ILX Poker Players Unite

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.

Yeah, I think it is. I was watching an S&G last night, not in a good frame of mind for playing but I observe a lot to get back into the rhythms after a decade away, and it took forever to get to the bubble, and then it was over in 3 hands.

ahh well that's just how S&Gs work, what I'm talking about is MTTs where it'll be like 100 players left and 90 cash. by this point like 25% of the players will have 5 BBs or less and a lot of them feel like they can just stall their way into the money, so they'll use their entire clock + time bank every hand, waiting for players on other tables to bust. trouble is almost every table has at least one player doing this so every hand takes a few minutes and if it's a turbo that's like 2-3 hands per blind level.

anyway I've decided to switch over to PLO full-time. for one NLHE has gotten pretty monotonous, half the hands are just folding to a flop cbet and I'd only get into like 2-3 interesting spots per session. for two I think there's a lot more money to be made in PLO, there are way more fish and the bad players are bad in much more obvious ways...just so much UTG limping & cold calling of 3bets. of course this is what makes PLO frustrating in ways I'd forgotten - hand values run way closer than they do in NLHE so even if the guy to your left is playing 90/5 and calling every single one of your raises you still can't just push range advantage. that said when you run hot, boy do you run hot...we'll see how this goes after 10k hands

yeah thats always been the way with omaha

tried my hand in a low stakes cash game at one of these local poker clubs (the Doug Polk club, lol) and ended up doing pretty well. I know next to nothing about gambling, so I'm chalking it up to good luck and am looking forward to getting rinsed out next time I show up there.

nice

just played at a casino for the first time in a while this weekend, it was a fun time (at least when people started talking and joking around) but unfortunately I got tilted. there was a 3 way hand, I put a shortstack all in on the flop, then the turn pairs the board and the other person in, who had just sat down, shoves like 1.5x pot which puts me to a very difficult decision. I figure no way is he bluffing a dry side pot and fold, and it turns out he WAS, for some reason (T7 on a board of A882), letting the 3rd guy win with KQ. gotta say my head wasn't really in it after that :)

playing online poker right now and I got this guy to spend 20 minutes explaining to me what "Lets Go Brandon" is

interesting hand here...

THIS JUST HAPPENED...@RobbiJadeLew vs @GmanPoker in one of the strangest poker hands you've ever seen

Tune in now for SUPER HIGH STAKES $100/200/400: https://t.co/VcpZNMUTi4 pic.twitter.com/iGppl6l9aa

— Hustler Casino Live (@HCLPokerShow) September 30, 2022

yeh i kinda side with it just being a terrible play / misread rather than cheating - as implied by quite a few peeps today

also rip ivan leow btw

the only explanation that makes sense there is she misread her hand, thinking she had J3 rather than J4. that would still be a hero call but if you think his range is very draw heavy I think you can justify it.

what makes it suspicious is that her explanations are all over the place. she says she put him on Ace high, but she can't beat Ace high. then she said she misread her hand but insists says she called because she knew that he was on a draw. but she doesn't beat the draws either, she's losing to the other straight draws and most flush draw combos he has. she then gives him the money back (!!!!) but afterwards goes on social media to defend the play and say she didn't misread her hand. but the more she tries to insist this particular play was correct the worse it looks, because there's no galaxy brain explanation here, even if you think he's 100% bluffing you still have to fold!!

that said I can definitely see why she feels cornered and gets defensive, which causes you to change your story a lot. if she's cheating it makes no sense to do it here of all places - not only is this literally one of the most suspicious scenarios possible but it's still a coinflip after you call! (though *if* she is cheating it's probably through a buzzer which just alerts her she has the best hand, so she probably wouldn't know it's a hand with a bazillion outs) I'm guessing every other televised hand she's played is being analyzed and I dont think they've found anything else suspicious. from what I've seen she just kinda seems like a whale

idk...whole thing breaks my brain. it's pretty ugly for the game too, since there's a lotta sexism being thrown around, from "she obviously has no clue how to play" to "oh you can't give a woman credit for a great call??" which is like calling someone a great Wordle player because they got QAZAX on the first guess.

frustrating thing is we'll probably never know, it's just gonna be one of those things that follows both players around unresolved for a long time. at least we'll get a good reaction gif out of it

just watched it again thinking "okay lets assume she thinks she has J3". certainly all the conflicting explanations would make sense then, because she was probably embarrassed for misreading her hand and got defensive because she didn't understand why her play looked so suspicious. I mean that's what Phil Ivey thinks happened, so who am I to disagree??? but then you get to the turn call and she's staring at her hand for like 15 seconds! how could it be a misread??

ok last thing. she has tournament results on Hendon Mob going back to 2010, so "she has no clue"/"she's just a really terrible player" doesn't really hold water either

Misread hand is the most credible explanation, but she also talks about how "You keep letting me do this to you," so there's some broader context in the game. Maybe she just had his number somehow? Or maybe it's just what it looks like, a really terrible bluff that got lucky.

