Re: Winning the Most on the Internet

[The Dude]

This article is filled with absalutely terrible advice.

I could spend several hours picking apart every little detail in this article I disagree with, but instead I'll just mention a few of the particularly terrible suggestions he makes and leave it at that.

-Don't Think... a few seconds is too long.
-Or to put it another way; if you can comfortably stop and think for say five seconds about a decision, then you could make more money if you were playing more games and didn't spend so long thinking about your actions.
-Any thinking should be done away from the table. (NOTE: I'm a big fan of spending time away from the table thinking, but claiming that you shouldn't be thinking during a hand is assanine.)
-In most games you will find on the Internet, treating all opponents, as one generic opponent is sufficient.
-You have aces, there are three cards on board, and you have the option to raise. Well, maybe another option is better, but can you really spend the time getting enough information to make a better decision?
-3. Studying the board, the cards, betting patterns, the opponents percent "Folded to river bet," "River Aggression Factor," and any other related information before making a considered opinion. You should never have enough time for Option No. 3

Card Player Magazine would be ashamed to publish this article; I have no idea why 2+2 did.

[pudley4]

[ QUOTE ]
This article is filled with absalutely terrible advice.

I could spend several hours picking apart every little detail in this article I disagree with, but instead I'll just mention a few of the particularly terrible suggestions he makes and leave it at that.

-Don't Think... a few seconds is too long.
-Or to put it another way; if you can comfortably stop and think for say five seconds about a decision, then you could make more money if you were playing more games and didn't spend so long thinking about your actions.
-Any thinking should be done away from the table. (NOTE: I'm a big fan of spending time away from the table thinking, but claiming that you shouldn't be thinking during a hand is assanine.)
-In most games you will find on the Internet, treating all opponents, as one generic opponent is sufficient.
-You have aces, there are three cards on board, and you have the option to raise. Well, maybe another option is better, but can you really spend the time getting enough information to make a better decision?
-3. Studying the board, the cards, betting patterns, the opponents percent "Folded to river bet," "River Aggression Factor," and any other related information before making a considered opinion. You should never have enough time for Option No. 3

Card Player Magazine would be ashamed to publish this article; I have no idea why 2+2 did.

[/ QUOTE ]

My interpretation is that the author is talking about ways to maximize the number of tables you're playing at once. These tips are for players who are trying to find the absolutely highest number of tables to play. So if you want to play 12 (or 16, or more) tables, you may need to implement some (or all) of these ideas.

In that context, these guidelines are fine.

[MEbenhoe]

I agree. The problem with this article is that if you're playing $0.50/$1 or $1/$2 where you can make money just by playing autopilot these suggestions will work to help you make the maximum amount you can make. However, this will serve to give the player an inflated sense of their ability, and they will move up levels without the skill to play at that level. So while this can be good short-sighted advice, over the long run this is terrible for the player.

[The Dude]

[ QUOTE ]
In that context, these guidelines are fine.

[/ QUOTE ]
Under absalutely no context could the following two statements be correct:
-In most games you will find on the Internet, treating all opponents, as one generic opponent is sufficient.
-You have aces, there are three cards on board, and you have the option to raise. Well, maybe another option is better, but can you really spend the time getting enough information to make a better decision?

Written to small- and micro-stakes players, this article gives the exact opposite advice as what should be given. He says multi-table like crazy, and play 20 tables if you can - it's worth it. Small- and especially micro-stakes players should, in fact, be most concerned with improving their game.

Starting at .5-1 and working his way up, a beginner should be able to build a bankroll faster than he is ready to move up. Assuming he's not withdrawing from his bankroll, there's just no way it's not going to get built faster than he improves.

A decent 2-4 player, playing like this author suggest, could be pulling down about 1.5 BB/100 12 tabling. That comes out to a little over $43/ hr, so it'd take about 300 hours to build a bankroll for 15-30. That's 2 months of full-time work.

Do you think there's any way this player will be ready for 15-30 after 2 months? No way in hell - he'd be a donator. And a good 15-30 player can make much more than $43/ hr 1-tabling.

