Pete Clarke is out to destroy low stakes.

His courses aren't bad, theory and/or exploit/mda based. If you watch his recent videos, you'll see he's quite honest and does a mea culpa on how wrong he was in the past with his almost exclusive focus on theory. Anyone who watched them and didn't like, and is already a player decent enough to be able to judge it, please post an honest review here itt??? Because honest/blunt criticism, from someone who is already good enough to actually give it, is 10x more valuable than even the best graph in the world.

I can't do it myself because A) I liked and someone who disliked and has good reasons for it will offer more value and B) I don't want to sound too arrogant implying I'm that good of a poker player 😃

Actually I have two negative criticisms, that are not related to the content per se:

A) The way Peter talks, he is talking about something, than all of a sudden he goes on a tangent, starts gibbering, then tells some random joke out of nowhere that is not funny at all, and this ends up adding 20/30% of the time that would be well spent if he kept the focus 100% on the subject, or at least try to learn to be real funny.

B) He puts a question, then say we should pause to answer it but he either do it in half a second, or he remembers something and start talking and then all of a sudden says I hope you have paused the video. Dude, give us time, please don't keep talking 100% of the time in a course. Don't you know what a pause is?

I think his content is really good, but it’s annoying that he keeps making up terms that already have names, like landing and finishing equity, true ev, etc

I watched some of the older videos after this thread was posted, since i'd never heard of him before. idk why there's so much criticism of videos that are made primarily for entertainment.

His videos are fine.

The hate stems from his coaching material being extremely pricey when he hasn't proven he can beat the stakes most of his students play.

his students play low stakes no?

there's no way he doesn't beat low stakes

I agree he's not terrible, he's an average 100nl reg. If you're a microstakes player watching his videos will make you improve.

But his understanding of poker is limited: he would get ripped apart at 500nl on stars for instance. And I keep seeing carrot poker youtube thumbnails with "HIGH STAKES PRO" which is ridiculous and insulting to real HS players who've done the work to get to their level for Peter to act like he's one of them

Because he has content involving someone who plays 500NL+.

how can you possibly say he's scamming people and/or is his content overpriced? you know how many coaches are charging $500 an hour to do hand reviews/put in no prep. Also the sheer number of hours he must have put in to create these comprehensive courses? And not to mention the constant and FREE content he puts out on youtube.

I often refer people over to his content because it's simply some of the best out there imo. And even though i play higher than him, i VERY regularly learn a bunch of concepts from his stuff.

But i guess having haters usually means you're doing something right soooo

I'm not sure man, I feel like the average 100nl reg is way worse than that

Charlie carrel and probably others criticized him for saying on his website something like “ I’m a poker TEACHER and I’m confident in that skill, but I don’t have time to put in volume.”
In peters telling, the reason he did this is because prior to that, he had some results on his website for transparency but they weren’t large samples and people criticized him for that. So eventually he got annoyed with people constantly asking him why his volume was low and saying he shouldn’t be posting any sample at all unless he had a larger sample so he just removed results entirely.

Yeah, the high stakes pro is his guest in the videos. It’s still a bit of a crock because it’s an American player on a ring fenced site, where typically mid stakes is the highest stake that regularly runs on those sites. If you play 10-50k hands a year of nl1k/2k, but the vast majority of your volume is lower, it doesn’t make you a high stakes pro. Imo at least. I guess it’s debatable. But whatever, that’s just Peter playing the YouTube algorithm like anyone else. It’s not technically untrue.

What should the title be, something like, "High stakes pro, but he plays in a fenced pool, so technically high stakes pro even though he plays in a weak pool where everyone knows that high stakes is like playing low stakes?"

Ragging on him for using an accurate title doesn't make any sense at all to me.

it's funny he's getting so much hate considering he's now actually trying to go out and prove that he can beat low stakes and aiming to put real volume in. He's also not an "average 100nl" player, I was a 100nl "average" reg stuck there for 100s of thousands of hands and would say he was much better than me at the time. Either way, the cost of coaching is highly subjective imo, and I personally found his course valuable.

