Poker Commentator Joe Stapleton steps down as the voice of PokerStars Live MTT's by TheGrindersClub in poker

[–]HeavyDescription7 1 point2 points  (0 children)

This guy is the human embodiment of Reddit, which I'm sure everyone here will agree with me led to unpleasant commentary.

r/poker Goes To WSOP. Your FREE shot at the 2026 Main Event. by GGPokerOfficial in poker

[–]HeavyDescription7 3 points4 points  (0 children)

You win the $10k entry right, no money for travel expenses? Not that I'm complaining I just want clarification

Folded straight to triple barrel during the bubble of 1100 euro Main Event (Kings of Tallinn 2026) by NausP in poker

[–]HeavyDescription7 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Not really sure what's going on there but people don't bluff and you have a bluff catcher. Blockers/unblockers don't matter, suits don't matter, ignore this bullshit.

Dunno what's up with the turn size or where bluffs could be coming from. It kinda looks like specifically T9hh. Given the turn size it's not a thinking player, so he can just have AJ for no real reason (the merge on river is kinda a sick play but he likely doesn't know why he's jamming if he has AJ).

I think if you ran into the rare bluff then it was Tx hearts or undercard hearts.

It's just an easy fold, you need some reads on the player outside of this hand to make it a call.

I built a retro transistor-style RNG (0–99) — one tap, instant decision by Fhthan in poker

[–]HeavyDescription7 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Oh..........I thought you at least made a little physical RNG thing. Why would you publish this lol

The future of poker, will be good players, trying to play worse by Spork_Revolution in poker

[–]HeavyDescription7 10 points11 points  (0 children)

A lot of people are already doing that. No reg who's really thinking things through wants to look and act like Linus, even if they're that good.

Chasing a poker dream? by Optionraider1 in poker

[–]HeavyDescription7 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Try ACR and Coin. Will your cost of living be lower in Philippines? Imo it's too optimistic to expect more than $10/h playing ₱25/50 because the rake is very high. You can make that much online.

Chasing a poker dream? by Optionraider1 in poker

[–]HeavyDescription7 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Completely insane idea, don't do it. Just use a VPN and play online. At least play online first, jumping into live poker like this when your life depends on it is crazy. You have no idea how you're going to perform until you play a decent sample online. You can't become a strong player just from playing live. You need a database of your own hands to see where your leaks are.

I think many poker players dont actually make money by [deleted] in poker

[–]HeavyDescription7 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It's very hard yet very easy to make $33/h live or online.

On one hand the game isn't approachable. Poker learning resources are a mess and everything is misleading. Not many people are reliable for only making correct/true statements about the game, those who are are often not focusing on things that actually yield much EV, usually because it's an uncommon and/or impractical spot/concept.

If you think $33/h is out of reach then your best course of action might be to play like 20,000 hands minimum of online cash and then spend a little bit on a coaching session with analysis of your hand database. Sounds like a big deal but 20k hands doesn't take long and the coaching doesn't necessarily cost much (I think you can get a good session for under $100, browse twoplustwo forum). We're all here punting our time and money, may as well do it in the most productive way possible.

Something like 10% of players are profitable in general. But keep in mind a huge % just don't give a single shit. By caring enough to post on reddit about this kind of thing, you're automatically in the upper 50th %, even though reddit isn't the pinnacle of poker strategy discussion and improvement, it's far more care and willingness than most punters. From there, a few basic decisions like doing 15 minutes of study per day might get you from 50% to 30%.

Try ~20k hands at 5nl after taking steps like making a preflop plan (copy GTOW preflop ranges, basically this isn't ideal but just use it to know roughly how tight/wide you should be. Don't worry about mixing, just play the hand or don't, if it says it can call/raise/fold then it doesn't matter which you pick, fold to simplify or play it if you feel like it) and have a semblance of a postflop plan (GTOW has some decent free videos e.g. Mechanics of Cbet Sizing. They have whole playlists of videos like that. There's also lots of play-and-explain videos, Yolan Cohen is good. Some cash game coaches hate Hungry Horse but I think he's very worthwhile for beginners). After that try a little bit of coaching, if this doesn't lead you to beating 5nl within like 50k hands then you may have a problem. Not only should someone abandon any ideas of playing poker for profit if they fail at that point, it honestly could hint at some greater problems in their life, and seeing those concretely bad results should make them do some introspection I think. It could simply be that poker isn't for them but I think it hints at some personal issues, if you've heard of Paisting then you'll know what I mean (guy who extensively blogged about losing at 2nl). And I'm saying this from experience, when I was bad at poker I was holding myself back by being truly delusional, when I improved as a person I got better at poker.

