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What Winning $250k at Poker Taught Me About Money

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Re: What Winning $250k at Poker Taught Me About Money

#91

Post by base698 »

gagagababa wrote: post #22
kaycebasques wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s the opposite of results-oriented in this case? I.e. what should you orient toward, if not results?

To maximize expected value (EV). You can go all in with AA pre-flop and get a bad beat from someone with 27o. While the result is bad (you lost this time), you made a +EV decision because you were ~80% favorite to win so over the long run this move will actually be profitable.

Even worse when you have a set against two pair with one card to come and the only card to help the other guy is the higher of his two pair and it hits with all your money in.

About a 95% favorite.

Re: What Winning $250k at Poker Taught Me About Money

#92

Post by johnsang »

Tangokat wrote: post #19

I used to play a lot of poker online back in the day, two lessons stuck with me: Speaking to the variance of the game: "Eventually you will run worse than you ever thought possible" Poker teaches, contrary to most business literature, to not be results oriented. It is the decision not the result that matters. "You can do everything right and still lose".

Learning to stick to the plan after getting crushed for weeks or months is something that can instill the worst doubt in the most confident of people.

Learning to separate the feeling of results (both highs and lows) from the act of playing was one of poker's toughest lessons.

Re: What Winning $250k at Poker Taught Me About Money

#93

Post by Phillipharryt »

Harimwakairi wrote: post #80
Waterluvian wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is a "cold deck" anything but another way of saying unlucky?

It's technically a type of cheating, but it's used here to mean profoundly bad luck. A cold deck is one that has been rigged to the advantage of one player, and then swapped in after the cut and shuffle (hence its "coldness"). Typically the deck would be stacked to give the victim a fantastically good hand, but the cheater one that's slightly better. The victim would bet a great deal thinking their hand was good only…

Regarding your last paragraph, that would be a bad beat. A cold deck is a string of poor cards, perhaps an entire sitting without getting any strong hands.

Re: What Winning $250k at Poker Taught Me About Money

#94

Post by bitxbitxbitcoin »

woliveirajr wrote: post #21
Tangokat wrote: post #19

I used to play a lot of poker online back in the day, two lessons stuck with me: Speaking to the variance of the game: "Eventually you will run worse than you ever thought possible" Poker teaches, contrary to most business literature, to not be results oriented. It is the decision not the result that matters. "You can do everything right and still lose".

> You can do everything right and still lose This one. I'm not sure how many readers I would have if I tried to explain it in a book, but I'm tired (to the point that I don't read the books, just the covers) about how everything will be ok if you just wish. When you just learn that sometimes people fail even having taking the best possible decision at any point, you get another perspective for your life.

tldr; life is unfair.

Re: What Winning $250k at Poker Taught Me About Money

#95

Post by [deleted] »

technofiend wrote: post #70
sokoloff wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When WSOP was in the early spring (when the weather is nice in Vegas and crappy in Boston), I used to go for a week and a bit every year and grind out the trip cost and then some on single table satellites. With the advent of online poker, televised NLHE, and the main event wins by Varkonyi, Raymer, Moneymaker, and Gold, it was like the universe provided an endless stream of avid, willing, timid, and fairly predictab…

Yeah the WSOP / WPT era is what I was talking about too. So many people there to play poker! Don't forget black Friday or whatever it was called when UIGEA murdered online poker. That was the feeder into tournament live play. Thanks, Sheldon. I haven't been back in at least 8 years. Vegas doesn't care about anything but whales and slots players anyway.

[deleted]

Re: What Winning $250k at Poker Taught Me About Money

#96

Post by jfim »

kadabra9 wrote: post #11

Tournament poker is just brutal. It's entirely common to go 15, 20 tournaments without cashing. You can play great poker, sometimes over the span of a few days, and suddenly get hit with a cold deck or get unlucky and poof you are eliminated with nothing, along with your chance at a 5 or 6 figure top prize. Then you have to suck it back up and move on to the next one. The variance is just insane, which is why a lot o…

For those confused, Black Friday in this context refers to the criminal case against the three largest online poker operators.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Scheinberg

Re: What Winning $250k at Poker Taught Me About Money

#97

Post by topmonk »

drjesusphd wrote: post #75
RyanRies wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dear god... that means that the government will win more from your poker playing than you _ever_ will!

