ILX Poker Players Unite

their servers are having a lot of trouble keeping up this week, it's always either laggy or down completely. worth sticking out though, what else are you gonna do right now?

definitely reminding me of the good old days where you'd get into 4-way 3bet pots with AA, flop would come 346 and you'd strongly suspect someone flopped a straight

allo experts

is there a recommended site that allows private rooms for a group of mates that doesnt require download?

the answer to that strongly depends on whether or not you live in the US. I know Pokerstars allows that and I assume they have a web interface by now. but you can't play it in the States.

funny story, I recently cashed in a bunch of "Ignition Miles" for ~$90 in the casino which has an insane rollover requirement (10x but it's really like 35x if you play Blackjack). apparently you can do it for tourney tickets but they're hard to find and I assumed they just went away. anyway I spent like 90 minutes trying to clear this, getting up to $200 and slowly grinding it away, hitting a big downswing with like 5% of the bonus to go, finally clearing it on the hand I lost my last dollar on

i've been running my usual poker nights using pokerrrr2
there's about 20 of us, and it's pretty smooth

anyway I guess I broke the cardinal rule, never brag about running good, I'm currently on a 40 buy-in downswing in cash, it is absolutely soul crushing

wishing some rungood on you man

playing semi-regularly on a private app (which is actually pretty amazing in terms of user-friendliness) and am pretty pleased with how I’m playing, though I have the same issue I always do when I play online, which is that I play well enough most of the time but then punt it back when I decide to get stoned and have nothing else to do

soooo tempted to start playing again...

what else is there to do?

thanks kev but it didn't work, dumped another 3 BIs last night

the thing that sucks about this downswing is that I'm seeing monsters under the bed, after 5-6 weeks of my opponents pretty much always having a set whenever the pot gets to a certain amount I'm getting super timid and not value betting in spots where I definitely should. Ignition in general seems to be pretty bad for my game. Last night I had a hand where I shoved with 2nd pair & a flush draw, fully expecting to get doinked but wound up getting called by pocket 2s. first thought was "how do you bluff when some players will punt off 100 BBs with an underpair?" second was "how am I getting my ass kicked by these guys?"

50 buy-ins now. starting to think I just might be bad but combing through the hand histories I don't feel like I'm making a lot of big mistakes, just getting a lot of stupid run outs, particularly in PLO. feels like a daily occurrence now where I flop top set + nut flush draw in a 3bet pot and still wind up losing a stack

love to tell myself "okay, June's a new month, clean slate" and then lose 11 out of the first 12 sessions (my one winning session was for 5 bucks lmao)

btw the case against Mike Postle was dismissed, fucking insane. he got away with it

wow

anybody been watching the doug polk/daniel negreanu heads up match? it’s really been a blast

Was watching when Negreanu was getting absolutely crushed, he basically lived out every HU nightmare scenario in like 30 minutes

Looks like he’s rebounded since

he was down about 950k or so and won about 140k in the last session, still down a ton. he’s definitely running bad, but doug’s also clearly the much better player. looks like he’ll play the full 25k hands so it’ll be interesting to see where it ends up. guessing doug +1.25 milly is reasonable

yeah I think DNegs is better than he often gets credit for but online HU vs. one of the best players in the world isn't it. props to him for giving it a shot though. HU vs. a good player can be brutal. you get put in so many spots you don't really have to deal with in 6max. I stopped playing HU because it was so psychologically taxing

doug hasn't played or really even studied in a couple years, but he was probably the best player in the world at that format less than half a decade ago and dnegs has next to no experience, it's a pretty big mismatch imo.

apropos of nothing I was for some reason reminded of Pharalad Freidman aka Spirit Rock the other day and how one of the TV broadcasts did a little profile of him where they revealed that he was a freestyle rapper. so he did a little rap for the WSOP that went like