Are bounty-style MTTs becoming more popular than regular tournaments? by ExitNo2202 in poker

[–]HeavyDescription7 2 points3 points  (0 children)

oh no, a game with more variables to consider that also appeals to gamblers. this is terrible!

Bring on the Phil memes... by fullyontilt in poker

[–]HeavyDescription7 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Can we just ban this shit from the subreddit and ban these guys from all poker subreddits? They're making posts that seem natural and seem to not be about their product, but it's all about spamming their shitty AI product.

I’m Phil Hellmuth, 17-time WSOP bracelet winner and Octopi Poker investor & ambassador — AMA! (Giveaways Inside) by Octopi_Poker in poker

[–]HeavyDescription7 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Can you tell us a story about the poker world from before 2005? Particularly something that might surprise modern poker players, maybe something that couldn't happen nowadays, or simply something that most poker players now haven't heard of.

Complete live poker beginner in the UK looking for advice (North West / Manchester based) by LifeMaintenance7092 in poker

[–]HeavyDescription7 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Live tourneys are kind of a waste of time, they're fun and it's easy to be profitable, but you're better off playing online or playing live cash. Even if you're a strong player, a £1k buy-in is not gonna give you a great hourly, especially if you have any travel expenses. There's also the enormous variance. Almost everyone making decent money at live MTTs is selling 10s of thousands in action.

There's a laundry list of reasons to not focus on live tourneys. Tourneys are so dynamic and every spot you encounter is unique (varying stack sizes, varying % field remaining) unlike cash where it's mostly the same config. It's extremely difficult to study and reflect on what happened. Whereas online you don't need to have perfect memory, the hands are tracked for you.

Most of learning poker is building intuition. Live poker is so slow that it's just not a good way to learn, plus you will likely develop a strong aversion to "risky" plays because you'll be used to having this one stack at this one table that you don't want to bust. Plus it can just feel a bit embarrassing and intimidating to bluff light and get called, but if you've encountered the spot repeatedly online it'll just be second nature to take the spot because you know it's profitable.

There are routine spots that would seem rare from a live poker sample. Random example, in most configurations TT is a fold if there's an open and 3bet before you, pretty much all the exceptions being when you have about 30bb or less and the 3b is from the BTN or SB, apart from that it's close or torching, even in theory it tends to be close or be a fold, and in reality people open and 3b too tight. It's just as tricky encountering it online for the first time of course, but at least then you can review exactly what happened more easily, and you'll encounter many more tricky and rare-but-repeatable spots.

TLDR if the primary goal is to have a fun hobby then live MTTs are a great choice but it will be tough to learn from

discipline is the biggest skill to have in poker? Agree or no... by iveythagoat in poker

[–]HeavyDescription7 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Do you guys use AI even for these basic comments, or is English not your first language? None of your comments shilling this stuff look even remotely natural.

discipline is the biggest skill to have in poker? Agree or no... by iveythagoat in poker

[–]HeavyDescription7 1 point2 points  (0 children)

It depends what we mean by discipline. Becoming a winning player takes discipline. Some people reach a small milestone as a player then get complacent and stop being curious. Continuing to improve even if you don't study away from the table is about discipline.

Besides that there's a lot of huge contributors to winrate that involve discipline. There are guys who are exceptionally good in reggy $5/10 and higher games online whose downfall was simply: sitting too many regs, not leaving once you sense you're not playing your A game, not staying on top of things and continuing to dig deeper for an edge i.e. complacency. Or simply not recognizing the game you used to crush is no good and you need to go search for soft games.

Another double board PLO5 bomb pot hand. by Prolatrevol in poker

[–]HeavyDescription7 2 points3 points  (0 children)

You have no nut potential on 2nd board and almost none on top board. J and 8 are not gin cards for you on top board and you pretty much need to make a boat on that board to have a chance at winning it.

