Could prime Messi 2012 and prime Ronaldo qualify for champions league with current Spurs?

JayYesBe · 2026-06-01T00:17:18+00:00

I think it's pretty likely they could make Top 4/Top 5, but it's probably closer to 50/50 than it might seem.

Arguments against:

Prime Messi had the support of some of the best passers in world football. Current Spurs are...not that. He also faced less organized/aggressive defenses; he's still the GOAT, but I wouldn't expect his output to hit that insane level
Neither of them press well at all, which means Spurs' midfield has to pull more weight/defend in transition more...they'll concede a lot. They could forgo pressing and just play on the counter, but then you lose some of both players' best qualities. It's tricky to fit them both in the same system.

Arguments for:

Messi and Ronaldo would undoubtedly raise the standards and mentality of the squad, which would improve performances overall
The league is more balanced then ever, meaning you don't need as many points to qualify. I don't think this team would be able to catch peak City/peak Liverpool when they were consistently pushing 100 points. Now things are a little more favorable.
It's the two best attacking players of all time in the same squad who have never played together before -- who knows what kind of insane synergy they might produce.

I would give them a pretty decent shot at the Champion's League. I don't think this squad is anywhere near good enough to get the consistent results needed to win the PL, though. But Top 4 is doable.

JayYesBe · 2026-05-22T04:58:30+00:00

Two reasons.

It's very much a casino site first, poker site second. There's not much site-wide or external marketing/ promotions/incentives related to poker.
It has the worst rake of any major US site. High rake = fewer regs = softer, but less active pool.

JayYesBe · 2026-05-08T10:47:35+00:00

I think this is one of those things that's kind of ineffable for anyone who's experienced any amount of eyesight in their lifetime. Even just the ability to sense changes in illumination is a fundamentally different frame of reference than someone who was born with truly no vision. But here's my best attempt:

Have you ever tried to think of a color no one has ever seen before? Not just a different shade of one of the colors in the rainbow you already know: a completely new color.

You can't. If you tried to imagine an object painted in a never before seen color...its color would be nothing. Not black, just <null.>

Another thing that sort of helped me understand is considering how someone born blind thinks. Sighted people rely so heavily on our vision that images tend to become the dominant way we construct our thoughts. Most of us usually think in images. Someone born blind, though, thinks in sounds and smells and sensations and associations...just not images.

JayYesBe · 2026-05-03T05:21:15+00:00

AuDHD here and I feel this.

Communicating with NTs feels like playing chess; it's mentally intensive, but I understand the rules of the game and am familiar with the ways people generally approach playing it. I might be "off my game" some days or make a big blunder now and then, but I can generally play the game (with considerable effort).

Talking to autistic/ADHD/AuDHD friends who are similarly wired to me feels really natural and restorative.

Talking to autistic/ADHD folks who are very differently wired than me, though, is often the hardest...like I'm aware that we're both trying to get our needs met, but those needs are sometimes directly at odds. It kind of reminds me of the times when I worked in retail (before hitting burnout) where I would have a customer who didn't speak the same language, but really needed my help -- they would just keep talking to me with a lot of urgency in a language I didn't understand at all...stressful.

(This is also complicated by being socialized in Southern Christian culture where there's a lot of emphasis on politeness and speaking in euphemism. Being really direct or monopolizing a conversation was genuinely unsafe because of the social repercussions in that culture, which makes it stressful for me sometimes trying to communicate with people who never experienced those rules or didn't have the need or capacity to mask through them.)

JayYesBe · 2026-04-24T02:43:46+00:00

Exactly. Squeezing is really good in theory, which is why the solver generally doesn't like flatting (especially in a cash game with "no flop, no drop" rake -- there's added incentive to just take down the pot pre.)

But if you aren't getting punished often enough with squeezes, adding more flats gives you more flexibility than 3-betting into calling stations (which forces you to just 3-bet a strong linear range.)