"Poker is fun
For everyone
Except my opponents
Should've practiced avoidance"

and then for like an entire year afterwards the phrase "should've practiced avoidance" made its way into every thread on 2+2

for some reason this was like the pinnacle of online comedy for me

last night I watched an episode of Brooklyn Nine-Nine where the squad has to infiltrate an underground poker game. Jake buys in for $15,000 into what I assume is a $50/$100 game, limps in with Ace Ten of clubs and flops a flush, shoves all in on the flop for (I assume) 75x the pot, gets called by top pair, and loses to a runner-runner boat. fictionalized poker scenes really are the greatest.

hahaha

not saying I'm speaking from experience or anything but some underground games are pretty damn soft

I mean even above ground some of the regulars on live at the bike for instance buy in for those amounts and make those kinds of plays, people are really bad lol

true but the Captain (who is telling Jake what to do at the table) is supposed to be some sort of master poker player. "We've got the nuts Jake, go all-in!!!"

haha I know, your point about the lack of expert consultants on popular shows/movies is well taken

trying to recall the music vid i saw once where heros straight flush lost to quads

Session: +$119,609.84 over 600 hands

Total: +$603,683.77 over 15850 hands.

Good to finally get a 6 figure win in. Up 15 buyins with about 9k hands to go. Not over by a long shot but we stopped the bleeding and if we can get a couple more solid wins should be hard to lose.

— Doug "Truck Driver" Polk (@DougPolkVids) January 14, 2021

after watching these on a daily basis before they took a break I haven't seen one since the new year. look like variance finally started to break daniel's way and he's eaten into doug's lead by a third overall

doug's hilarious btw praising daniel's play as he starts running better, you know he's taking all the action on himself he can haha

Doug uses the "we could raise, call OR fold here" line so much he probably thinks all his opponents are great

in retrospect that sort of thinking seems obvious but people really found that confusing when he started making videos! now that solvers are a thing and it's conventional wisdom it's no wonder he decided to quit poker

to be honest since the advent of GTO thinking I feel like the game's passed me by, I can still make money playing the $25 cash games (particularly in PLO) but I do struggle to follow why modern players focus so hard on being perfectly balanced in each spot, treating their opponents like they always know pretty much exactly what their range is. I don't see how it applies to the games I play at all. Like I don't get why I need to have 30% bluffs in a spot where my opponents call too wide anyway, especially on an anonymous site where people will punt off their entire stack with 66 on a board with 3 overs.

maybe someone can explain it in a way that makes more sense but my feeling is if you need to play GTO to turn a profit the game probably isn't very profitable to begin with

well, very few players are winning players in the long run

I think the most succint way I can put it is that your assumptions about what players will show up with in certain spots are a lot less solid than you think they are. in different settings you can definitely make systematically exploitative deviations from whatever the optimal frequencies are (ie I'm going to 3 bet this percentage when normally I'd 3 bet that percentage), but our ability to accurately identify individual situations is just not good and our brain's ability to evaluate anecdotes and channel it into useful feedback is basically nonexistent. I mean take live at the bike for example, you can watch for ten minutes and realize that even people who play on a regular basis on TV have absolutely no rhyme or reason to the way they play. you can't level randomness no matter how much it seems to make sense

this isn't just a problem with your average mouth-breathing poker player, doctors for example are notoriously awful at estimating risk and evaluating whether their treatments work. (take that zelenko quack and HCQ for an example.) I still get into arguments with cardiologists who will place stents in people even when randomized trials have shown them to be useless in that scenario, but cardiologists are convinced they can intuit which people will benefit and which won't. they can't

if there was one tiny silver lining to the election of Donald Trump it was the realization that poker was gonna be profitable forever. there's a bar game I try to hit up 2-3 times a year (pre-Covid, of course) and it's amazing how bad most of these players still are, even a decade-plus after I first met them. if anything, they're even worse than I remember! and they play every week!