'misread hand' doesn't make sense since she double checks her hole cards before calling. the clip posted cuts some of it out but on stream she was looking at her hand for a while

bluffs by definition aren't really suspicious, since you can argue "I thought my opponent was weak and would fold". people make weird bluffs all the time. but this is a call which means the only way she can win is if her J high is actually good. which it really only can be vs. this specific hand. when Mike Postle, Potripper, NioNio etc. got started getting heat it wasn't because of their bluffs it was because of their calls

I’ve been in that situation where a player knows the other is full of shit and wants to call them on it, and might even lose sight of how weak their own hand is while doing it. Not when there’s $100K+ at stake, but still.

I was watching this live, agree completely with froggy

The added fuck-you of her having the 5th card in his straight flush is pretty amazing.

so what I think might've happened is she caught a glimpse of his hand from across the table. maybe the cards were dealt high, maybe Garrett lifted them up a little too much, doesn't have to be a lot, just enough for her to know that he's got two small clubs. imo this kind of explains everything, it explains why she was so cagey about it and was offering up a ton of contracting explanations, and also explains why she felt she should give the money back. and it doesn't involve her having to wear a device and have an inside man and all that. playing in casinos you accidentally catch little glimpses of people's cards all the time. not exactly what they are but something like "it's a red non-face card". not unreasonable to think someone may find themselves in position to act on that information.

also answers the question of "if she was cheating why did she pick the most suspicious spot possible", well maybe that's the only spot where she had additional info

Garrett had one of the stoniest stone-cold looks I’ve ever seen once he saw her cards.

if nothing else I appreciate the sheer David Lynchian quality to the whole thing. not only does the hand make no sense but everything she says and does afterwards makes it even weirder. there are ways to counter pretty much any argument you could make about it. too bad we'll probably never know the truth

garrett also left the game after this hand and weirdly she gave him his money back too

Garrett blocked me. Guilty as charged. What an honest man. He cornered me & threatened me. If he has the audacity to give me the death stare ON camera, picture what it’s like OFF camera. I was pulled out of the game & forced to speak to him in a dark hallway. Full details to come

— Robbi Jade Lew (@RobbiJadeLew) September 30, 2022

well of course you got the death stare on camera, you just made maybe the craziest call in televised poker history in a huge pot

kinda fun to see people proclaim her innocence by saying "she's a bad player, bad players make bad plays", it kinda belies the notion that most of the people commenting on this have no clue what they're talking about. just because someone is bad at something doesn't mean they do the worst possible thing every chance they get. if an NBA player suddenly starts shooting at the wrong hoop you don't say "what do you expect, he sucks". Robbi's play here is one of the few spots in poker where there's a clearly wrong decision, even if you have a read you are very confident in. this doesn't mean she cheated of course but the only times I've seen calls like this are when the person was revealed to be a superuser OR when they were 37 Coors Lights deep

obviously Adelstein handled this in a really bad way but he's also one of the most experienced and recognizable players out there now so I at least put some stock into the idea that if he thinks something's up then something probably is. its not like he hasn't lost big pots on camera in bizarre ways before.

This is also my home game, so was a fun detail:

J4o is our home game’s prop hand ( the buzzsaw ), but today its ceiling has been reached. Who knew there would be so much collateral damage 🎈

— 🎈Brandon Shack-Harris (@Oscillator_WSOP) September 30, 2022

wow looks like this story has actually become somewhat mainstream as evidenced by bad takes like this one getting 250k+ likes

I am hearing now that dudes are mad at a woman for beating them in poker because she gambled on a statistically bad hand after reading her opponent’s tells, which is, as far as I was aware, the exact reason they call poker “gambling” and not “statistics”

— Katie Martin (@katiedimartin) October 2, 2022

yeah, it's been all over the place, the idea that he was bluffing therefore it was smart of her to call seems like a pretty plausible description of her (very wrong) thought process

In the low-stakes regular game where I play, there's one player in particular who gets morally incensed any time someone beats him on a hand they obviously should have folded. It's a lot easier to do when there's only like $5 in the pot, of course, but to him it's the principle of the thing: People shouldn't play bad poker, regardless of the outcome.

in poker you want people to play bad against you lol

this is true, but the flip side is sometimes they win regardless, and it's foolish to be a big crybaby about it

yeah if you cant accept that the worse play wins sometimes then poker is prob not the game for you

in regards to the hand, her misreading it makes sense it doesnt really matter how long she looked at it if you think you have a three you can stare at four and think its a three no problem top chess players have thought a piece was on a different square than it was while staring at the board for many minutes, seeing his cards could also work, if you had a cheating set up with someone telling you the cards or whatever it would be an insane spot to use that cheat in but people do insane things

always funny when you misread your hand thinking youre strong and end up winning on what was really a bluff

yeah if you cant accept that the worse play wins sometimes then poker is prob not the game for you

Yeah, he actually quit playing for about six months once because he was so mad about a bad beat. I agree this is his problem, not poker's.

he should play chess the good play wins every time

yep, no cheating scandals in chess, no siree...