A true amateur will never win the Main Event
Someone like Moneymaker/Raymer/Gold/Yang will never win the Main Event. The caliber of play is too strong, and too many smart tough players are using GTO strategy.
We saw in the heads-up how Griff, despite having the chip lead, was badly outplayed. Heads-up NLHE has been solved by computers, and Tamayo has GTO down to a science.
One can argue that it's bad for poker, as poker needs a charismatic likable amateur (and/or a woman!) to win the Main Event in order to experience another poker boom.
Not sure what you mean by "grand conclusions".
I spent my career in sales. If Tomayo's coaches are trying to sell people on the value of their coaching, it doesn't seem to me that Tomayo's performance is a good case study, unless they told the world he was terrible and would have been dead money without their help.
The online chatter is that the solver on the rail "isn't a good look" for the game. My perspective is that it's a terrible look for their business, if he's supposed to be the poster bo
It's shortish stack heads up poker. Any remotely competent player shouldn't have worse than 45% (and this is probably low) playing directly against a solver, Phil Ivey or anyone else.
Variance and card distribution are far too large of factors.
If they played a 100 or a 1000 matches and Griff won half itd be a bad look for solvers.
Literally nobody things he's the poster boy for solver dominance. Almost everyone says what he did is unethical. Most think it's cheating. And most think it's terrible for poker.
I thought Griff played better than most of the professionals at the last 2 tables or so. He played it like it was a $250 tournament. Some of them were so cautious, not defending their blinds, folding to small cbets, not making plays, not getting it in with AK or strong draws, etc.
It's shortish stack heads up poker. Any remotely competent player shouldn't have worse than 45% (and this is probably low) playing directly against a solver, Phil Ivey or anyone else.
Variance and card distribution are far too large of factors.
If they played a 100 or a 1000 matches and Griff won half itd be a bad look for solvers.
So...you agree with me then, that an amateur can still win, despite the increased use of solvers by pros?
I think you may have misunderstood the point I was making, because you seem to be saying the same thing. All the debate about Tomayo's rail using solvers mostly avoids trying to quantify if he actually had an appreciable edge as a result.
If he had an edge, it didn't appear to be large. I agree that variance and card distribution are huge factors, and in this instance, they happened to break in Tomayo's favor. That wouldn't seem to be a great advertisement for the use of solvers.
Literally nobody things he's the poster boy for solver dominance. Almost everyone says what he did is unethical. Most think it's cheating. And most think it's terrible for poker.
Really? Because you said this, which sounds like the same thing:
Someone like Moneymaker/Raymer/Gold/Yang will never win the Main Event. The caliber of play is too strong, and too many smart tough players are using GTO strategy.
We saw in the heads-up how Griff, despite having the chip lead, was badly outplayed. Heads-up NLHE has been solved by computers, and Tamayo has GTO down to a science.
One can argue that it's bad for poker, as poker needs a charismatic likable amateur (and/or a woman!) to win the Main Event in order to experience another poker boom.
I'd say before making such a claim, you may want to understand how the law of large numbers and probability work.
Ballpark, what percentage of the main event players do you think were pros using solvers? 10%? 20%? More? If 80%-90% are amateurs, the odds of an amateur winning would remain pretty high, even if the pros are using solvers. And I would bet that fewer than 10% were pros using solvers.
If the best player always won, no one would bother playing. Even if all the pros are playing perfectly according to GTO, they'll still need to overcome variance, repeatedly, which is hard to do over the course of a huge tournament.
I'm certain that solvers can improve someone's game. But even the best player in the world has to chop his way through a field of 10k to win the main. Doing so requires both luck and skill. So long as the players relying more on luck than skill greatly outnumber those using skill to counter luck, I wouldn't be overly certain that an amateur will never win.
Never ever, so amateurs should stay away from the main
The whole point of playing the main is that the amateurs simply won't stay away from the main.
There is a reason why it is known as the softest $10K by far on the tournament trail.
Just remember - If you can't spot the sucker in your first half hour at the table, then you are the sucker. Guys around here will tell ya, you play for a living, it's like any other job. You don't gamble, you grind it out.
The reason the wsop has hit ridiculous numbers is because all the people who began playing around the boom are old enough to afford it. Those players stuck around and there were a lot of them, with a lot of them being pros or strong recreational players who moved on.
It's likely peaked at this point if there isn't something that sparks the younger generation but I fear that the guys in their 50s-70s were the last true "gambling" generation and kids in the 25-15 age will either want to approach i
This is a great point overall and I think one people might overlook.
Another way to look at this is back during the original poker boom (Moneymaker winning the main) there were Pro gamers leaving pro gaming to become poker pros (i.e. Elky for example) because there was a lot more money and championships to make and win then in gaming.
Now gaming is obviously massive and there's multiple paths to "making it" as a pro gamer ( streaming, competing. etc). And you can do it without risking much money OR losing. You have to put work in, luck plays some factor, but IMO it's the poker of younger generation. Almost anyone can take their shot and spend $0 doing so. It's also more mainstream , more wildly accepted, and much wider opportunities for growth, fame, sponsorships, income. Why would someone who wants to play games for a living play poker when video games offer much more opportunity for many?