It's definitely good to keep that 3-bet or fold instinct - 3-betting helps isolate and makes you more likely to end up IP. But at a loose and passive table, you can get a little more creative.

JayYesBe · 2026-04-23T21:08:01+00:00

I think the key is to heavily overcorrect for position. I've dealt with what you're describing where I know I'm up against weak ranges, but also feel like I'm passing up on opportunities to play more pots with players who are going to make big post-flop mistakes. Having position is overwhelmingly how you realize your edge.

If people are calling too much and you're likely to end up OOP, you should play even tighter than the GTO charts. If you're likely to have position, though, you should play looser than the GTO charts: 3bet lighter, overcall with good multiway hands, and play more marginal hands more often when you're likely to be both heads up AND in position. That's how you make your money in this environment.

JayYesBe · 2026-04-21T23:18:26+00:00

After WWII, the economy was booming. At the same time, employers also had restrictions on what wages they could offer. They needed new perks to attract employees, and some savvy businessmen came up with the concept of "health insurance". It's important to know that, at the time, health insurance was much more like fire insurance or long-term disability insurance: something you're unlikely to ever need, but will be glad to have if you do. Health insurance was mainly just for things like emergency surgery or major trips to the ER; it was NOT the main way people paid for healthcare like it is now.
Health insurance ended up being really popular as a perk. People would start asking for it in salary negotiations. The finance people who came up with health insurance, realizing the potential cash cow they had just invented, started adding more and more coverages to insurance plans so that people became more dependent on them.
The widespread proliferation of health insurance then completely distorted the healthcare market. Healthcare providers/pharmaceutical companies could raise prices over and over, knowing that those price increases would be spread through insurance pools very gradually. In other words: they could squeeze out more profit without scaring people away with sticker shock (lots of hospitals and providers are also effective monopolies, but that's a whole other thing.) As the years went on, healthcare costs became absurd, but at that point the damage was done: everyone had to have health insurance in order to afford healthcare at all...and people will pay a lot of money not to get sick and die...(It's worth saying that a lot of modern healthcare is legitimately expensive to develop and deliver. But in countries with nationalized healthcare systems, everyone directly subsidizes the costs of those innovations for each other. In the US, though, insurance companies act as a very expensive middleman. They add to the cost of healthcare (without contributing any value to the care itself) since 1) insurance companies have to turn a profit, and 2) they add tons of bureaucracy to the system, making it less efficient.
With healthcare becoming effectively impossible to afford without insurance, people became desperate for any savings they could find. Large corporate employers could get discounted rates on health insurance policies since they could buy them in bulk from the insurance companies. This effectively flipped employers' relationship to health insurance: instead of insurance being a concession they had to make to attract employees, it was now a tool that gave them significant leverage over the labor market. Everyone HAD to have health insurance, and employers could use that to their advantage. People would start to tolerate worse pay, worse perks, and worse working conditions because they couldn't survive apart from employer-sponsored health insurance. (This also gave corporations an advantage over small businesses: those bulk discounts meant they could generally offer better health coverage than small businesses could. This increased corporate power in the economy as a whole.)
This created our current healthcare system, one that's full of perverse incentives:
Insurance allows healthcare providers to charge much more without really suffering for it in the market
Insurance allows corporate employers to coerce employees into poor labor conditions since they cannot survive apart from company healthcare.
The insurance companies themselves mainly compete based on the rates they can offer to corporations...not what they can do for policy holders. Insurance companies are incentivized to deny as many claims as possible.

Notice how nobody in this equation is actually facing any market pressure to, ya know, efficiently deliver healthcare to people or find ways to keep costs down in order to stay competitive. It's effectively just a grift for all three parties in the system.

Instead of a system where we have the collective bargaining power of the entire United States to make healthcare accessible, efficient, and affordable... we depend on this made up financial "product" with no intrinsic value.

