When others comment on how tight/nitty you are

the entire forum is basically weekend warriors playing 1/2 lol. i dont think the hands / thought processes here are really reflective of reality and its why ive been very vocally skeptical of the crushing claims everyone has made.

i think the online forum is more realistic where even .05 / .1 ppl run hands thru solvers. i put money on acr to practice recently, and even people that are playing comparably low stakes do alot of stuff really well. poker imo is an incredibly tough and saturated market now. theres still edge but the idea that people winning 75k or 100k a year at midstakes while not looking at preflop charts is like 5-10 years out of date imo

What you said at the time was if you eanns expand your CC range from co vs btn, youd do it with suited hands, which ive implemented and mostly found to feel better than Axo. I agree A9o oop as a 3b is ok. I also am just less inclined to cold call in a 3 blind game which i play more of these days.

Just smile when you leave with their chips
😀

Oh, I 100% agree with all of this.

And I really agree with basically everything you said in this thread, but for one brief moment where you seemed to be saying that midstakes live is all Euro crushers now and any bright eyed 100nl player thinking they can easily win at 5/T has another thing coming.

I guess connecting this post to that other one, I'll just clarify that there's a big gap between "looking at preflop charts" and using advanced strats and then a big gap between using those strats and implementing them competently and consistently and then a big gap between the existence of players who implement various amounts of those strats competently and consistently at a stake and all of those strats being the price of admission at a stake.

(Using "advanced strats" for lack of a better word.)

To continue the online comparison, this is essentially why 500z is so much harder than 10z, even though most 10z players have their (basic) charts down pat.

Not even trying to be flip, I think it's more like 100x for FF on any major site (not WPTgold or geolocked games). (Comparing buy-in to buy-in and assuming live is usually 200bb max).

I'm confident 10z is at least as tough as 2/5/1000 NL. 10z is 3:1 reg:fish, and that includes a lot of "fish" that wouldn't register as a mark for live players, like 20/12 style regfish that are probably tagged as "decent" or "marginal winner" in live games and 12/5s who'd be tagged as "nit." No one (even Doug Polk on any number of his bankroll challenges) is beating 10nl at the 40bb/100 clip 2/5NL players claim, even at relatively lower rake.

I'm (at least pretending to) defer to others on 5/T+ because it seems at least plausible that another few years of solver study + the effective ceiling on available games creates a bottleneck of talent, but nothing I've seen during my time there or since has made me think it's harder than a 25z game. (To be honest, I'd be disappointed if it's even that hard, and I'm still extremely skeptical it is based on anything I hear on here or elsewhere.)

Which, to be clear, it shouldn't be. Winning 20bb/100 pre rake of 25 hand-per-hour poker with no rakeback is a slim enough margin to barely keep your cat fed during the breakeven stretches; you shouldn't have to get by on online low-stakes winrates.

Which I guess means I still effectively agree with sub that the "dream is dust" if the dream was to make quit your job and make $100/hr or whatever. But for me, the dream is to eke out any kind of profit from my side hobby where I sit on a 5-figure stack and run 4-figure bluffs while casually eating an apple, so that we can have something interesting to talk about at parties.

If we're all being honest with ourselves, that's the dream for most of us here, isn't it?

Well maybe if you didn't turn down my discord date we wouldn't have to litigate the finer points of all our half-agreements in someone else's thread on an unrelated topic 😒

Lol, appreciate being tangentially involved in your discussion.. one thing I will say is that I think the most frustrating thing about poker for me is that it's tremendously difficult to evaluate whether strategy tweaks are successful or not since "feeling" it is super-susceptible to cognitive bias and in terms of raw results I would need close to a year of play just to have 90% confidence in beating the rake (std < ~7bb/hr or whatever). Every day brings new fish to exploit and you rarely get enough of a sample size to have perfect reads on their exploitability, etc. The wealth of data online is amazing by comparison, but it's no fun compared to live. On the other hand, the difficulty in being conclusively disproven is why the fish keep spawning...

guess we're screwed then :(

meh. unpopular opinion but recs really dont ranges in bunch of lines / sizings / timings / live tell configurations / game flows. you should be able to get clear, immediate, somewhat useful feedback nearly every time you do something weird vs them based on what they do, their hand, what they say, timings etc. i think the biggest challenge is really not taking it too far and understanding when plays that would normally work even vs this specific player are not going to

start with low hanging fruit and gradually increase. but come from a place where poker is war and you want to mercilessly crush your opponents as opposed to show up and execute your preselected strategy better than the opposition. while optimal probably lies in the middle, i think you'll find you can get away with way more vs the recs than you think. or you will go broke and lose all of your money. but either way, excitement!

agree with some of this and disagree with other parts. would take too long to explain though.

In particular, I think the original thesis was "play more than a 10% range from LP against a fish open", and I would still argue it's pretty difficult to come up with meaningfully sound conclusions about the effect of doing this (especially "do my abilities and/or playstyle make it profitable?") over any reasonably short timespan. Yes, you can infer a lot from "feels" and intuitive pattern matching about specific spots and hands, but it's just incredibly dangerous because while humans are quite good at it, we are also very susceptible to certain biases. Probably a lot easier online where I assume you could filter statistics to cases where you played 85-90th percentile hands in that spot, see subtle changes to other stats, etc.

I think we tried all the big wordy stuff and it was probably less effective than following sub's initial suggestion: Look at some ante charts.

The logic that skill edge just adds some EV to the system that is effectively like there's dead money in the form of antes might sound dumb and simplistic, but it's honestly quite sound and definitely far better than all 3 trillion combined pages of arguments on here about when to play what hand types en masse.

Yes - my point is just that actually measuring the result is frustratingly difficult because of the inherent level of variance in poker. I agree that the theoretical argument here is sound, but if you wanted to get very specific in theory then a certain amount of EV from postflop skill vs. fish should warrant a specific extension of range, which is difficult to be precise.

Like I could go play wider from LP and win 20 bb/hr over the next 50 hours of play and it could be because I did that, or because I have also amped up my level of general study recently, or it could be luck (like the time I woke up in the BB with AA and 110bb in the pot already). I'm not saying I won't try it out (you guys have a convincing argument) but simply that knowing for sure whether it's working will be very difficult to measure. Most other games of skill are somewhat more tangible in this regard.

i think the need for certainty is a detriment if you are playing vs extremely weak opponents. i could make some nauseating platitude about how online poker is science and live is art but i will spare you. around and around we go in a circle in this thread.

I know live pros who make way more than 100k/year in 2025 who never look at preflop charts.

If you are playing bad loose/passive players, playing extremely tight is not the way to optimize your win rate. You should also be raising and 3-betting more than most and maybe bluffing and semibluffing more than most, so you usually won't appear that tight.

No disagreement, just a source of frustration that's all.

There's something weird that happens in our stupid human brains where when we apply any rigor or falsifiability to our approach we get frustrated by the fact that it doesn't meet those standards perfectly, but we give a free pass to the fact that "just winging it" has zero rigor or falsifiability whatsoever.