So? Government policy should incentivize constructive industries.

This tax rate is for general work when self employed. It's not specific to gambling.

Re: What Winning $250k at Poker Taught Me About Money

#98

Post by MFLoon »

MR4D wrote: post #41

Great article with many insights that I never would have expected! This quote in particular gave me an interesting thought: >> Trust everyone, and people will take advantage of you. >> Distrust too much? That’s just as bad — you’re going to be the one calling every hand, thinking everyone’s always bluffing you, out to get you. >> You need to figure out when to distrust and when to trust. That last line is interesting…

I'm not super familiar with how ETFs work, but I'm guessing the parallel would be ETFs as ABC players making safe, low variance plays, while the actively managed funds would be a pro looking to capture all of their equity edges, regardless of the assumed variance.

It is well known how they respectively fare in tournaments - the ETF players make it into the money at a somewhat higher rate, but will typically have a middling to low stack with little hope of making a deep run, so they have a lot of low but positive ROI results - a mincash will typically be around 50-100% ROI. However they still may not eke out enough cashes over the long run to be +ROI. The Hedge Fund players on the other hand tend to bust out earlier but when they do run well will amass a huge stack and be well positioned to make a run at winning the whole thing - most of their results will be losses, but because of the super steep payout structures of tournaments, a single big-field victory can be well over 10000% ROI, so a single "bink" can overcome dozens of losses.

Re: What Winning $250k at Poker Taught Me About Money

#99

Post by shorsher »

base698 wrote: post #89
jdietrich wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even that is highly dependent on your post-flop skill. Marginal hands and drawing hands like small pairs and small suited connectors can be highly profitable on loose tables if you're confident in your reading ability. Playing like a nit is the easiest way to play profitably on a loose table and has dramatically lower variance, but widening your range and playing intelligently post-flop can often be substantially mor…

I used to be profitable in the golden days being a nit and just letting the huge swaths of players pay me off. So many all-ins to bluff me off while holding top set, nut straight, or nut flush. Just recently got back playing and am trying to learn to play against real players. I'm down overall after about 50 hours of play, but not very much. Any advice?

One book that I have really really enjoyed that is somewhat recent (2016) is The Grinders Manual [1]. It gives fantastic advice that is still relevant and is extremely readable. Covers a wide range of topics and came widely recommended to me. It’s helped my game a lot as I just started playing seriously about 5 months ago.

It’s geared toward online cash playing, but I ignore most of the HUD stuff and can use all the concepts in my live games.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Grinders-Manual-Complete-Course-Onlin...

Re: What Winning $250k at Poker Taught Me About Money

#100

Post by jinfiesto »

base698 wrote: post #89
jdietrich wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even that is highly dependent on your post-flop skill. Marginal hands and drawing hands like small pairs and small suited connectors can be highly profitable on loose tables if you're confident in your reading ability. Playing like a nit is the easiest way to play profitably on a loose table and has dramatically lower variance, but widening your range and playing intelligently post-flop can often be substantially mor…

I used to be profitable in the golden days being a nit and just letting the huge swaths of players pay me off. So many all-ins to bluff me off while holding top set, nut straight, or nut flush. Just recently got back playing and am trying to learn to play against real players. I'm down overall after about 50 hours of play, but not very much. Any advice?

Poker is much harder now and it's hard to find tables that will happily pay off nitty play ad infinitum. I'd make a list of concepts you should learn about, but I think it'll be easier for me to make a list of books you should read:

The Mathematics of Poker (Chen and Ankenman)

Applications of No-Limit Poker (Janda)

Expert Heads up No-Limit Hold 'em (Tipton, this one is nice as the author is a Computer Scientist and also has a course on building a solver.)

Professional No Limit-Hold 'em (Flynn, Miller, Mehta)

Finally, you should get a membership to something like Upswing or RIO to help synthesize the information into a useful framework for play. Also, you'll want access to something like PIO or Pokersnowie for analysis of your hands.

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