EPTI don't really like poker though, not anymore. Everything that we learn about poker, we can't actually apply it when playing the game, because by playing badly people make it so that playing well becomes a mistake. Development for that claim in spoiler:
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Under any sane definition, playing well means playing an unexploitable game, where no matter how your opponent responds to what you're doing, you're not going to lose money.
In practice: let's say that you're on the river against a single opponent, what should you do? Well you should assess if you usually have the best hand, and the more it's likely that you win the pot, the more frequently you should bet. But you can't only bet good hands, otherwise your opponent can exploit that by not calling you, and you don't make money, so you also need to bet some bluffs so that if your opponent folds too often, that's a mistake he's making. Then your opponent has to respond to your strategy by folding and calling at an appropriate frequency, and it's a beautiful dance of trying to play as well as possible in order to not get exploited.
Except, none of that ever happens. People don't consider your strategy at all, they either overfold or overcall based on what they want to do and how they feel about their own hand. And it's on you to exploit that, you can't just play your strategy and win. If your opponent always calls and you bluff with a hand that theory wants you to bluff for balance, this is a huge mistake because your opponent always calls. If you try and play well against someone who doesn't, you are quite literally torching money, and you can verify that using solver tools: if you make the solver deviate from optimal strategy and say that the opponent folds, like, 15% of the time less often than he is supposed to, then the solver wants you to NEVER bluff. Not bluff 15% less or anything like that, just never bluff, at all, because now all of your bluffs are losing a ton of money.
This kind of thing feels good when you start playing and you don't study the game, because it also means that people who are better than you don't have a huge advantage on you. But overall it is terrible design for a game. Imagine if you were playing chess against Magnus Carlsen, and Carlsen couldn't just play well, he had to adapt to your shit opening otherwise he wouldn't be likely to win? That is insane.
So, it isn't a good game, and the people who play it tend to not be good people. I think I always knew that, really, but recently it is striking to me how much people are trying to squeeze into every edge so that they can make a little more money than they're supposed to.
They put on an act to make sure the people who are terrible feel welcomed and want to keep playing, so that they'll lose more money after a while. By the way, if you've ever played poker with strangers and everyone was very nice to you, they weren't, they just thought you were a mark. If there is some sort of disagreement at the table, it can be anything at all, the table will always side with the person who is perceived to be the worst player, facts are entirely irrelevant.
I've seen a dude who got shoved on, said "I have kings", then the opponent responded "I have aces" and the dude called the tournament director to ask if his opponent's hand could be declared dead if he actually has aces because you're not allowed to say what your cards are before the hand is over.
I've seen a decent player who was always stoic and never said anything suddenly be disgustingly mellow and nice chatting to a particularly bad player because he wanted to invite him to a private cash game.
I've been at a table in Vegas where everyone was playing terrible, then some dude was rude in some way I don't really remember and he left after a fight (verbal fight), then the whole table started to insult the other guy in the fight because he "made the bad player leave".
I suspect the two things are linked: because you can't really make a ton more money by becoming a better player, people look for other avenues to get more money, and it gets ugly. Probably when they started playing most people weren't assholes like this.
I don't really have a solution, I can't just stop playing or I would have to change my lifestyle and that would be annoying, overall I feel like I've stumbled into a way to cheat capitalism out of my time and that's a very good feeling. I also have an issue with devoting so much time to something over the years and not getting a return on that investment anymore just because it doesn't spark joy, it's not like most people enjoy their jobs.
