Most significant thing about the bot...

[adanthar]

More disjointed stream of consciousness, continued from the other thread:

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Because Party might change its structure or because the fish will go somewhere else (for whatever reason) that has a different structure?

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It seems that 2+2 has developed into a community of people that basically feed off of the fish at exactly Party (and, to a lesser extent, Stars) 24/7. Stars has more postflop play to start with but during and after the middle stages of its MTT's it's even more all in/fold than Party is. This makes almost all of us very vulnerable to anything that changes conditions. Look how many threads there are about the 10+1 games getting marginally tighter - should that even matter, given a moronically incompetent bot can apparently beat the 20's for over 10%?

Aside from the regular $200 posters here, I know that eastbay, Irieguy, lorinda and I, along with a few others, are all capable of beating these games at any level. I don't put myself in first place from that group, but I feel I'm one of the better players here, and I just realized I'm scared of a goddamn 13 BB AJo hand.

That's ridiculous and it's spawned by the ridiculousness of Party's structure and horrible playerbase. This can't last. It might be bots, it might be the end of the poker boom, it might be fish deciding that Party sucks and (insert site here) has been on TV more...I don't know but all in or fold specialists aren't the future of this game. That's too easy for a bot to do.

Right now, I'm playing on Full Tilt. Their SNG's and multis take forever but I can crush them and they allow me to play postflop. When that nice rakeback/bonus runs out I may move somewhere else or I may not. All I know is I'm not coming back to Party full time until my game improves enough to sit in at a $200, raise that AJo and know what I'm doing with it no matter what the opponent or flop.

[El Maximo]

I agree Adanthar. Im starting to think that Party low limit SnGs aren't the weakest around. They are right up there but Ive been playing elsewhere a few times a week. Trying to find other spots to play. Especially during the day US EST time. Im liking the change so far. I still play Party at night but I want some options. I think if you look around you can find some really good games at some of the smaller sites.

[Oluwafemi]

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It appears to demonstrate that a player can be +$EV at $22 with preflop skills ONLY. This is pretty enlightening and significant, IMO.


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Hence my consistent statements that a monkey can beat the lower limits at Party. Wonder if it's possible to 16 table them with rakeback, using a modified variant of this bot's strategy? Maybe.

But I reiterate: if you want to be a consistent, long term big winner 3 years from now, quit playing Party SNG's and go somewhere else (at least for a while) to learn how to play postflop. I think this is a big hole in the games of 90% of the STT forum that no one's bothered to post about because most of us are too busy quadding Party where it doesn't apply...and it's got a potential to bite everyone here right in the ass.

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excellente!

[gumpzilla]

It seems to me (and I could well be wrong here) that current SNG structures are put together in order to have events that you can get over with pretty quickly. This seems to have two purposes: 1) many people who are sitting down to play a tournament don't want to get involved in something that's going to go much longer than an hour, 2) increasing the throughput of tournaments increases the rake. Reason 2, in particular, seems to me to suggest that SNG structures seem unlikely to become slow unless the games thin out to such a degree that massive slowdowns are necessary to get people back. So the incredible crunch at the end just seems to me to be something that is to be expected in the SNG form, given that speed seems to be a major design factor. I've no experience with casino SNG play, but my impression is that the story is pretty similar there, as well.

I have limited experience with MTTs (I play at Paradise, which to my understanding has unusually fast MTT structure), but it's the same situation there, as well. Once you get near the money the average stack tends to dip down to around 12-15 BBs, and since a lot of that is concentrated in the hands of a few people, you have a situation where many people are essentially in all-in specialist mode. The main difference to my mind is that you usually have a little more choice in who you try and steal from, since you're usually at a full table at this point with a pretty wide stack distribution.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that it seems to me that the problems you describe are just part of tournament (particularly online) poker. The speed breeds a preflop game. If people get sick of this, maybe tournaments will become less prominent and people will convert to playing ring games. My understanding is that the popularity of tournaments is a very recent phenomenon. But I think there are enough people playing in these tournaments that don't think/care about these strategy considerations that tournaments still have plenty of life in them.

EDIT: I notice that I forgot to bring up my question about Full Tilt. What's the blind structure there that makes the games slow? Do you think that offering a slow game is a good decision for them?

[Oluwafemi]

[ QUOTE ]
More disjointed stream of consciousness, continued from the other thread:

[ QUOTE ]
Because Party might change its structure or because the fish will go somewhere else (for whatever reason) that has a different structure?

[/ QUOTE ]

It seems that 2+2 has developed into a community of people that basically feed off of the fish at exactly Party (and, to a lesser extent, Stars) 24/7. Stars has more postflop play to start with but during and after the middle stages of its MTT's it's even more all in/fold than Party is. This makes almost all of us very vulnerable to anything that changes conditions. Look how many threads there are about the 10+1 games getting marginally tighter - should that even matter, given a moronically incompetent bot can apparently beat the 20's for over 10%?

Aside from the regular $200 posters here, I know that eastbay, Irieguy, lorinda and I, along with a few others, are all capable of beating these games at any level. I don't put myself in first place from that group, but I feel I'm one of the better players here, and I just realized I'm scared of a goddamn 13 BB AJo hand.

That's ridiculous and it's spawned by the ridiculousness of Party's structure and horrible playerbase. This can't last. It might be bots, it might be the end of the poker boom, it might be fish deciding that Party sucks and (insert site here) has been on TV more...I don't know but all in or fold specialists aren't the future of this game. That's too easy for a bot to do.

Right now, I'm playing on Full Tilt. Their SNG's and multis take forever but I can crush them and they allow me to play postflop. When that nice rakeback/bonus runs out I may move somewhere else or I may not. All I know is I'm not coming back to Party full time until my game improves enough to sit in at a $200, raise that AJo and know what I'm doing with it no matter what the opponent or flop.

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...and yet Party has the best SNG players in the world, a site who's structure almost eliminates post flop play and skill altogether. sounds like something i've already brought up as to why this assumption, at best, has a big LEAK in it.

[adanthar]

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...and yet Party has the best SNG players in the world, a site who's structure almost eliminates post flop play and skill altogether. sounds like something i've already brought up as to why this assumption, at best, has a big LEAK in it.

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Eliminating postflop play is not the same as eliminating skill. It's a different skill set, but most people will not be able to elaborate on why pushing AJo is better than raising, why you should fold it PF when there's 4 left and the short stack has 50 chips, etc.

The problem is that this skill set is mathematical and very beatable by a simple computer program that one person can write in their spare time. It doesn't make it any less skillful than chess, but there's no(t much) money in Internet chess.

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EDIT: I notice that I forgot to bring up my question about Full Tilt. What's the blind structure there that makes the games slow? Do you think that offering a slow game is a good decision for them?

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Full Tilt is weird. You start with 1500 chips, 6 minute rounds in SNG's and 10 in MTT's, and the blinds go up as follows:

15/30
20/40
25/50
30/60
40/80
50/100
60/120
80/160
100/200
120/240
150/300/25 [no antes in SNG's]
200/400/50

Etc. Their SNG's are not viable for a full time SNG player, but their multis are very good. I can't really say whether it's a good business decision on their part (probably not, actually) and it may not be viable to do these with Party-sized fields, but they're very profitable for a *good* player.