A brave new world for poker pros? Yeah right.

[mrbaseball]

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are they really that great in the first place

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If the "good" players can't beat the "bad" players one has to wonder just how good the good players are and just how bad the bad players are? If you can't adjust to new or different conditions and styles odds are you aint so good to begin with.

People are playing 100's of thousands of hands on the internet and gaining years and years of experience in months. This gives many internet "rookies" far more experience than grizzled B&M veterans. It's a different world now and people have to adapt or whither and die.

[Kurn, son of Mogh]

A random musing as to what I view as the fundamental conflict between the "old school" and the "newbies" particularly with respect to NLHE tournaments.

If you play NLHE exclusively in the tournament format, be they multis or SNGs, what you are trying to accomplish is to maximize your ROI based upon the constraints of a fixed risk level (buy-in) vs. a fixed pize structure. To accomplish this you formulate a strategy for moving your game pieces (chips) to accumulate more of your opponents' game pieces. This is the background of the online tournament player; the environment in which they learned the game.

Now, the pro players have learned most of their big bet poker from playing cash games that have no fixed risk and no fixed return. Each individual hand represents real monetary risk and return. This is the environment from which the pros have developed their strategy.

Is there an understanding out there that these two environments may well represent two radically different optimal strategies?

Why do pros bluff more? Perhaps because when that $3,000 that you have to put in to call the bet *really is* an additional $3,000 out of your pocket, the propensity to call may indeed be reduced? That is not the reality in a tournament.

I guess my point here is that it's the pros who have to adapt in tournament poker because the online crowd may actually be playing a different game. The pros learned their strategy by pushing real money to the middle of the table. The online folks learned their strategy by paying an entry fee and playing a board game. The apples and oranges difference between how the pros and online folks treat chips may be the biggest factor of all.

[Clarkmeister]

Robin,

A really good player knows how to play in any game condition. The fact of the matter is that the games are much easier to beat now than they were even 2 years ago. I really don't think its possible to argue otherwise. Did your friends forget how to play? Nah, they just never knew *how* to play in any type of game other than a tight passive one.

So they have trouble beating the real good games because of this. And when the games are bad, they run into new players (attracted by the preponderance of good games) who are much better than they are. They could do well with little variance as the best or 2nd best player in a bad game. That was the staple of many Vegas pros. They literally beat up on the same 20 or so people day in day out for years. Now when the games are bad, they are the 4th best at the table, and a significant problem arises.

[Clarkmeister]

"The apples and oranges difference between how the pros and online folks treat chips may be the biggest factor of all. "

I don't think this is it. Its only recently that there were that many cash NL games to play at all. Its not like they were all over the place.

Frankly, the difference is that many of the internet players are better, and the ones who aren't are quickly catching up. The only thing they lack is the experience of live play. The key thing to remember is that many of these internet players have played more NL tourney hands, and more entered more events in the last two years, than guys like Phil have played in their entire lifetimes . The learning curve has been drastically changed, and new players can catch up to, and even pass the older players very very quickly.

This holds true for limit also. Look at Astroglide as one example of many around here. Granted, he's been playing for more than 2 years, but in the last two years, I'd guess he's played more hands than someone like Roy Cooke has played in his entire life. Anyone who doesn't think that's significant is kidding themselves.

[nolanfan34]

Kurn and Clarknasty,

Great posts.

I think the point of how pros play tournaments vs. internet pros is a great observation. Internet players don't look at chips as being real money, only "game pieces" like Kurn said. A stone cold bluff is not as hard to call for an internet player I think, because they've likely played tons of MTT's where they've lost chips, been shortstacked, and doubled up over and over all in the course of an hour. I just think that creates a different mindset.

I know the discussion has been had many times in these forums, but what really makes someone a professional anyway? Well, the pros are clearly successful players who choose to make this their living. But there are plenty of players in a tournament of this size who likely COULD make a living playing poker, but choose not to for whatever reason. That makes poker unique I believe, and I really think it's something that the pros from the comments I've seen are still underestimating.

It will be interesting to see how the internet continues to change the game over the next few years. And the game WILL continue to change - whether the old-school pros adapt to it or not.

[Al_Capone_Junior]

Well, the ring games have gotten BETTER not worse. It's the tournaments that have gotten harder to beat. Any pro however, who cannot beat limit ring games right now, hasn't remembered enough about what it was like playing 3-6 in the middle of the night on a weekend in vegas, or any day in any casino in California. Now I am very happy to have stayed at 3-6 and 4-8 all those years, playing against loose, unreadable opponents, even tho I could have undoubtedly beaten higher limit, tougher games. The 10-20 games now are often like 3-6 used to be, loose and with unreadable players. Fine with me, I used to beat 3-6 very nicely, for more than a big bet per hour, even with the high drops in California. I can now beat tougher games, but I have the loose game experience to fall back on now that the game has changed.

I don't like what the massive influx is doing to the tournament scene. It's made the variance go WAY up. But what the heh, I'll pick and choose my tournaments according to my taste, and play ring games the rest of the time.

al

[Al_Capone_Junior]

[ QUOTE ]
People are playing 100's of thousands of hands on the internet and gaining years and years of experience in months. This gives many internet "rookies" far more experience than grizzled B&M veterans.

[/ QUOTE ]

They may gain experience in playing, but they'll still be at a huge disadvantage to someone who is a good reader of people and plays live all the time. NOT being able to read players is by far the biggest downside to online play. The inexperienced players are very much protected by the internet. Set them in a live game and watch their meager win rates go way down when calculated hand for hand.

That said, I have no doubt that hand for hand I make more playing live than I do on the internet, despite the higher rakes and tips.

al

[Kurn, son of Mogh]

Excellent point. I agree.

[CrackerZack]

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It's the tournaments that have gotten harder to beat.

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This is misleading IMO. I'll certainly agree it is much harder to win a tourney with a very large field, but its much easier to money in a tourney with a much larger field. When some of the better 2+2 tourney players are sitting in the party 1/4 mil guarantee, its not odd to see 50% or more make the money on any given week. I remember watching a couple of weeks where 4 of 5 monied back to back. Given you need to finish high to make a real big score, but if you can money rather consistently, it takes a lot of the variance from tournament pros allowing the big scores to really be big scores and not be necessary to sustain month or year long dry spells.

Zack

[CrackerZack]

I can't describe how true this is. It really is amazing. I started out as only a live player playing hold 'em and occassionally 7-stud at Mohegan Sun when I could get up there. I knew of internet poker but didn't really want to put any real money out in cyberspace, etc etc so didn't play. Eventually 2+2er MaxPower said he'd send me a few bucks on Party and I could give him the cash. Easy, no need to create Neteller accounts or involve my checking account, away I went. I played for a couple of months online before I got back out to play a live game and it was shocking. It was like someone took the blinders off. I had only played like 5k hands online, maybe less, but I had been in so many common situation so many times through those that the game seemed to be in slow motion. Not due to the number of hands being dealt, just that the minute the flop hit the table, I almost always had a complete plan for the hand. I don't believe this is something that can be learned from books, just loads of experience. You can know how the books say to play situations, but until you're faced with them, its hard to really identify the book stuff from the real game. Experience ties this together, and getting experience on the internet is obscenely easy and quick. anyway, just my 2 cents.

Zack