villain.

Villlain is 35 PIP / 25 PFR LAGTAG pro that wins 3BB/hour. Loose PF but expert postflop & finished all college math in middle school.

Whale is bad LAGTAG. Probably 50 VPIP / 40 pfr.



1. Call river as HERO w JJ?
2. Should villain cbet flop, turn and river with QQ?

whether he bets or checks the flop with QQ there is a pretty small difference in value.

him always betting the river with AQ would be a bigger deal and a mistake. he has very little hope of folding out better or getting called by worse. it works way better as a check when you have AJs and QJs as bluffs. if not, ok, then use it occasionally as a bluff and feel good that it should in theory get 77 to fold.

you folding the river though - wow, that would be brutal.

if he's betting with TT and 99 and literally never bluffs you're still being laid way more odds to call than you'd need. you're getting more than 10:1.
why would he bet the flop/turn with TT and then check the river? because you might have JJ or QQ specifically? if he's beat he's losing 1 bet either way almost every time, and clearly you're calling more often with 99/77/AQ than you are bluffing with them when checked to.


that's like 12BB/100 given the pace of live limit games. why question the judgment of someone beating this game at 4x the highest sustained winrate of any online limit crusher?

Thank you!

OT:
Villain is my best friend and sells large data analytics to hedge funds, bulge bracket banks, high frequency trading firms, etc.


BB/hour is correct based on small sample size of 5 years, twice a week sessions by villain. Utilized high level Statistical Analysis he learned in top 3 Data Science Masters program via IBM statistics software & transposing data in excel.


Not sure how he'd play AQ & 99-TT vs HERO on FTR. Villain drinks a lot while he plays but switches gears accordingly based on meta during session so can't answer X% answer which changes day to day & hour to hour.

He has QQ, you should fold.

+1.

Need to bring magic 8 ball answers which based on Sean Snyder Twitter, is 99% accurate

running the numbers doesn't require sophisticated data analysis. we just need to know the number of hands and a rough idea of the standard deviation which doesn't differ much from player to player.

2 sessions a week per year is somewhere in the ballpark of 12k hands a year.
and after 5 years it wouldn't be unheard of that he'd be running 1BB/hour (4BB/100) over expectation.
... and of course that's assuming he's keeping perfect logs and not missing any weeks.
what seems more likely is (even if he's being completely sincere) that he missed a week here or there, was forced to leave early sometimes when the games broke, and didn't always have a pen/paper with him to take note of his exact result.

but the skepticism isn't because i don't think he's "that good" it's because the gap between a reasonably competent grinder and the best of the best is not as big as you might think, and for ceiling to be that high is less hinged on him being amazing than it is how bad the field is.

if you were to look at datamines when they were publicly available, the biggest winners in small to midstakes games were around 3BB/100 where very questionably competent regs were pulling in around 1BB/100 (both before rakeback or prop pay implying their effective was was closer to 2 and 4BB/100 respectively).

in this hand, for instance, almost no competent player would do anything differently than what either of you did. this is true for 9/10 hands realistically and where two competent players deviate it's a very minor consideration. it matters a ton when you're playing in big games where the best make 2BB/hour where a decent but not great reg would be break even - not so much when the winrate ceiling is very high.

when games as big as 20/40 are filled with that many weak players it's not very likely that there won't be an influx of local grinders to dilute the field. especially over a 5 year time frame.

it's not impossible that he is that big of a winner but it would require games at that level to be way softer than what I've ever seen, and for a very long period of time. the fact that he played 2 sessions a week suggests he was primarily playing on weekends which would make it somewhat more believable but i'd still bet the farm on him underperforming that if we had a way to test it.

it also seems somewhat questionable that someone who fits that criteria would stick with 20/40 for so long. he'd have been up nearly a quarter million after the first few years. it would be beyond irrational to stick at that level for that long while crushing so hard.

+1.

Thanks, definitely my personal bias.

Best friend has taken shots 100/200 (online Absolute 100% RB during prop as ShesEasy when blackout 4-8am post bar but at least he paid full college tuition via poker +maxed out Roth IRA since he was 21.
.

Ditto live but think wasn't as Drunk at Commerce / WSOP during LAPC 2020 MLK / 2 years ago during small LHE event & broke even I think

PS: Best friend solid trader as side income (100% ROI YTD sans CRYPTO 300k+ Risk Captital). +He just got double bonus +1.5x salary raise as C suite / #2 in small firm he works for. Very happy for him even if only 1BB/hour winner at LHE in reality as you indicated last 5 years of small sample

this isn't a knock against the person in question. and i have no specific reason to doubt your claims about their success in trading... the skill ceiling is way higher and it's infinitely scalable.

i was an AP reg and i played against that account back then a few times. i actually thought he/she was a multi site grinder because he/she was often idling in the bigger games from what i remember and very rarely playing in the midstakes tables that were running. a fairly low volume player, but yea - definitely played occasional 100/200 which usually started when mark seif or phil hellmuth decided to donk around for a couple of hours.

a bit hard to figure out why a guy who was beating 100/200 online a decade ago would be so consistently playing 20/40 live for the past 5 years though. he must have a true passion for the game.

Poker is just supplemental income for my best friend / villain. He became a C suite at a small company in Midwest & plays poker recreationally. Never played higher stakes because he over leverages LONG a lot, not just in trading but other investments. He probably has at least 5 source of passive income not including dividends, etc.

Villain only played on AP / UB. Had an account before at NL / sports bet site but never multi tabled via different sites.

Smoked a lot of cigars from White Owl inside his car (hot box) & drank a ton of beer / gin though when he was playing

standard cbet
standard call down