Raymer and BIG STACK poker...

[Tyler Durden]

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At the final table last year the other players repeatedly got all their chips in as favorites against Greg preflop and Greg sucked out. His stack going into the final table was impressive, but his final table play was nothing special.

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meh, repeatedly? it happened twice. i guess you could say it happened once and then was repeated, but the way you worded it, it happened five times.

[NYCNative]

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During that time, he was stealing as much as he could."

[/ QUOTE ]There are quite a few $11 SNG players that know enough to do this as well.

[/ QUOTE ]I am one of them. However, the level of competition I am facing in my $11 SNG compared to the competition that Raymer faced on the cusp of the final table is a fairly important distinction.

[MoreWineII]

n/m reading is hard.

[valenzuela]

I dont see Raymer winning this year but I see him coming 4th,3rd something like that. About last year final table , my only two opinions are
-he earned his stack outplaying ppl
-that AT call was awful, just read matias anderson blog of last year wsop and ull see why.

[revots33]

To everyone who says Raymer got lucky and won a lot of coinflips at last year's final table - I'd argue that that's his reward for playing great and building a huge stack throughout the tournament. The big stack can afford to gamble and get lucky, the small stacks can't.

[fnurt]

If you believed most of the posters in this thread, skill at poker is measured by getting your money in with the best of it. Once the cards are flipped up, if the worse hand wins it's a bad beat.

Let's try looking at it another way. Say you raise all-in and I correctly deduce that you would only do this with AA-99. I have KK so I call. It turns out you have AA, but I flop a king and win.

Anyone discussing this hand would say that I got lucky. But almost no one would point out that I got very unlucky when you turned out to have AA, out of the range of hands I correctly put you on. But just because you had AA doesn't change the fact that my call was correct. And if I go on to win the tournament, people would talk about how I got lucky on that KK v. AA hand, but considering I made the right decision, was it really "luck" that I won? Heck, if the other guy won the hand, I'd say he was "lucky" to be dealt AA when someone else had KK!

Whoever wins the WSOP is going to be very, very lucky, even if he never makes an incorrect decision for the entire tournament. Sometimes he will be lucky to get good cards, and sometimes he will be lucky to suck out when he gets his money in with the worst of it. So please understand that it's meaningless to talk about how "lucky" someone was when they won, unless you can point to actual bad plays that they made and got away with.

It's complicated to talk about luck and skill in this way, since we never really know what range of hands one player puts another player on, and we can argue all day about what range of hands he SHOULD put the other player on. But it's important to understand that talking about luck and skill in any other terms is virtually meaningless.

[capone0]

revots-the thing is he hardly lost any coinflips. I can't tell you the number of coinflips i've lost in tournies. he hardly lost any. yes he could afford to get into those situations which was part of the big stack theory, but he only got busted once, with AK vs 66s that I can remember. how hard is it to win a tourney when you win 80%+ of your coinflips? I know i'm exaggerating with 80%, but I'm pretty sure he won a lot more than 50% of his flips.

[Daniel Hoerr]

[ QUOTE ]
If you believed most of the posters in this thread, skill at poker is measured by getting your money in with the best of it. Once the cards are flipped up, if the worse hand wins it's a bad beat.

Let's try looking at it another way. Say you raise all-in and I correctly deduce that you would only do this with AA-99. I have KK so I call. It turns out you have AA, but I flop a king and win.

Anyone discussing this hand would say that I got lucky. But almost no one would point out that I got very unlucky when you turned out to have AA, out of the range of hands I correctly put you on. But just because you had AA doesn't change the fact that my call was correct. And if I go on to win the tournament, people would talk about how I got lucky on that KK v. AA hand, but considering I made the right decision, was it really "luck" that I won? Heck, if the other guy won the hand, I'd say he was "lucky" to be dealt AA when someone else had KK!

Whoever wins the WSOP is going to be very, very lucky, even if he never makes an incorrect decision for the entire tournament. Sometimes he will be lucky to get good cards, and sometimes he will be lucky to suck out when he gets his money in with the worst of it. So please understand that it's meaningless to talk about how "lucky" someone was when they won, unless you can point to actual bad plays that they made and got away with.

It's complicated to talk about luck and skill in this way, since we never really know what range of hands one player puts another player on, and we can argue all day about what range of hands he SHOULD put the other player on. But it's important to understand that talking about luck and skill in any other terms is virtually meaningless.

[/ QUOTE ]

Required reading.

[revots33]

Understood, he won a disproportionate number of coin flips. But my point is that, throughout all the days of the tournament, he worked to build up a big stack. With such a big stack, he could've likely LOST more than 50% of the coin flips and still won the tournament. In other words, I wouldn't point to this as the main reason he won.

[Platypus]

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Understood, he won a disproportionate number of coin flips. But my point is that, throughout all the days of the tournament, he worked to build up a big stack. With such a big stack, he could've likely LOST more than 50% of the coin flips and still won the tournament. In other words, I wouldn't point to this as the main reason he won.

[/ QUOTE ]

no way.