Re: Paul Phillips: class act
 

[ QUOTE ]
I know of multiple people who are not as good as him who have much higher winrates than that over hundreds of thousands of hands of poker.

[/ QUOTE ]

Sure you do! And everyone knows that Armegeddon will be here in the year 2000! Oops, did we miss that too. Everybody has a story of all of these wealthy internet poker superstars! Show me the stats--- maybe then I'll believe it!

Vince

Re: Paul Phillips: class act
 

are you seriously questioning wether or not El D made 200/hr over 250k hands at 10/20?

Re: Paul Phillips: class act
 

Yes

Vince

Re: Paul Phillips: class act
 

pokerhorse?

Re: Paul Phillips: class act
 

[ QUOTE ]
Everybody has a story of all of these wealthy internet poker superstars! Show me the stats--- maybe then I'll believe it!

[/ QUOTE ]

Not sure why you would believe spreadsheet or pokertracker shots any more than someone's word, since that stuff is trivial to forge. Anyway, I don't care what you believe, I was just pointing out that imo it's unlikely elindauer is lying, that's all.

As for all the people making tons on the Internet, just take a look. Many of the regulars on this site who were playing 10/20 or 15/30 a year ago are now playing 100/200, 300/600, 25/50NL, 50/100NL, etc as their regular games. Maybe they all have just been diligently depositing money every day to get the bankroll for those games - or, imagine this, maybe they actually won it.

Read this from Eric!
 

Read the following and I'll show you why I don't believe. It is a recent post by this Eric guy. It's on confidence intervals. Go to the bottom and read the last paragraph. then tell me how many hands (and hours) that this super pro is basing his 15-30 stats on. If 300 to 600 hours is significant enough to determine that he is a winning pro at 15-30 then I guess you are right. I just don''t buy it!

"Mike just dropped a monster post in which he says, to sum up, that limit poker is a joke because you have to play 25 million hands to know whether or not you're any good. He uses this argument to imply that the luck factor in limit hold 'em is very high.

I have now seen statements like this many times in many forms, and I've never seen anyone bother to debunk it, so I'm going to try to do it now. Here's the deal:

Let's say we look only at a player's results, and we attempt to determine if this player is a winning player. Fine. We check out his EV, we look at his standard dev, and we calculate a confidence interval. As Mike points out, correctly, we have to have a huge number of hands to determine somewhat conclusively that this player is a winner. Of course, this calculation uses no knowledge of poker whatsoever.

In real life though, we have much more information. Namely, we can look at the actual hands that were played, both by the player and by the opponents, to aid us in our estimate of how much money this player is making.

For example, if I see a player call 3 cold with A8, I don't need 2 million hands to tell me he's a losing player. I can do it in one. And if I'm playing with this guy, and he's losing money, then I'm winning it. Now I just look around the table, and look at all my opponents this way. If I can identify lots of obvious leaks, then I must be winning. It's that simple.

I've played about 30K hands of 15/30. Using confidence intervals, I can barely prove that I'm a break even player. But I know I'm a substantial winner. I know I'm not just on a two standard dev hot streak. I know this, because I ignore the mathematics of confidence intervals and use the much faster converging mathematics of poker. I know that calling 3 cold with A8 is making a hugely losing play, one that I don't make. I know that playing any 2 suited is a losing proposition. And I know a lot of things more subtle than that. I can see the poker mistakes that my opponents make, and I know that I am winning money from them.

This confidence interval stuff has been blown way out of proportion.


Good luck.
Eric "


Vince

Re: Read this from Eric!
 

Two points.

1) If Eric has only played 30k hands of 15/30, he likely has very little idea about what his true win rate is. My winrate over 50k chunks of hands had pretty big differences. However, my cumulative winrate at 50k, 100k, 150k, etc was relatively constant.

2) I have never played w/ Eric, so I have no idea how he really plays. However, just based on the understanding of the game he has displayed in the posts of his I've read, I have no doubt that it wouldn't be a big deal for him to win $120/hr playing 15/30. That is based on comparing him to other players whose win rates I'm aware of over very large sample sizes. Of course, he could be a tilt-monkey or suffer from any number of problems that prevent him from being a significant winner. I don't know or care. My point was simply that the $120/hr he claimed was a very reasonable and believable number given what other people are making in that game.

Re: Read this from Eric!
 

Hi Masked Man:

Also, the paragraph the Vince references is similar to stuff I have written in the past. When you can see that many of your opponents are rountinely making significant errors and you do not make thsoe errors you have a pretty good edge.

best wishes,
Mason

Re: Paul Phillips: class act
 

[ QUOTE ]
Read the thread. I have an internet history with Mr. Phillips. If you do not detect his superiority feelings through the comments he makes to a few posters in this thread then you are just not listening or possibly living in a PP dream world.

Vince

[/ QUOTE ]

Are feelings of superiority still wrong when they are well-founded?

Also, it's pretty evident that if one non-family member genuinely likes and respects phillips (elindaur), it's one more than respects you, vince.

Re: Paul Phillips, $2-5 Mirage
 

Mason,

I think you, like many other repliers, are taking my comments to Paul to mean too much. I wasn't anywhere near the Bellagio when this happened, but The Ram has twice said his story is 100% accurate and I know him very well so I believe it did as well. The point of my post was that it's one thing for a poker player to have sucker privileges, but this is different. I think most of us understand the reasoning behind Paul's early play in that game and for what it's worth I think he's absolutely right for doing it. But Mason, if you just destroyed an entire 30-60 table while a young pro sitting next to you is also doing well and wants to tell you what a joy and experience it was to play with you, would you berate him about his play or taking his chips because he's awful? I should hope not. Especially if he has a certain red cover book in his hand with a pen. FWIW I think this thread has been blown way out of proportion.