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I'm decent at poker, not at a level where I could live from it really but I've been doing the thing where I work at 50% so that I can pay rent and then the rest comes from what I win at poker, which is most of the times enough that I don't have to worry too much living alone in a society that isn't designed to crush humans.
I 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:
+ Show Spoiler +
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.
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United States1923 Posts
On May 19 2025 12:28 Nebuchad wrote:
I 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:
Not being results oriented is card game 101.
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On May 19 2025 13:02 Mizenhauer wrote:Show nested quote +On May 19 2025 12:28 Nebuchad wrote:
I 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: Not being results oriented is card game 101.
It's not about results though, it's theory approved. Play around with any theoretical poker tool and ask it to play against a suboptimal strategy, it will always tell you to deviate from "optimal" play. The reason why strategies are suboptimal is precisely because someone could deviate from standard play and make more money against that strategy than they should be doing. If you aren't doing the deviation that makes the other strategy bad and instead you're playing "good poker", then the person playing badly isn't punished, and their strategy won't be losing much. Let's say that they call too much for example, and you're playing in a way that's optimal according to game theory. Your value bets are going to make more money than they're supposed to, because they call too much, but your bluffs are going to win the pot less often than they're supposed to, again because they call too much. It's going to even out, and you'll win about as much money against this opponent as against someone who plays perfectly (0$).
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United States1923 Posts
On May 19 2025 13:30 Nebuchad wrote:Show nested quote +On May 19 2025 13:02 Mizenhauer wrote:On May 19 2025 12:28 Nebuchad wrote:
I don't really like poker though, not anymore. Everything that we learn about poker, we can't actually apply it when playing the game, because by playing badly people make it so that playing well becomes a mistake. Development for that claim in spoiler: Not being results oriented is card game 101. It's not about results though, it's theory approved. Play around with any theoretical poker tool and ask it to play against a suboptimal strategy, it will always tell you to deviate from "optimal" play. The reason why strategies are suboptimal is precisely because someone could deviate from standard play and make more money against that strategy than they should be doing. If you aren't doing the deviation that makes the other strategy bad and instead you're playing "good poker", then the person playing badly isn't punished, and their strategy won't be losing much. Let's say that they call too much for example, and you're playing in a way that's optimal according to game theory. Your value bets are going to make more money than they're supposed to, because they call too much, but your bluffs are going to win the pot less often than they're supposed to, again because they call too much. It's going to even out, and you'll win about as much money against this opponent as against someone who plays perfectly (0$).
Do you feel you have a responsibility to adjust your play to the given situation as a player? I completely understand the dilemma because you end up in a quandary where changing your play based on results vs changing your play based on small sample size data is largely the same thing. I'm a profitable poker player at pretty low stakes but I'm sure you've run more hands than me. Most of my experience is from mtg where making the mathematically correct decision is no guarantee your opponent won't draw the card they have one of instead of the card they have four of. In that situation you can't really adapt to anything, it's just variance. However, I think it's justifiable to alter your play over a large enough sample size, though I admit this can be extremely difficult-especially when you're playing live and you can't make notes/log hands etc.
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the game itself is fine what you're having an issue with is the financial incentives that dictate human behavior
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It's been a while since I've watched it, but I feel like Rounders covered a lot of this haha.
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On May 19 2025 13:55 Mizenhauer wrote:
Do you feel you have a responsibility to adjust your play to the given situation as a player? I completely understand the dilemma because you end up in a quandary where changing your play based on results vs changing your play based on small sample size data is largely the same thing. I'm a profitable poker player at pretty low stakes but I'm sure you've run more hands than me. Most of my experience is from mtg where making the mathematically correct decision is no guarantee your opponent won't draw the card they have one of instead of the card they have four of. In that situation you can't really adapt to anything, it's just variance. However, I think it's justifiable to alter your play over a large enough sample size, though I admit this can be extremely difficult-especially when you're playing live and you can't make notes/log hands etc.
Yeah you nailed the issue, it becomes hard to justify saying any vaguely reasonable play is good or bad. If you're bluffing with a hand that shouldn't bluff in theory, you now get to say that your opponent is too weak, and would fold more hands than theory, so your play is good. If you don't call with a hand that should call, you can say your opponent doesn't bluff enough, and now your hand shouldn't call. There is no longer a metric to state that you're playing well, so, really, who are we to say that you aren't? The only thing left is results, and we know that variance makes it so that most results are possible. It's terrible design for a game.
On May 20 2025 03:59 GreenHorizons wrote:
It's been a while since I've watched it, but I feel like Rounders covered a lot of this haha.
Yeah you could say that, Rounders is a cool movie. It does overstate the edge of the skilled player, but that is realistic, we all had the mindset of Matt Damon's character when we started playing. And I know who in my life is Ed Norton's character for sure.
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Norway28786 Posts
I mean, the concept of GTO is more that you should be unexploitable - but how to maximally exploit an opponent who does not play GTO ends up varying wildly based on the opponent's tendencies. There's nothing weird about that.
That said I very much agree about your broader point about poker players, and this is why I, when I did play poker, only played tournaments. Playing cash game it's like, you have the ring of regulars who are reasonably evenly matched, where essentially everybody loses because of rake, however the appearance of a whale turns everybody into winners instead, so it's about finding and including either the bad billionaire like guy laliberte, or about finding lots of smaller addicts who are ruining their lives and possibly also their families' lives thinking they have a shot. Cash game as a source of income is inherently predatory.