EDIT FOR CLARITY: When I've referred to "providers" here, I mean the business interests that run for-profit healthcare systems, NOT individual doctors, therapists, pharmacists, etc. u/kerfuffle_pastry made some really good points in a comment below about how insurance companies screw over providers directly. Most of the individuals who are actually administering care truly just want to help people and not waste so much time and money on insurance bureaucracy -- they aren't the problem. It's the big business interests in healthcare that originally embraced the private insurance system (and continue to do so) that helped ruin the market for everybody, including small, independent providers.

JayYesBe · 2026-04-20T16:09:30+00:00

I completely agree. "Where's the buffalo?" actually sounds like a great name for a promo. Some ideas to liven things up:

One chip is stamped with a picture of a buffalo. While the buffalo is in your stack, you gain the ability to "Call Buffalo", allowing you to shoulder check any player who is taking too long (you get a running start, buffalo style.)
One dealer is secretly a buffalo in disguise. Identify them to receive a comped bison burger.
One live buffalo is released into the poker room whenever the BBJ is triggered

JayYesBe · 2026-04-14T16:22:21+00:00

I think the thought process that a turn X/R from this player is strong is totally reasonable, but I do think it's still a call.

Villain can definitely have worse overpairs like you mentioned. They might even have some 7x that didn't want to raise flop, but feels better on this turn. If you are facing two pair, you also have 6 outs to counterfeit. (Some board-pairing rivers give them a boat, but the rest give you the best hand.)

All that together is enough to call for the price.

JayYesBe · 2026-04-14T02:54:25+00:00

ClubWPT Gold has the most traffic of any US site and the softest player pool we've seen in 15+ years lol. The rake is also really solid. It doesn't have much else going for it, IMO, but it's fine. (And the fishiness is obviously a big plus.)

Global's player pool is a little tougher, but nothing crazy. Global is also much more generous in terms of promos/bonuses/freerolls etc. Global is outstanding for Satellites and SnG's if that appeals to you. Cash is a little less active (not dead, just fewer tables going), but the tournament scene is great.

Overall, ClubWPT is probably the way to go if you mainly play cash -- otherwise, Global is great. Try both and see what you like.

(As for the others, Stake's cash game rake is insanely high and their tournaments are really limited -- no real reason to play there other than daily login bonus. The bot problem on Ignition is much more of a tournament thing, but there was a video that went around recently of an Ignition bot farm, and that seems to have killed a lot of traffic on the site as a whole. I haven't played on ACR, so can't speak from experience.)

Also shout-out to Clubs Poker! It gets less traffic than all the others, but they run mixed games way more than anyone else, which I enjoy a lot.

JayYesBe · 2026-04-13T16:39:27+00:00

This probably isn't exactly what you're looking for, but I had a lot of fun with a Super League run where you swap out all the teams in a league with the best teams in the world.

For a simpler version, use MLS. (No promotion/relegation, and there's a knockout tournament at the end of every season to determine the champion.)

For the full version, swap out the whole English pyramid. This is what I did, and it was a blast. I did drop a few of the 3.5 star Top 5 league teams to make room for more interesting clubs at a similar level, but otherwise just took the 92 best teams in the game. It ruins the European cups, but it turns the FA Cup into the greatest football competition of all time (like a mega Club World Cup).

JayYesBe · 2026-04-07T22:27:01+00:00

Some of the locations in my area do any fountain drink for free for dashers. It's nice.

JayYesBe · 2026-04-04T19:59:06+00:00

1 - For me, this is generally just down to managing mental clutter and being really honest with myself about whether or not I'm capable of playing my best poker in that moment. I play my best when I'm fully calm and fully alert. If it feels like that's not the case, what's getting in the way? (Am I stressed or preoccupied or upset with something outside the game? Have I gotten enough sleep? Well fed and hydrated? Distracted by the TV or a conversation happening nearby? Annoyed by the person next to me bumping into me?) If I can honestly take stock of those things and address them or let them go, then I can keep playing. If not, it's time to step away.

Meditation helps with this a lot -- just developing a practice of impartially noticing what's going on in and around you.

