Monday, November 9, 2009
Friday, November 6, 2009
Willing to Trade: Short Stack Snake Oil for Baby Stack College Fund
I wanted to offer my services as a coach, perhaps for the last time. As I have vastly improved my game and winnings, I have become less and less inclined to take on new students, and quite likely will stop doing it altogether as of the end of this month. For anyone who is interested, the rate is $150 per hour, or $125 per hour for those who sign up at my rakeback site, with a minimum of 2 hours purchased.
I have included my results since September 1st and this is the last time I will be posting them as well. I don't care to gloss over the content of this site with brags or pissing contests about win rates. I am only including this now for street cred and to show that you can make a lot of money when short stacking correctly and without even putting in extreme volume.
*The oddly staked games came from a conversion error from Cake poker hands where the small blind wasn't posted. All nasty responses posted will be deleted, so don't even waste your time. Just contact me at lyelle@insightbb.com.
Thursday, November 5, 2009
Debate #1: Learn to Play Full-Stacked
As we all know, short stackers are a bunch of talentless, uncreative twits who are either lazy or greedy and have no respect for the game. Luckily this is poker and not alternative music and we don't need to pretend that are we here for anything other than the money. So why should any of us "learn" to play full stacked (we have said many times that we do, but since you won't believe us anyway, just assume that we don't)? Here are the objections to this lousy argument:
IS THIS REALLY WHAT YOU WANT?
I assume that since you both play online and take the time out of your day to google poker terms, that this game is important to you and therefore the money that you make (or attempt to make) is also important to you. So if we learn how to play poker, how exactly does this benefit you? You must be assuming that since we are talentless to begin with, you will still be able to crush us in your .10/.25 game where you would proudly reign as king if it were not for those lowly dissident short stackers. Yet what if that isn't the case? You have now turned an untalented fish into a competing force that now swallows fish whole rather than taking a nibble from them and saving the good parts for YOU.
But now here's the thing. If I'm talentless and yet still found a way to win, why would I give that up, especially when giving it up would mean that I would have to work a 9 to 5 job on someone else's terms? At least the people who say "DIE SHORTSTACK SKUM" have their priorities in order....
YOU WOULD MAKE A LOT MORE MONEY PLAYING WITH A FULL STACK
Supposing this is true (I'm talentless), I just don't see how this is any concern of yours. Alas, it's not a concern of mine either. No one has said anything like "you could play so many more tables" or "you will have so much less stress" or "you won't lose any sleep because you got bluffed out of a huge pot" or even "you could play much longer sessions." I eventually came to the conclusion (see article titled: ...And Everything is Illuminated) that these things are what REALLY matter to me. My win rate was probably a little bit better, but the swings made it difficult to play for long sessions at a time and I often would put in 20-25 hour weeks, which could make subpar months difficult to live on.
SHORT STACKING WOULDN'T BE ANY FUN
It's a job dillhole, it's not supposed to be fun. A job that I make a lot of money doing and yet once again, I don't see how this is any of your concern. In fact, this is what should console you and your choice to sweat it out every day and warm your soul when you can't sleep at night. I traded my win rate and variance for the fun that you get out of the game. Is this what bothers you or is it that you worry that I actually DO enjoy it? I DO...sorry, you lose again!!!
YOU ARE TAKING THE FUN OUT OF IT FOR REGULARS!
This is just stupid. Making the game fun is something that you do in a live setting or home game to keep the fish around. I don't recall anyone saying that this is some kind of rule for online play, and chances are that if you are making it fun for someone else, you have been doing something wrong. In other words, if guys are following you around from table to table it isn't because of your quick wit or because they admire your play.
And besides...all those regs hate each other, and they hate you as well. Case closed.
SHORT STACKING IS A SIMPLE, ROBOTIC, AND LAME STRATEGY
First of all, let me clarify that short stacking falls into two categories that I now like to coin: passive short stacking and exploitive short stacking. Passive short stacking is the one that most of you are familiar with and I fail to see how this is a problem in your normal game. Those are the guys who sit around and wait for premium hands and try to get all in with them before the flop. I don't understand how or why you think guys like this are ruining the game, because all you need to do is fold to their raises and steal their blinds. They are out there looking for large edges and since those come along very seldom, these guys won't be playing a whole lot of pots with you. In short, quit acting like a fucking cry baby, because that is what you are if you are complaining about this. And don't worry- these guys aren't making much money.