Tournament poker has much less of this. Sure, there are still lots of people who sign up for tournaments they're not rolled for, thinking one time!! - but when they're out, they're out, and there's none of this, perverse incentive to try to make people lose more of their money.
And - as a game, poker is indeed a bad game. You can argue that it's good gambling, in the sense that there's an advantage to being skilled, but the bad player also has a shot, but in terms of being a rewarding game, it isn't, because it's often hard/impossible to really determine whether you did the right thing (if somebody bluffs in a certain spot 20% of the time and you need for them to bluff 30% of the time for your call to be correct, and you call and win, that's a bad play but one that you feel good about), and because following this, whether you win or not isn't necessarily related to whether you played well.
Remove the money (play with chips and no money involved) and it becomes very boring compared to a myriad of other card games. Meanwhile very few people want to play chess - or bridge - with their own cash on the table - because people aren't going to think they have a shot if they don't, and if they don't have a shot, they don't have.
I did make some money of it 15 years ago and I have a lot of fun with the occasional live small stakes poker with friends, but I honestly can't imagine playing cash game regularly with the idea that this should be a source of income, especially not as an ethically conscious person, and I definitely don't think it functions as a way of cheating capitalism, if anything, it's part-taking in the most predatory aspects.
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United States10380 Posts
In Suits, Harvey Specter always made it a show about how you need to play the man, not the cards. GTO seems to try to remove that sense of your opponents and rather focuses on the cards themselves with some deviation based upon opponent behavior.
In general, I just play very small stake cash games with friends, like .25/.50 or 1/1. Nothing that would cause someone to lose over 4 figures in a night unless they were especially on tilt. It's fun and mostly juts something to do as a way to chat up with friends/new people who are invited to the game. But honestly I have more fun dealing and just getting tips from the players, because it's funny to watch people play and banter while I make no risk cash that's consistent every time we sit down.
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On May 19 2025 12:28 Nebuchad wrote:
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.
sounds dystopian. For two years i made in total ~$40K CDN playing a live weekly poker game. the players were terrible. i made most of it off of 3 guys. two of them are now dead. they were under 45. the other had a massive stroke during an OD episode.
Regarding your situation I humbly suggest this: Work non-stop so you can save money and find a path out of this existence. find something that inspires you and move to that.
Find something intersecting between expertise/market demand/personal passion. Do that.
If you are physically healthy you got a shot.
On May 19 2025 12:28 Nebuchad wrote:
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.
most adults equate growing up with giving up. Most NA men are over weight, myopic, and headed to an early grave as life expectancy declines and suicide rates rise. Does this mean everyone should not resist inertia and just follow along this sad path?
I went to dinner with Dr. Nathaniel Branden about 4 years before he died. He had a philosophy professor phd guy friend with him. The prof was complaining that his marriage was dead and that he and his wife were really just room mates at this point. He was excited that he met a woman who made him feel alive again in ways he had not felt since he was a teenager. They were seeing each other quite a bit. He was gushing over her. Dr. Branden stopped him mid sentence and said: "if you had 6 months to live.. what would you do?". He quickly replied... "obviously I'd divorce my wife and spend as much time as i could with this woman".
Branden replied: "what makes you think you've got 6 months?"
So dude..
"what makes you think you've got 6 months?"
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i think u're too fixed on GTO... which is EXTREMELY important at HIGHEST level of play...
but if u have a decent understanding of GTO, then u know when your opponent is way out of line, then u can throw GTO out of the window and go full exploitative at least vs that player...
i try to avoid playing vs ppl that study the game, my edge comes from noob stomping, also from playing vs old guys drinking in casinos or from grinding some dark LATAM online sites (sport bets sites with poker).
is much more profitable to play vs idiots, using basic theory, than playing vs smart studied players, with very deep theory.
just find a soft game that runs periodically and grind that game A TON... that was the most EV decision ive taken in poker, i used to go online to the hardest sites and battle tough regs every day (starcraft mentality) but i waas always lossing or break even after a decent sample... when i said fuck that shit and started playing on soft sites shit became easy, then i tried my luck at 1/2 live on holidays, and ill tell u dude, if u're not drinking theres some very decent money to be made, at least in chilean casinos, id guess is not so different in EU/NA...
ofc u can't take this approach if u plan to go pro and play nosebleeds.
also i agree with ur take on poker players being dicks, i used to play this underground cash game in my hometown years ago, there was a dude, sunday million winner, that ran the game, very decent person and decent player, also the dealer was my best friend, another starcraft player, so i wasnt too unconfortable in that line up, but since my city was small the other players on the game where a bunch of idiots trying to angle shoot at every chance they had, they all were members of the same poker club, they all played terrible, limping oop, cold calling, flatting premiums on multiway pots, playing 20 or 30 bb stacks, u know the deal...
the worst part was that they all were annoying as fuck to listen to... every hand they were criticizing other players and talking mad shit... i specially remember this 2 old guys (50 years++), wearing their club jacket always trying to get ur hand dead for whatever reason they could find...
i was very young at the time and i didnt know how to handle them idiots, so i talked to my friend and said that i was no longer going to play on that game cause i didnt like the other regulars, that i rather play a smaller game were i would enjoy playing, instead of listening to these assholes for hours 3 or 4 times a week. I remember his face being like o_O? and he said "dude, u're winning a lot in this game, just bring some headphones"...... worked like a charm.
shout out to my friend AnyOne, that was some very good advice!
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EPT