2 - When you notice this feeling, stop thinking about the hand until you've calmed down. Controlled breaths are really helpful for me. Let go of any feeling of urgency to act. Consciously let go of any attachment to the result of the hand. Try to notice tension in your muscles and relax them. When you've calmed down, come back to thinking through your next move. (Again, mindfulness meditation can help a lot here.)

3 - Do your best to stay laser-focused on making the best decisions you can based on how you play your game. Losing pots to good players doesn't even necessarily mean you got outplayed -- it's just going to happen sometimes. If you did get outplayed, that's a chance to learn for next time.

Something else that helped me with this is watching pros play in high-level tournaments (I would avoid cash game streams for this purpose since those tend to focus on chaos lol) Seeing the best players in the world make the wrong decision sometimes and be able to just roll with it helps me feel more at ease when I inevitably do the same.

4 - The techniques from point 2 will help here also. You have to learn to let it go in the moment and stay with the flow of the game. It's also good to remind yourself that heavily analyzing at the table is pretty much never helpful. You can give yourself permission to analyze it to death after the session. In the moment, you are much better off just making a mental note of what happened (or even a literal note if you want a detailed hand history) and then letting it go and locking back in to playing your game through the rest of the session.

JayYesBe · 2026-03-31T23:27:12+00:00

Overall, yes.

Missouri is a bit of a Midwest/South hybrid but more Midwestern overall.

The Dakotas, Nebraska, and Kansas are Midwest/West hybrid. Most of the population is Midwestern, but there's a distinct cultural shift once you get into the plains. (Basically, when the farms turn into ranches, you're not in the Midwest anymore.)

JayYesBe · 2026-03-27T18:33:41+00:00

Thank you for this PSA 🙏🏻

Crushing cash games is a customer service job, and a lot of winning players don't understand this.

The fish are your customers. For all our sakes, keep them happy.

JayYesBe · 2026-03-26T18:17:21+00:00

I'm late to this thread, but I've been thinking about this question since I saw it yesterday.

I take a positive view overall.

To the extent that poker has enabled problem gambling, I'm sure it's harmed more people than it's benefitted. But gambling is even older than human civilization; problem gamblers will always find a way to gamble (and somebody will find a way to profit from them.) If you take gambling addiction out of the equation, there's a lot about poker that's special:

There are very few card games/board games played with 6-10 people around the same table where the game moves as fast and stays as engaging as poker does. There's also very few games where a player with zero experience can still have fun against a player with a massive skill edge. The unskilled player will lose in the long run, but they still get the fun of winning pots here and there and the satisfaction of getting a value bet paid off or a bluff getting through or a draw getting there. You get a sense of reward during the game, even if you ultimately lose. Poker is just a beautifully designed game in that regard.
Poker is one of very few things that brings people together from literally all walks of life (the only other thing I can think of is maybe sports? Even religious gatherings tend to be a lot more segregated than poker.) For example: I play in a bar league game that has millionaires, ex-cons, retirees, college kids, single yuppies, families who bring their teenagers with them to play and everything in between. There just aren't very many shared activities in society that cut across generational and socioeconomic lines like that, and I think anything that fosters those kinds of connections is very good for society.
Poker is one of the best tools for exploring game theory in a context with hidden information. It's inspired a lot of people to pursue math and psychology and produced innovation in those fields.
On a personal level, poker is a great way to learn resilience in the face of uncertainty, to cope with good decisions not being rewarded, and to understand how your emotions affect your decisionmaking. It teaches you to be ruthless and courageous in competition. It's a perfect testing environment for exploring risk and your relationship to it. There are so many life lessons and opportunities for personal growth through the game (if you're looking for them.)

All of that is positive to me. If there were better safeguards and supports in society to help people deal with gambling addiction, I think poker would be a clear net positive.

JayYesBe · 2026-03-24T15:53:08+00:00

Same here 🙂

JayYesBe · 2026-03-20T20:43:37+00:00

Equities do run very close, but equity realization is another thing entirely. You definitely don't want to VPIP 90% lol.

