ILX Poker Players Unite

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

he's won a few big tourneys, and is deffo a good player
but i don't think he's regarded in the upper standards of the best of the best etc
just a really enjoyable watch for fans, holds his own against the big guns with some sick bluffs and folds

i think i remember one tourney where somebody tried to explain icm to him and he just laughed

lmao nice

lagoon watch the triton series videos on youtube, very high production value, great commentary, insanely high stakes, best players in the world. really can't be matched

kinda tom dwan early high stakes poker vibes

god I miss that show, that Jamie Gold vs. Sam Farha AA vs. KK hand was like, peak television drama...the way Farha seemed to peg his hand exactly only to talk himself out of it as Gold started acting crazier and crazier (absolutely convinced that *HE*, in fact, had the best hand) is one of my favorite televised poker moments

I do remember a lot of 2+2 people complaining that adding internet guys like Tom Dwan would ruin the game only to watch him immediately pull insane bluffs that even the "maniacs" wouldn't dare try

lagoon watch the triton series videos on youtube, very high production value, great commentary, insanely high stakes, best players in the world. really can't be matched

― k3vin k., Thursday, January 14, 2021 4:57 PM (three minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

actually was just watching some, agreed good stuff

xps the dwan lederer hand is all time viewing too

those huge cash games are better tv than tournaments imo, u get to see negreanu show up with a shopping bag full of cash and get it all taken from him lol

playing deep stacked is more interesting too

deffo
new season of high stakes is p fun too!
obvs with rick salomon at the table
but great to hear gabe back in the booth

is it available on like Hulu or do I have to subscribe to PokerGo for it? don't really wanna pay $10/month for just this one show

think just pokergo sorry

oh well, I might just subscribe to hear Gabe announcing again. I think he's my favorite of all of them - he's like Bob Uecker, where he can find the humor in the game without being hacky about it

obvs don't know how worth it is for others but their back catalogue is p sweet and i find it worthwhile

doug's up about 750k now

btw froggy if you start this video at about 3:14:15, nick petrangelo sort of answers that same question I attempted the other day

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNdgxFigLK8

yeah I had a similar observation, there are few plays in poker which are blatantly bad, but on a site like Ignition you have to make assumptions based on only a tiny bit of data

not sure what he's referring to with 10% river bets being "standard" and 66% being "this guy's an idiot", maybe I'm mishearing something. I haven't kept up on strategy these last few years. Are river overbets kind of a standard thing now?

i think was he was saying that you actually cant make a judgement on someone based on the size of their bets what matters is how the size fits into their overall strategy

btw theres something kind of odd about the same people playing two heads up games at once

presumed it was mainly used to get more hands in a shorter time

yeah it def is idk why its just weird to me

btw there was a big controversy a couple of sessions ago where doug started limping all his buttons (since there were only 5k hands left, as a way to reduce pot sizes and increase the chance that he ends the 25k hands ahead and presumably collect on his side bets), and in response daniel started taking the max allowed time every decision. daniel did this to decrease the total number of hands played in the session (they have a minimum time per session of I think either 90 or 120 mins) so that he could have more time to study between sessions, and also to avoid giving off timing tells since playing against a limping strategy was unfamiliar to him. an added bonus was to tilt doug because he absolutely hates playing slow. anyway it got escalated to phil galfond, their agreed-upon arbiter, who basically convinced them to finish out the session while he worked out whether daniel was breaking the terms of the challenge. imo while the tanking ploy is lame it's legitimate, but anyway seems like doug avoided the tanking strategy the next session and idk what the final decision was

lmao

yeh lol that

i think was he was saying that you actually cant make a judgement on someone based on the size of their bets what matters is how the size fits into their overall strategy

true, but I still think reads like that can be useful even if they're not always accurate. my site is anon so little bet size tells are sometimes all you have to go on. still it does speak to a pretty good point, one I bring up on 2+2 a lot when things get too complex, that its worthless to fret about how you might be exploited against a person who you magically assume knows your whole range in any given spot despite only having played 30 hands against you, in fact thinking like that probably actively makes your game worse. two players can have wildly different strategies and still arrive at the same winrate. also "good player" and "bad player" is kind of a false dichotomy, some players are very good at certain things but bad at others - for example I think I'm a pretty good preflop player, but my bet sizing sucks. similar to how a certain tight end might be slow and have bad hands but is really great at blocking.

also lol @ the Daniel thing, Polk is eating his lunch rn so whatever, suck it up. still feels like an angle shot but that's kind of what happens when you invent formats like "whoever's up after 25,000 hands wins 10 buyins" or whatever it is they're doing

polk ended up taking him for $1.2m, not sure why negreanu agreed to play him in the first place

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BuM3IsRxBEw

DNegs is one of those "power of positive thinking" sorta guys with his own MasterClass he can't say no to something like this

Hellmuth apparently won his 16th bracelet last week. that's uh pretty impressive

Back in it at ACR. 4 tourneys, 2 cashes (both in 9-player SnGs). Back before Black Friday, a SnG would fill up within a minute or two on Stars or Full Tilt, now you have to wait 15-20 minutes for a game to fill up. What sites do y'all recommend?

i use Stars

American here, I play Bovada/Ignition. the site blows, it's constantly lagging and has been down a ton lately, plus there are virtually no bonuses or rakeback outside of the initial (very slow clearing) deposit bonus. what it does have is some incredibly soft games, most likely for that reason, plus its feature of total anonymity. the PLO action on here really reminds me of the old days sometimes.

I was reading on 2+2 forums about Bovada/Ignition's lagginess and downtime the other day, but soft games makes it sound interesting.

poker players are notoriously whiny so I wouldn't let it deter you too much but yeah, it's been particularly bad lately. I think the frustration is more that their support is just terrible, the site will be completely down for half a day and when you email them they respond 3 days later with "check your network settings". they're constantly updating the software but don't fix the myriad of bugs that people have been complaining about since I've started playing. all that said, most of the time it's fine. to me the lack of rakeback or bonuses is a much bigger issue. but if that's what keeps the regs away so I can get tables full of people playing 80/5 I'll take it.

idk how it is with tournaments...the $5 and $10 DoNs fill up every couple of minutes but there isn't really consistent sit n' go action. MTTs seem soft but people stall like crazy as you approach the bubble, so you go from like the 200/400 level to 1500/3000 and only get to play 8 or 9 hands, pretty much instantly putting you in shove-or-fold territory after you hit the money. I feel like this is an issue with every poker site though.