If passive short stacking is the poker equivalent of pan handling then all you would need to do is cross the street to avoid them. An exploitive short stacker is a back alley mugger who will chase you across the street and stab you just to take the quarter that they just saw you stick in your pocket. They are masters of finding small edges and aren't afraid to stick in all their money to get it. This what the truly successful ones are doing, and some of them are making upwards of $400,000 a year, in other words, what you would make in approximately 80 years in your normal .10/.25 game or 26 years working your job at McDonald's.
Now if there were a Nobel Prize for poker, the person who created exploitive short stacking surely would have won it. You might think it is simple, yet it is actually a superior strategy when placed side by side with ALL of them. "But it's so simple...." you whine. Exactly. It's what made Windows superior to DOS, which made computing accessible to the masses. Full stacked poker is actually a very weak strategy (let's lump them all together, for argument's sake), because for most people it does more harm than good. If it is only available or usable by a small group of elite players, then that says more about the person wielding it than it does about the strategy.
Pretend for a minute that someone were attacking you with a knife. What would you rather defend yourself with, your own knife or a can of pepper spray? With the knife, you have to get in close where you are in the most danger, strike better than your opponent and hit vital organs and then jump back before they can strike back. With the can of pepper spray, you can stand back at a distance, shoot it in their general direction and then run away while they curse you.
It has been said that if you don't know what you are doing then taking a knife to a fight poses more danger to yourself than it does to your adversary. After all, I'm not out to kill anyone, I just want to live to fight another day...
IS THIS REALLY WHAT YOU WANT?
I assume that since you both play online and take the time out of your day to google poker terms, that this game is important to you and therefore the money that you make (or attempt to make) is also important to you. So if we learn how to play poker, how exactly does this benefit you? You must be assuming that since we are talentless to begin with, you will still be able to crush us in your .10/.25 game where you would proudly reign as king if it were not for those lowly dissident short stackers. Yet what if that isn't the case? You have now turned an untalented fish into a competing force that now swallows fish whole rather than taking a nibble from them and saving the good parts for YOU.
But now here's the thing. If I'm talentless and yet still found a way to win, why would I give that up, especially when giving it up would mean that I would have to work a 9 to 5 job on someone else's terms? At least the people who say "DIE SHORTSTACK SKUM" have their priorities in order....
YOU WOULD MAKE A LOT MORE MONEY PLAYING WITH A FULL STACK
Supposing this is true (I'm talentless), I just don't see how this is any concern of yours. Alas, it's not a concern of mine either. No one has said anything like "you could play so many more tables" or "you will have so much less stress" or "you won't lose any sleep because you got bluffed out of a huge pot" or even "you could play much longer sessions." I eventually came to the conclusion (see article titled: ...And Everything is Illuminated) that these things are what REALLY matter to me. My win rate was probably a little bit better, but the swings made it difficult to play for long sessions at a time and I often would put in 20-25 hour weeks, which could make subpar months difficult to live on.
SHORT STACKING WOULDN'T BE ANY FUN
It's a job dillhole, it's not supposed to be fun. A job that I make a lot of money doing and yet once again, I don't see how this is any of your concern. In fact, this is what should console you and your choice to sweat it out every day and warm your soul when you can't sleep at night. I traded my win rate and variance for the fun that you get out of the game. Is this what bothers you or is it that you worry that I actually DO enjoy it? I DO...sorry, you lose again!!!
YOU ARE TAKING THE FUN OUT OF IT FOR REGULARS!
This is just stupid. Making the game fun is something that you do in a live setting or home game to keep the fish around. I don't recall anyone saying that this is some kind of rule for online play, and chances are that if you are making it fun for someone else, you have been doing something wrong. In other words, if guys are following you around from table to table it isn't because of your quick wit or because they admire your play.
And besides...all those regs hate each other, and they hate you as well. Case closed.