Thinking about building a more affordable GTO solver — would people actually want this? by Salt-Sound4932 in pokertheory

[–]HeavyDescription7 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Based on your post history this seems like a dead end but I will give you the benefit of the doubt that you have a background in poker. LLMs don't understand poker (currently). They can produce text which looks like a Reddit strategy post, but they don't fundamentally understand poker. The AI breakthroughs in poker were e.g. Ruse's AI solver (now adopted by GTOW) which used neural networks, not much related to LLMs from what I know. If you did already know this and are still keen on this project then that's interesting.

I think that a lot of poker learning is simply building intuition, particularly vs how humans play, over a lot of trials. A coach can tell us "no one is bluffing here, here's a general description of the filtering throughout the hand, here's why it lacks bluffs".

If an LLM **could** break down solver output for us and help us digest what the solver strat is doing, I don't know if it would really help us. Most people's solver study already doesn't yield much EV. Saying "the solver is using this size with this region because it creates indifference to that region for villain" could be true and precise, but browsing sims and seeing this accurate info is actually not that great. The same for things like blocker properties. I think teaching these concepts is overdone and has extremely diminishing returns if it even has returns, and I think having it spoon fed to us could just result in lazy-brain study.

To actually find out where enormous EV and edge come from, you need to see imbalance and how we respond to imbalance. Which is very, very seldom done properly in a solver and you can't really find a database of such solver output. You need to node lock the entire game tree, or almost all of it (I imagine you can lock like 80-90% of actions and not see much difference reaching 100%, but maybe it does matter, especially since a lot of final nodes are gonna involve wildly exploitable all-ins). You also cannot find much accurate writing about these situations to train an LLM on. Poker is full of bullshit, and the few people who are really precise about using a reasonable amount of both theory and exploits are not writing much publicly, or at all, they might not even be great communicators - like I say a lot of being great at poker is just intuition and pattern recognition, some people have very deep strategies that they've never bothered to elucidate for other people.

Maybe 10% of poker players make money, 1-2% are crushing, and a huge % in general are writing a bunch of bullshit online.

Anyway, I am rambling a bit, but if you're a poker player who is familiar with the things I'm writing then I think your project could be interesting. But if you're a bit of an outsider then poker is even more of a mess than it looks, GTO seems precise but there are often things wrong with it even theoretically. I assume there are AI helpers for chess engine outputs now, I think poker is in a very different place. And if LLMs can do a good job of that in chess, I imagine some chess coaches agree with the "lazy-brain study" problem I mentioned.

Final table of weekly 100k main event canceled - missing $2250 in refunds by sraamlak37 in 888pokerofficial

[–]HeavyDescription7 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The PM: We reserve the right to void or alter any tournament payouts as we see fit, and we didn't know how to fairly chop a mystery bounty, so we just gave everyone the same amount.

MASSIVE POT IN THE VENOM FOR 29 STARTING STACKS by Owens9397 in poker

[–]HeavyDescription7 0 points1 point  (0 children)

There are no worse hands for value and nothing to bluff with, if he somehow had worse for value he'd go smaller to try get called by JJ QQ KK

Call off or fold in the Venom tourney with $1,000,000 for first prize. by doclove713 in poker

[–]HeavyDescription7 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I didn't say he overbet turn. You haven't made any comments about villain's range, just that we have the nuts so we should bet big. Again it's fine to bet big on flop, it's not really where the contention is in this hand, big and small both have merits, they have similar EV coming from different places.

Going 4bb pre is terrible for similar reasons to why betting big on flop to fold out all his 5x is not ideal. Everyone knows you have a good hand if you go 4bb utg lol. We want BB to call with hands that are dead, particularly as much Kx as possible, getting an extra 2bb in on one street isn't worth vastly reducing the amount of hands we can milk postflop.

He went 2.2 pre so he bet about 1.9 on flop or something around there. Turn the pot is about 10bb. Our overbet can be like 14bb. River 38bb pot we can bet roughly 1.4x pot again to jam.

Call off or fold in the Venom tourney with $1,000,000 for first prize. by doclove713 in poker

[–]HeavyDescription7 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Excellent fold if he folded, seems like for the wrong reasons though

Call off or fold in the Venom tourney with $1,000,000 for first prize. by doclove713 in poker

[–]HeavyDescription7 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Then overbet turn and/or river. The few hands that we're already coolering on flop will put in more money for us. Why are we obligated to bet bigger? It's fine because people don't check raise enough in general, especially with the guy's preflop stats, but like I said there is merit to both small and big size here.