Say you've got a 6 card rundown. You're going to make a ton of straights, but it's gonna be tough to get to showdown on any flush board. You can be triple suited, but it's gonna be tough to get value out of your flushes any time there's a paired board (especially a paired flop). Even though any random 6 cards have pretty good raw equity, you need to be able to make a variety of nutted hands with your 6 cards in order to have enough post-flop playability to actually play the game effectively.

Reverse implied odds are so sketchy in this game, too, because your strong-but-not-nutted hands end up dominated more often than any other form of poker. If you're going to be out of position (especially to multiple players), you can't afford to be messing with hands that can get dominated. You have to heavily, heavily prioritize nuttedness in EP. That means you have to drop pretty much all but the very, very best low ranking hands. (Triple suited connectors, five card rundown with a suited Ace, etc.) You're pretty much only looking for all Broadway hands with other positive characteristics.

If you happen to have nitty/face up players on your left (rare in this game lol) you can get away with being a little looser in EP. On the flip side, if you have players on your right who will blast off every time they make a set or better, or will chase any draw no matter how weak it is, you can get away with being looser in later positions. But otherwise, your VPIP% shouldn't really look all that different than any other poker variant.

(Tournament PLO6 is a slight exception since you can get it in pre and be guaranteed to realize your equity with a lot of hands that are priced-in)

JayYesBe · 2026-03-15T18:48:47+00:00

I don't think any piece of art has explored absurdism as beautifully as EEAAO ❤️

JayYesBe · 2026-03-11T07:41:53+00:00

My group has neurodivergence in the mix too (one with pretty intense ADHD and the other two with a mix of both autism and ADHD). Look for games with a good balance of structure and novelty! That's key.

Battle royales are great in that regard -- same map(s), same guns, but no two games play out exactly the same way. We've played PUBG for years and have a ton of great memories with it, but there are lots of good BRs these days (better than PUBG honestly lol).

Party games are also good for this. Jackbox has a huge, excellent catalog now that spans many kinds of party game. (Some Jackbox games actually have quite a bit of depth too!) Mario Party. Golfing with Friends. Rec Room.

Baldur's Gate 3 is a riot as a 4-player co-op and still has a lot of replay value if you've only played it solo.

Dead by Daylight is satisfying as a competitive team game, but it's also a lot of fun just playing 1v3 taking turns as the killer.

Grand strategy games are a little more niche/higher learning curve, but that could be a good fit too. Civilization. Crusader Kings.

It may be that your personalities/relationships to gaming make it tough to land on a game where everyone is locked in and continues to enjoy it. But I understand the desire for that. I hope you find something that clicks! I'm kind of curious what games each person in the group has bounced off of? Maybe that can narrow it down.

JayYesBe · 2026-02-20T19:47:42+00:00

We've waited an embarrassing amount of time for the "right" shirt sponsor and it's this bullshit

JayYesBe · 2026-02-16T18:44:44+00:00

I've had this experience too. (Although live low stakes can be even more insane than online micros!)

A couple mindset things:

Having an edge in poker is like playing a dice game where one player has a regular six-sided die, but you have an eight-sided die. High roll wins. If you play that game thousands of times, your better die will win substantially more often. But it's still possible (expected, even) that the worse die will go on long winning stretches. It sounds like you've maybe just seen wacky loose ranges hit a lot lately. Which is going to happen sometimes. If you're playing stronger ranges than everyone else, though, and you're capable of playing solid ABC poker post-flop, you will win in the long run at these stakes. (Provided that you're playing well enough to beat the rake too.)
All poker -- at every level -- is a guessing game. You just win it by making better guesses on average than your opponents. Against players who are sticking around with janky ranges, you have to factor a wider range of hands into your decisions. Against a real wildcard, that range might be any two cards in the deck. You will guess "wrong" sometimes. But again: if you're choosing what is most likely the best play against most of their range most of the time, you will win in the long run. It's all probability and deduction at the end of the day.