I'm gonna push back on the idea that it's easier to make $$$ in video games than in poker.
Go sit a 1/3 game anywhere in the country and you can be profitable if you have solid fundamentals.
Streaming and pro gaming are ruthlessly competitive, with many many people competing for a few spots.
Making it as a streamer is more akin to making it on the high roller circuit or as a poker content creator.
It's much more of a pipe dream than finding a beatable poker game IMO.
It was amazing how many stripers would drop in on a limit hold'em game at the Mirage or TI around 2005.
Candy stripers? I don’t remember seeing many of them 20 years ago.
Of course an amateur will win again. Variance is huge and chances are the main event will continue for a very long time.
Literally nobody things he's the poster boy for solver dominance. Almost everyone says what he did is unethical. Most think it's cheating. And most think it's terrible for poker.
"Almost everyone" = a handful of incest enthusiasts who don't understand the wsop rules, and continue assert that GTO isn't winning poker despite having spent less than 45 seconds on average looking at any data.
"Almost everyone" = a handful of incest enthusiasts who don't understand the wsop rules, and continue assert that GTO isn't winning poker despite having spent less than 45 seconds on average looking at any data.
First within rules does not mean ethical. Whether the actions were within rules is its own debate with some arguments on both sides. OTOH, pretty much unanimous the actions were not ethical and definitely not a good view for poker.
As to the GTO debate, you are literally contradicting yourself. If these "few" were saying GTO isn't winning poker, then they would not care if GTO assistance was being given during the tournament. It is the fact that GTO assistance certain can impact results that is driving folks to say what was done was wrong.
Personally since I a) don't play tournaments and b) don't play high stakes, I really don't have a horse in the who debate other than sharing that I have not heard any positive talk around the tables. But it is also rapidly dying down.
I've always said "pro" is poorly defined since the most common definition is someone who plays for a living but there's shitregs who play 1/2 for $40k a year and live with 8 roommates, and guys who may have crushed the game and then moved onto careers in finance or tech who would technically be "recs" even if they're great players. Is Doug Polk a "rec" if he makes his primary income from Upswing and The Lodge?
My definition of pro is something like "treats it professionally with things like recor
You got some valid points. To touch more on who is a pro and who isnt, it's kinda hard to define who is a pro and who isnt. I can guarantee you there is a lot of "recreationals" that are significantly stronger than the guys that were pros during or pre the poker boom and even up to black friday probably.
To make some type of oversimplification you could say early wsop era consisted off:
- professionals ( considering there probably wasn't backing and people being pros at lowstakes to a high extent)
- recreationals
There wasn't much of a nuance considering anyone who read a few poker books and was a winning player certainly counted as a pro.
Nowadays you got:
- professionals
- oldschool pros that probably are closer to recreationals in any 10k outside of the US than to a pro
- lowstakes pros that get some type of stake
- serious recreationals that study with solvers/play a lot/might be winning players in big private games etc
- recreationals
Is the WSOP main a high value tournament still? Yes. Is it tougher than it was 5 years ago/10 years ago/20 years ago? Yes obviously. But also a even bigger reason is that considering there is so many new groups of players, the recreationals are just a very small % of the field relatively to what it used to be. He was damn close to winning and the computer non sense doesn't give a much of a edge as people think. Essentially the likelyhood of a rec winning is way smaller, but it's mainly because of the construction of players in the field.
I also think people underestimate that an amateur might also prefer to see a good player winning. They might not have seen Moneymaker as a bad player who got lucky but as a very good player who was "undiscovered" and that they might too have a hidden innate talent. The skill aspect of the game can be appealing even to unskilled players. If you want something that anyone can win, the lottery already exists. And for people who want something in between, the Mystery Bounties seem to have scratched
I missed this point the first time around, and it reminds me of what I thought at the time Moneymaker won:
Moneymaker got his seat through a satellite on Stars. At the time I was having modestly good results online (which is to say, I would win and then tilt off my winnings), but friends of mine were having spectacularly good online results. The rule of thumb had already emerged that an online stake was equivalent in difficulty to a live stake of ten times the size. E.g., Beating online 2-4 limit holdem was said to take the same skill level as beating live 20-40.
So I took it for granted that this "amateur" player who won an online satellite was an experienced and therefore tough competitor, and I compared him to a baseball player who had done well in the Japanese leagues coming over to the United States and dominated the game, seemingly out of nowhere.
It turned out that I was wrong, that Chris Moneymaker was an ordinary guy who got lucky to win a main event package and then got lucky again to take it down.
But then, the real talent that had come up through online play started to transition to live and began to dominate the game. Galfond, Dwan, and so on.
CM was an ordinary guy, but he adapted well as the tournament went on and made great reads. Some big names busted out poorly against him.
He got lucky as all ME winners do, but nowhere near as much as Ferguson for one did.
But the overall point about diamonds in the rough is correct. As Greg has said, he was actually well ahead of most of the field regarding correct strategy when he won the following year.
An amateur won the $250K high roller with a 75 entry field.
But no true Scotsman -- errr,, amateur could have done it.
didnt Darvin Moon come second in the 2009 Main Event eventually losing to Joe Cada