[VegasVixen]

The advice of this article goes COMPLETELY against what was written in the February article "Why some struggle making The mirco to small stakes jump" by Scott Armstrong. According to Scott, the type of play recommended by Mr. Shepperson is exactly what will cost you your bankroll if you are a serious player intending to move up in limits:...
"While there are plenty of soft spots at small stakes tables online, it requires better reads and concentration to find them. You can't play multiple tables on autopilot the way you can at the micro levels. The necessary adjustments become even more vital if you plan to move up past the small stakes level in the future. It's not even the particular adjustments that are important here -- it's the process of recognizing those adjustments and adapting your game to a different level."
In my opinion, Shepperson's article is filled with terrible advice for anyone who is interested in improving their poker skills and growing their bankroll, which are the principals that I thought the 2+2 forums were all about...

[RiverDood]

I had to read it two or three times before knowing whether the guy was putting me on or not. I guess it's serious -- and maybe some people can make good money playing this way. More power to them.

But on first reading, I thought the idea of 10-tabling at microlimits was meant for laughs -- and was going to be a jump-off point for ever-zanier recommendations. Why stop at 10-tabling the same game? Why not multitable your own HORSE tournament and see if you can go from Omaha to Holdem to Razz to Stud/8, etc. in less time than it takes to say it -- and then back again?

Why not enter sit-and-gos under seven different screen names, from seven different ISPs and collude with yourself? Put yourself all in, over and over! The two poor outsiders at the table won't know what's going on.

In fact, maybe it's a waste of time to look at the board. Just bet AA/KK/QQ hard all the way and assume you'll win; play suited connectors for a raise and call, call. Play Ax for a raise and then check/fold. Yeah, that's not quite maximizing each hand, but when you're able to play 30 tables at once, the overall gains on 20 extra tables more than make up for it.

Just a thought.

Anyway, it was a provocative piece

[bernie]

I got halfway through the article and figured it wasn't meant to be taken seriously. I hope it wasn't intended to be a serious strategy article.

Reading it in a more sarcastic tone, it's kind of humorous.

b

[theBruiser500]

wow this article really is terrible

"Most decisions you make are only dependant on a subset of the information available. Processing information takes time. "

"This has more general application, but is particularly important to online play. Your intuition is essentially the output form a processor that is not under conscious control. Its default setting is optimized for normal day-to-day tasks. "How high is the next step," "Where is the light switch," "Is she telling the truth." It's very good at its job, but has limitation, which are pathetically obvious when applied to poker."

"Monetary return from poker is a function of the quality and quantity of your decisions. You should seek to maximise the number of decisions per unit time, while not letting the quality slip outside certain bounds."

WTF is this [censored]?? In NLHE this advice is absolutely terrible, taking some time to piece together all the information in a hand makes a huge difference and just because you need to think about a hand for a while doesn't mean that any decision you make is okay because it's "close" that's just retarded. Who is this guy anyway, does he post on 2+2?

[einbert]

Yeah I agree with you Dude. Some of the advice is pretty bad if you want to eventually move up to higher limits.

I 8-table (sometimes, sometimes 4- or 6-table), and I think it has really helped my pattern recognition ability. That said, some of this advice he gives is really bad. Treating all opponents as the same will lose any poker player a ton of money in the long run, that much is for sure.

I think there is some merit to playing extra tables to get used to some of the pattern recognition. Also, sometimes I do something without exactly thinking it through and after the hand I immediately email myself the hand and think about what I did vs what I could have done, this has helped me learn a lot about the way different hands should be played.

For the long run, and to beat tougher games, these skills are going to be way less important than being able to play HU and SH pots with TAG players and make marginal decisions correctly (I'm coming to believe that the marginal decisions are really what separates a GOOD poker player from a WINNING poker player). Just because a decision is close doesn't mean that the EV of both options is the same, one is usually slightly +EV and the other is usually slightly -EV (or one is 0 EV), and making the wrong decision every time is going to cost you a ton of money. Making the right decision 50% of the time is going to leave a lot of money on the table as well.

But I think learning to make some decisions unconsciously and develop pattern recognition ability (this stuff is especially important in the big, multiway pots played at the lower limits) can be helped by playing many tables.

However, no amount of repetition is ever going to teach you why you shouldn't play a hand a certain way HU, only thinking about the specific hand and the different ways to play it are going to allow you to grasp anything. And those hands only get more common as you go up in limits.

Just trying to discern some of the usefulness of this article from the parts I didn't think were useful.

[theBruiser500]

Oh yeah one more thing, I scanned the article so maybe I'm missing something where he talks about this I'm guessing not though because this guys a retard. IMO the best way to make money at poker is to put all your effort into getting better and moving up in stakes and not multitabling. Have fun maximizing your EV at 1/2 limit piersson you moron.