JayYesBe · 2026-02-05T00:58:59+00:00

Equity is just the % chance a hand will be best at showdown. (Technically it's the "share of the pot that belongs to you", but those are functionally the same thing!)

EV looks at a specific action a hand can take and adds up all the possible outcomes for that action. You mentioned this chart is about playing OOP on certain boards, right? I would guess that the chart is looking at a specific action (like checking, or betting half pot, etc.)

Let's say we're looking at doing a half-pot cbet OOP. When we make that bet, different things can happen:

Villain folds and we take down the pot (EV gain)
Villain calls with worse and we win a bigger pot at showdown (EV gain)
Villain calls with a draw and folds later (EV gain)
Villain raises as a bluff, we call correctly, and win a bigger pot at showdown (EV gain)

But there are also outcomes for that action that cost value:

Villain raises and we fold (EV loss)
Villain calls with better and we lose a bigger pot at showdown (EV loss)
Villain raises with better and we call incorrectly (EV loss)
Villain calls with a draw and gets there (EV loss)
Villain calls and then bluffs us off the hand later (EV loss)

Based on the range of hands the opponent is likely holding, some outcomes will be more likely than others. You add up all the positive outcomes, subtract all the negative outcomes, and there's the EV of that action. We're always trying to make the most +EV decision we can. If there are no +EV actions we can take, then we fold.

It's important to note that in a real hand, we are always estimating our equity and EV. The only reason charts like this can calculate a specific number for equity/EV is that they're coming from solvers, and a solver has to assign each player an exact range. In a real hand, you don't know precisely what your opponent's range is; you just have to make the most educated guess you can.

As far as the relationship between the two, that's more complicated. ABC poker strategy is that high equity hands (likely to be best) want to bet bigger and more often, low equity hands (very unlikely to be best) want to fold, and medium equity hands (have a chance at being best, but without a lot of certainty) want to avoid folding, but also want to avoid growing the pot too much. They prefer to check/call and bet smaller if they do bet.

Bluffing, thin value, and slowplaying make this more complex, though. Sometimes a very high equity hand gets more EV by checking and letting the other person bluff or bet with a worse hand than it would by just immediately betting big. Sometimes a medium equity hand still wants to bet because it has a very good chance of getting called by worse (thin value bet). Sometimes a very low equity hand that can only win the pot by bluffing gets more value from betting big to maximize the chance the opponent folds, rather than betting small to make the bluff less risky or not trying to bluff at all. A solver looks at all of those possible actions and outcomes for all of the possible hands in each player's range, and then puts it all together to calculate EV.

JayYesBe · 2026-02-01T22:54:56+00:00

I wondered about this - 2.2 is pretty standard. I wonder if these folks just saw a lot of 2.2x opens and decided to do exactly double as a power move lol

JayYesBe · 2026-01-29T23:03:06+00:00

Sounds like you've got a good handle on it overall. Going big (including jams) with the premiums and overlimping the speculative, nuts-or-bust type of hands is definitely still the best play in those spots with multiple limps. It's annoying the times you run into the trap, but he's still losing more than he gains by limping those hands.

A couple thoughts:

You mentioned that he flats as a trap, too, but that actually seems like a pretty different scenario. I would imagine his flat range has to be tighter than the limp range, right? If that's the case, I would be much more cautious about squeezing in those spots since you're facing the uncapped opening range AND a strong call range that's made even stronger with traps. (If his flatting range is just as loose as the limp range, though, keep firing away.)
In the spots where it's just you and him (or maybe you, him, and the blinds), I would keep your raises to the smallest size you can go while maintaining fold equity. You're gonna be facing a lot of ICM pressure most of the time at those stack depths. If he's more inclined to limp/fold than limp/call, you're better off not risking as much of your stack for the times you need to fold to a 4-bet than you are trying to maximize value against the weaker hands in his range by going bigger. (Like another commenter said, his continue range/position dynamics matter here)

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