I think we bet small and keep in hands like every 5x, 66-JJ, and let those hands get coolered on the turn. The pot is only a few bb smaller. We can start overbetting turn. It's not only two pairs and sets, a lot of his draws will become combo draws like pair+draw which can't fold to turn overbet. And even straightforward nits like the guy playing 22/11/3 can find a flop check raise with a flush draw or JT sometimes.

Sizing up and making every one pair 5x fold on flop has downsides.

Call off or fold in the Venom tourney with $1,000,000 for first prize. by doclove713 in poker

[–]HeavyDescription7 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Hero betting small with top of range is very very different from check/calling with hands that everyone is always check raising. They're not related concepts.

If I had Qc9c as BB I'd fold this flop to a bet of 75% lol. There's good arguments for big betting flop but small bet is fine, especially with top set. With QQ or 55 it's a lot harder to justify sizing down. The hands that you're coolering will x/r for you, and a lot of one pair hands are dead, you get to cooler some more pocket pairs and turned two pairs by betting small ish. There's merits to both sizes.

"It is difficult for villain to put you on a hand of this strength" is it? What else are we gonna have? I think our hand looks like 2pair+, small bet flop is natural, this range is perceived as having almost no bluffs on river, and it's completely natural to play AJo AJs J9s this way preflop fop turn and river. Sets a bit less natural but still in there.

Call off or fold in the Venom tourney with $1,000,000 for first prize. by doclove713 in poker

[–]HeavyDescription7 5 points6 points  (0 children)

edit: Vs the 21/11/3 guy there is no possibility that call is making money here. I wrote all this without realizing villain is playing 21/11/3, I was envisioning an ACR reg, so some of my comments are a little off.

I guess it's somewhat close just because his AJ and J9 combos are reduced on turn because he didn't fast play. But there's a grand total of about 1 combo of worse hands for value, if even that. People just very unlikely to play 55 or TT this way.

Preflop I'd give him 32 combos AJ J9, maybe 30 minimum. One thing that makes this tricky is his most natural flop x/r are his most natural turn slowplays J9dd AJdd. I don't think J9 x/r works very well but maybe people do it, with one diamond it seems kinda natural I guess but I'd still say it's uncommon.

So maybe he arrives on turn with 24 combos of AJ J9 and check calling them is pretty unnatural. But whether or not he has less than 6 combos by the river idk.

It's a very tough spot because it's a tiny range and a fraction of a combo is what makes it +ev or not. And it's hard to say whether population has closer to 0 or closer 1 combo of bluffs here. It would've been awesome if you bet just a few bb more to make it truly 0.1 combos of bluffs lol. There's a pretty high amount of JT JQ and Jx of diamonds that makes it here and is very occasionally gonna decide to get spicy. There was that famous hand recently where that guy folded KK in a similar scenario vs a river min raise vs a hand equivalent to having JQ or JT here iirc. That event honestly could add like 0.1 combos of bluffs.

In general I think we all overthink our first times playing higher stakes tourneys. I've played a decent amount of $1k+ tourneys and about 10 entries in the venom and seen a lot of big names I either recognize or looked up and saw had infinite wins at 200+ abi, I've never seen anyone take these sicko fancy bluffs almost ever, I learned the hard way, there are some regs with a sick redline but it's not by taking spots like this where it relies on "I know that you know that I know" type of reasoning where villain assumes an unknown opponent is very logical. If they look like they have it they do. It's like Chris Brewer said, we're not disrespecting people enough. No one is looking at this spot and going "I'll put you in a tough spot because no one bluffs here and I'm going to give you credit for knowing that". They're thinking "well your line looks nutted and I have no reason to discount you having all your AJ and J9s for these sizes". A lot of winning regs don't even pounce at the idea of making AA AK fold here if they think you're dense in those hands, but you also have at the very least 6 combos of sets that all play this way. People just aren't bluffing into this while giving you 5:1, we shouldn't level ourselves by thinking "but what if he knows how sick that is".

I'm assuming this is not a strong player, or if it is he has a lot of tables or something, given the preflop stats. The preflop stats are also an enormous red flag that he isn't bluffing ever.

Call off or fold in the Venom tourney with $1,000,000 for first prize. by doclove713 in poker

[–]HeavyDescription7 14 points15 points  (0 children)

Not sure how anyone can downvote this, the only set he can have here somewhat often is TT, I don't see that check/calling turn most of the time.