SHORT STACKING IS A SIMPLE, ROBOTIC, AND LAME STRATEGY
First of all, let me clarify that short stacking falls into two categories that I now like to coin: passive short stacking and exploitive short stacking. Passive short stacking is the one that most of you are familiar with and I fail to see how this is a problem in your normal game. Those are the guys who sit around and wait for premium hands and try to get all in with them before the flop. I don't understand how or why you think guys like this are ruining the game, because all you need to do is fold to their raises and steal their blinds. They are out there looking for large edges and since those come along very seldom, these guys won't be playing a whole lot of pots with you. In short, quit acting like a fucking cry baby, because that is what you are if you are complaining about this. And don't worry- these guys aren't making much money.
If passive short stacking is the poker equivalent of pan handling then all you would need to do is cross the street to avoid them. An exploitive short stacker is a back alley mugger who will chase you across the street and stab you just to take the quarter that they just saw you stick in your pocket. They are masters of finding small edges and aren't afraid to stick in all their money to get it. This what the truly successful ones are doing, and some of them are making upwards of $400,000 a year, in other words, what you would make in approximately 80 years in your normal .10/.25 game or 26 years working your job at McDonald's.
Now if there were a Nobel Prize for poker, the person who created exploitive short stacking surely would have won it. You might think it is simple, yet it is actually a superior strategy when placed side by side with ALL of them. "But it's so simple...." you whine. Exactly. It's what made Windows superior to DOS, which made computing accessible to the masses. Full stacked poker is actually a very weak strategy (let's lump them all together, for argument's sake), because for most people it does more harm than good. If it is only available or usable by a small group of elite players, then that says more about the person wielding it than it does about the strategy.
Pretend for a minute that someone were attacking you with a knife. What would you rather defend yourself with, your own knife or a can of pepper spray? With the knife, you have to get in close where you are in the most danger, strike better than your opponent and hit vital organs and then jump back before they can strike back. With the can of pepper spray, you can stand back at a distance, shoot it in their general direction and then run away while they curse you.
It has been said that if you don't know what you are doing then taking a knife to a fight poses more danger to yourself than it does to your adversary. After all, I'm not out to kill anyone, I just want to live to fight another day...
Monday, September 21, 2009
Short Stacker Poker Extortion
Lorin said something today that got me thinking. He talked about a guy calling his shove with 78s and then saying something like "serves you right you short stack peice of shit" or something along those lines when his hand hit and he stacked Lorin. One of the benefits of short stacking is the fact that other players hate us. This is evident on almost every forum post about shortstackers regardless of the forum. This is a benefit because players will call bets and shoves lighter than they should in the hopes of busting us. What they don't realize is that we don't leave the table when we get busted, we just reload. We only leave when we double up (or reach a predetermined stack size that we deem unwieldy).
I say that we take this a step further. From now on, whenever I sit down at a new table (lets say a $1-$2 NL Full Ring game) I will make the table an offer. It the chat box, as soon as I buy in for my Short stack and they all know what I am there to do, I will type in the Chat Box something along the lines of:
"Attention Players. Since none of you want me here and I will only leave when I double up, I will cut you all a deal. If each of you pony up $4, I will go ahead and leave and not return for at least 2 hours. If not I will stay, make your lives miserable by shoving on your weak attempts at blind steals, destroying your continuation bets and eating your blinds mercilessly. Eventually I will crack one of you for $40, then leave and be back in exactly 30 minutes to ruin your day again. Discuss amongst yourselves, but I need your answer before I have to post the Big Blind".
While possibly morally ambiguous, if nothing else this attempt at extortion should at least throw several of my table mates into full on uber-tilt, especially when they continuously see this at every table they play at. Just a thought. Let me know what you think, or if you have a better wording for my new "table greeting"
I say that we take this a step further. From now on, whenever I sit down at a new table (lets say a $1-$2 NL Full Ring game) I will make the table an offer. It the chat box, as soon as I buy in for my Short stack and they all know what I am there to do, I will type in the Chat Box something along the lines of:
"Attention Players. Since none of you want me here and I will only leave when I double up, I will cut you all a deal. If each of you pony up $4, I will go ahead and leave and not return for at least 2 hours. If not I will stay, make your lives miserable by shoving on your weak attempts at blind steals, destroying your continuation bets and eating your blinds mercilessly. Eventually I will crack one of you for $40, then leave and be back in exactly 30 minutes to ruin your day again. Discuss amongst yourselves, but I need your answer before I have to post the Big Blind".