I also disagree with the idea that the graphs or results make a coach. Poker is such a complicated game I don't think this can be a true. An example is quant trading. A trader probably couldn't even tell you what makes him a good trader, just a mix of intuition, quantitative skills, and hard work. Just because a poker player is good doesn't mean he can explain what made him good or even what he does that works better than theory.

Following the trading analogy, you could improve as a trader by learning options theory from a maths professor who's never traded in his life. Similarly, there are coaches who probably don't constitute the full package of a high stakes player, namely the theory, exploits, mindset, and millions more things that make them good, but they do have an understanding of parts of the game that is invaluable.

Ultimately I think results are helpful if you are looking for a high stakes player to mentor you in all parts of the game, not just strategy, but ideally the coaching speaks for itself, and I think Pete's does based on my experience with FTGU and other people's experiences.

I do think he's gonna quit the challenge because the players on GG RNC are idiots/nits and the entire pool should be banished off the face of the earth. Playing reg tables is apparently not a high stakes skill in pete's repertoire

Idk dawg. It shouldn’t matter what stakes you’re at if you’re a good coach. He could have just said American pro. But he said high stakes pro because the algorithm likes that. Which is totally fine.

To be clear, I don't hate his stuff that I've seen on YT. I was just pointing out what I've seen others say about him and his material (mainly pricing).

It would be interesting to see if anyone's taken any of his more expensive courses and similar priced courses from Uri or Upswing (guys that play much higher than Pete).

How do they compare?

kind of funny that nearly every positive comment about him comes from other people selling coaching services 😀

I do not sell coaching services

there have been about 8 comments defending him. there's one(?) coach out of those?

sorry i thought you two were both coaches and then with seeing wereall i thought it was funny, guess i was wrong

I've had students that have also purchased 1 on 1 lessons with him and they were happy with his services.

I think it's pretty clear that Pete's private coaching services are overpriced, or at least not close to a high-value proposition on the coaching market. I also think it's next to impossible he can have the massive winrate pre rb he thinks he'll have at 100rnc.

That said, he clearly has a strong understanding of both theoretical and exploitative play, he's good at explaining the concepts in an easily understandable way, and he's released boatloads of high-value free content. The guy is definitely not a scammer by any stretch and he can easily beat lowstakes and teach others to become winners in lowstakes games.

Putting a ton of effort into building a brand (including piles of free content) and then utilizing that brand to sell your services at a premium is not unethical or scammy, it's standard business practice. He also never bills himself as being a highstakes killer or endboss and doesn't try to deceive people about his level or expertise at all, frequently saying that he prioritizes coaching and building that skillset over putting in volume.

It seems hard to criticize that approach just because it's non-standard. I do think he's overpriced, but coaching is an open market and he's not doing anything unethical. I hope he gives this challenge a fair shake because it'll be interesting to see how he does.

Average reg on GG mid stakes is losing -3.5bb/100 pre rb

from the perspective of a recreational zoom 0.10 player I value his free content and I can see things I can immediately apply to my game and it is relatively well structured, which is one of the main issues I have always seen with poker content: poorly structured and hard to be applied appropriately in practice . I have seen paid material from high stakes players that in my opinion was of considerably less quality, of course I understand I'm not the target audience and it is hard to judge. Ultimately you don't have to be the best player to be a great teacher. I think he might be getting outshined though as Saulo costa YT material is even better in my opinion and coming from a more "reputable" player

I don't like however the way he is handling this challenge either, sounds like it will take him years to accomplish that sample and the winrate he's set as a benchmark sounds ridiculous to me, perhaps I don't have the same grasp of edges in poker but I would say it is much more narrower when I see the worst recs in my microstakes pool losing at "just" average -35bbs/100, I don't know how you can possibly achieve a +15bb/100 edge pre-rake over regs at zoom100 that are likely professionals. If it is possible I think it must take an absolute juggernaut with plenty of population data to achieve.