generally when calculating ranges I add in an extra 10-15%, which turns me into a bit of a station but I think it's profitable in the long run, at least in these games. like I'll analyze some hands, which on Ignition is fun because you can actually see everyone's cards in the hand history, and I'll see a bunch of situations where my opponents range should be limited to like slowplayed sets, top pair/big kicker, and missed draws, but what they ACTUALLY have is a Q3o that they decided to 3bet out of middle position

there is one streamer I like a lot (Skuz Poker) and I do challenge him on this a lot - he plays $200 Zone and is way better than me, but I do ask him a lot why he concerns himself with being balanced in an anonymous game...if you're in a spot where population calls down way too lightly, do you really need bluffs in your range? like, in $25 Zone, I'm well aware of the fact that the utter lunatics out there make it easy for me to get value, since they never know if I'm a reg or someone massively overplaying pocket sevens

if youve played a lot online and put a little effort into learning about poker then year youre going to be better than guys who play in a bar once a week, you could see more hands online in a couple weeks than theyve seen in their life

anyway if poker ever becomes legal again in the usa i will be there for the fish lol, i was still winning when i played on bovada/ignition, in fact i won bigger than i ever had but the quality of play of people who bother to find an illegal site is so much higher than if it were legal, especially if it were newly legal and there was a poker boom

i actually tried to login to my ignition account recently, pretty sure there was like $100 left in there after i took most of my $$ out, but i cldnt get in and they sent me an auto reply when i emailed then i gave up, anyway i started playing chess a few years ago so i just do that now

imo most people talking about GTO arent really doing anything systematic theyre just playing at it, theres maybe a handful of top level players who have some actual strong mathy system, everyone else is just larping

a good example kevin's post is this - a thing that really used to irritate me in the bar games is whenever there was a misdeal, like a player was skipped or whatever, and no one looked at their cards yet, the whole table would go through this process of meticulously passing back each dealt card to the proper person, which sometimes could get real confusing. this happens often in a darkly lit game full of drunk people so eventually I spoke up and said "why can't we just deal off the top? a random card is a random card!" and two guys explained to me as though I was 5 years old why you can't do that, because it means that players have cards that ~~shouldn't have been dealt to them~~, and how that ruins the entire deal, and I kind of realized right then that I should probably keep my mouth shut because you don't want to accidentally teach them something about probability

bovada/ignition is still pretty soft, though its not Party Poker 2.0 the way it was back when I started there. I was able to average a winrate of like 8bb/100 for a year. it's more like 3-3.5 now.

lol yeah just be cool dont even broach the topic that there might be such thing as knowing stuff about poker

i mean people are just playing for fun anyway, which is what i do when i play live too, im not nearly as disciplined as if i were playing online, and its so slow i usually just get bored and starting making insane bluffs

i run pub poker games and in it's deffo easier as organiser to relay the info that misdeals don't matter etc but generally the old boys still refuse so you just let them be haha

trying to teach them short deck
now that was a challenge

short deck is a game for fucking sickos man I’m hella into watching it tho

it's super fun
and yeh i miss the triton events so much
was great watching a new game develop tactically in real time too

every new commentator watching ivan leow for the first time also so good

triton uploaded a couple of hourlong bits of high stakes short deck tourney footage last month fyi if you’re itching for more. I really love lex as commentator too, perfect combination of absolute sicko and passion for the game/knowledge

ah sweet will check!
yeh lex is a sweetheart, and deffo agree with you, love it when you can tell his pleasure at the sick plays

i mean people are just playing for fun anyway, which is what i do when i play live too, im not nearly as disciplined as if i were playing online, and its so slow i usually just get bored and starting making insane bluffs

yeah I'm only really disciplined at the casino which I don't go to often anyway. bar games & home games I don't play my A game or really even my B game. if you don't get drunk and joke around at the bar games they won't tell you where the next one is

every new commentator watching ivan leow for the first time also so good

― nxd, Thursday, January 14, 2021 4:06 PM (thirty-one minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

i dont follow the game anymore whats ivan leows deal

very loose, and successful, basically even though everything he does should be avoided, it works
kinda tom dwan early high stakes poker vibes

ah do ppl think hes actually good or just on some extended heater