While possibly morally ambiguous, if nothing else this attempt at extortion should at least throw several of my table mates into full on uber-tilt, especially when they continuously see this at every table they play at. Just a thought. Let me know what you think, or if you have a better wording for my new "table greeting"
Sunday, September 13, 2009
The Law of Unintended Consequences
We see this everywhere. A smoking ban in bars leads to more drunk driving deaths when people drive further to get to bar that has heated outdoor smoking areas. Obama's "Cash for Clunkers" program hurts the Demolition Derby sport by causing a drought of old vehicles that now going straight to the junkyard. Why should we care? Because all players who are upset by the short stack epidemic are witnessing this happening right now. The culprit? A powerful new generation of poker software that we all love and enjoy.
Many people have suggested that we raise the minimum buy in. I would like to point out, though, that the minimum buy in has always been 20BB pretty much across the board. Yet if you peel the layers back a little further, you will see that there only exists a short stack swarm at sites where the newer highly advanced HUD's are not only rampant, but encouraged. After all, the 20BB minimum buy in exists at the Cake Poker network as well, yet there are very few short stackers who exist there and none of them are particularly dangerous...because of the site wide ban on this software.
The highly detailed HUD's available through HEM and PT3 et al. paved the way for short stackers who can now slice through you with razor thin margins because of a huge list of very specific stats that can track your patterns of play from every single position at the table and can feed this information into advanced simulators on their free time like StoxEV that can measure their expected value down to the PENNY. Even if a player has never logged any hands against you, they can still purchase hand histories by the million and have a complete profile against you as soon as they wake up at noon.
So is this new generation of software aids the true danger to the game? I would wager a "yes" here. Even Kyle "Cottonseed" Hendon made a remark in one of his videos on Stox Poker that the HEM HUD is so good that it is almost like cheating. While the lines have blurred tremendously since their inception, it is certainly quickly reaching that point. Had you explained to an old time pro back in 1999 what people were doing now to the game they almost certainly would have called it such.
Many people have suggested that we raise the minimum buy in. I would like to point out, though, that the minimum buy in has always been 20BB pretty much across the board. Yet if you peel the layers back a little further, you will see that there only exists a short stack swarm at sites where the newer highly advanced HUD's are not only rampant, but encouraged. After all, the 20BB minimum buy in exists at the Cake Poker network as well, yet there are very few short stackers who exist there and none of them are particularly dangerous...because of the site wide ban on this software.
The highly detailed HUD's available through HEM and PT3 et al. paved the way for short stackers who can now slice through you with razor thin margins because of a huge list of very specific stats that can track your patterns of play from every single position at the table and can feed this information into advanced simulators on their free time like StoxEV that can measure their expected value down to the PENNY. Even if a player has never logged any hands against you, they can still purchase hand histories by the million and have a complete profile against you as soon as they wake up at noon.
So is this new generation of software aids the true danger to the game? I would wager a "yes" here. Even Kyle "Cottonseed" Hendon made a remark in one of his videos on Stox Poker that the HEM HUD is so good that it is almost like cheating. While the lines have blurred tremendously since their inception, it is certainly quickly reaching that point. Had you explained to an old time pro back in 1999 what people were doing now to the game they almost certainly would have called it such.
Saturday, September 12, 2009
Friday, August 21, 2009
The Perils of Emulating Your Own Success
It would seem a very rational thing to do. You pick the game of your choice, learn the fundamentals and mechanics of solid play and then slowly become a winner in that game. Though you don't quite know fully what you are doing yet, you try some creative plays and some of them turn out to be brilliant. Perhaps you got a little lucky here and there with these plays, but mostly they were fundamentally sound and based on good observation of your opponents and the flow of the game. You congratulate yourself and vow that you will do these good deeds again. Well done!
On the other hand, during your experimental phase you also make some plays that don't turn out quite so well. Actually, that is an understatement- they are monumental fucking failures. In fact, had you eliminated two of the plays from your session, you would have actually come out a small winner for the day. You take these harsh lessons to bed with you, only this time you vow to never make these plays again.
Now that you are bumping around less frequently in the dark and have pruned all of the major atrocities from your game, you start winning fast now...and BIG. You could keep on trying new things, but you are a professional and you have bills to pay, so better to just stick with the formula- at least for now.
Right now I play x tables with y win rate for z hours per week. If I play x + 3 tables for z + 15 hours a week, even if I can maintain a win rate of just y - b, I can pay off my car and my credit cards in 5 1/2 months!! ...And all I have to do is keep doing what I've been doing!
Except for one tiny little problem...it just doesn't work anymore. Is it the variance? The bad beats? The fact that your opponents are catching on to you? Perhaps a combination of all these things, but they are merely symptoms of the real problem. The real problem is that by failing to react appropriately to the situation at hand yet still playing fundamentally decent in a formulaic fashion, you moved from an exploitative/optimal strategy to one that is only approaching optimal, at best. This what occurs when you begin applying your commonly most effective lines to every single hand.
Once this finally dawns on you, it truly becomes easy to understand. Your best lines were developed in response to game flow that existed THEN but is not likely to be present NOW. In the past, you were to trying to play GREAT, not just ADEQUATE. However, in all likelihood, the lines that you are using formulaicly at this point are probably rarely awful, but they also going to rarely be great as well. And great play is what creates good win rates and solid monthly incomes. Making the occasional horrific play that you would not normally make is not necessarily something to be avoided at all costs, but rather shows that you still have blood pumping through your veins. The only types of plays that should be cut completely from your game are those odds defying blundering all-in calls on the turn.
By emulating your past success, you are settling for mediocrity and being just plain lazy. The bottom line is very simple- you must strive to get a little bit better every day. That is how you got to where you are right now. This is the very minimal requirement, even if you plan on only keeping your current win rate. As they say "if you aren't slowly getting better, you are slowly getting worse."
On the other hand, during your experimental phase you also make some plays that don't turn out quite so well. Actually, that is an understatement- they are monumental fucking failures. In fact, had you eliminated two of the plays from your session, you would have actually come out a small winner for the day. You take these harsh lessons to bed with you, only this time you vow to never make these plays again.
Now that you are bumping around less frequently in the dark and have pruned all of the major atrocities from your game, you start winning fast now...and BIG. You could keep on trying new things, but you are a professional and you have bills to pay, so better to just stick with the formula- at least for now.
Right now I play x tables with y win rate for z hours per week. If I play x + 3 tables for z + 15 hours a week, even if I can maintain a win rate of just y - b, I can pay off my car and my credit cards in 5 1/2 months!! ...And all I have to do is keep doing what I've been doing!
Except for one tiny little problem...it just doesn't work anymore. Is it the variance? The bad beats? The fact that your opponents are catching on to you? Perhaps a combination of all these things, but they are merely symptoms of the real problem. The real problem is that by failing to react appropriately to the situation at hand yet still playing fundamentally decent in a formulaic fashion, you moved from an exploitative/optimal strategy to one that is only approaching optimal, at best. This what occurs when you begin applying your commonly most effective lines to every single hand.
Once this finally dawns on you, it truly becomes easy to understand. Your best lines were developed in response to game flow that existed THEN but is not likely to be present NOW. In the past, you were to trying to play GREAT, not just ADEQUATE. However, in all likelihood, the lines that you are using formulaicly at this point are probably rarely awful, but they also going to rarely be great as well. And great play is what creates good win rates and solid monthly incomes. Making the occasional horrific play that you would not normally make is not necessarily something to be avoided at all costs, but rather shows that you still have blood pumping through your veins. The only types of plays that should be cut completely from your game are those odds defying blundering all-in calls on the turn.
By emulating your past success, you are settling for mediocrity and being just plain lazy. The bottom line is very simple- you must strive to get a little bit better every day. That is how you got to where you are right now. This is the very minimal requirement, even if you plan on only keeping your current win rate. As they say "if you aren't slowly getting better, you are slowly getting worse."
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