blonde poker forum

   


I have read M3boy’s thread about the luck factor in poker and I must say, there are some great post. As for my view? I would say that the luck factor in poker is becoming more and more evident.

Firstly, we have seen numbers for tournaments grow beyond every expectation. And as such, poker is seeing more and more novices coming into the game. Of course, solid players will benefit from bad plays or calls from these players. However, the odds of poker will also ensure that this situation will help to create more and more bad beats. But even without this factor, the game of poker cannot help but include the luck factor. Example; A-A v K-K. Whatever the outcome, one player will ultimately be unlucky.

When it comes to online poker, the luck factor is dramatically increased. More hands per hour, multi-tasking, more novices to the game. Whatever the reasons, I know that online poker is frustrating the hell out of many players. So much so, that many are simply walking away from online. And in truth, I can’t help but feel for these people. In my case, online poker has almost totally subsidized the last four years of my life. However, had I not been a regular winner, or not won enough, I doubt if I would continue to play online in place of live poker. As it is, I am very thankful to online poker and the fact that I can play from home. But I just can’t help thinking about those less fortunate. And I don’t just refer to “ordinary” players here.

As an example, I spoke with one pro, just prior to the WSOP; about a particular site and how he could NOT beat it. If I tell you what this player did during the WSOP, it may give it away and I‘m not sure if he would want me to mention it. Suffice to say, that he had a great WSOP. The point is, I know many good pro‘s that struggle to beat online. But irrespective of the reasons why some players cannot win online, its seem clear that online poker cannot help but increase player‘s frustrations. The thing is though, all we can do is simply accept it because……THAT”S POKER!

And this brings me nicely to the point of my post, would poker players want to see a change in how poker is packaged, presented, played?

Over the last three years or so, I have been focusing on creating new games etc. By nature, poker has been one of the games I have constantly looked at. In fact, about two years, I filled a patent that contained some variations of poker ( I am on the verge on getting these developed with one of the operators). Anyway, the aim of these variations is to lessen the bad beats and the frustrations that poker dishes out like it had a god-given right to do so. But the fact is, that‘s exactly what poker has got at present. We, by how we package and present poker, allow it to do just that. I therefore ask the following question, would YOU like to see a change in poker, if the changes did not detract from the game in any great way?

As for the changes introduced in the patent, some do change the nature of the game. But in return, they do make poker more fun, more enjoyable and less stressful. And though I know it wouldn’t be everyone‘s cup of tea, I would hope that a fair percentage of the online community would go for it.

Anyhow, just recently, I have had a couple of “Eureka” moments that I feel are the missing link in terms of dramatically decreasing bad beats, without much change to the game. Obviously, I cannot go into any detail at this stage, but I would still love to hear what players have to say about online poker, bad beats etc.. And of course, if they would like to see a change in poker.

Thanks in advance to any replies (if I get any that is)

Peter Costa

Sorry people - just realized - should I do a poll?

Not quite sure what your idea is but, anything that decreases beats will be unsucessfull as losing players will lose to quickly.  It is the variance in poker, particularly in tournaments, that is its biggest asset - the best player doesn't always win in the short term.   

Go for it, that way you can get a feed back from those to shy to post.

Nice post, food for thought. All I can say is I have been knocked out of 2 of my last 5 MTTs holding Aces and bust 3 such holdings during that spell. I make a small profit on line but would hate to find I relied on it for income, the luck factor makes me tear my hair out.

I don't know what you mean by changes in online poker...Poker is what it is, no? Decreasing beats in online poker would take something away from the game as online poker would then mathematically become a completely different game from live poker.

I guess I'd like to know more about any changes you propose before I could say whether it's a good idea or not.

What a great post. You catch me on bad beat day, so I say 'Go for it!' :)

I think what attracts many people to online poker is
-the ability to make money through the application of skill
-a bit of excitement akin to gambling

and a few other things, before the actual poker itself. I mean...the poker itself can be pretty boring (how Limit grinders do it without contemplating suicide, I don't know). Maybe the beats are hard to take in online poker because the investment is larger: in a MTT, for example, if you bubble online you have not only invested your buy-in but also 2 hours of total drudgery clicking a couple of buttons while staring at some avatars. The live game is a different thing altogether, the social scene can be brilliant.

So what I can maybe see happening is that once it's realised by some big firms that the massive boom in online poker isn't so much to do with the game of cards per se, they may try to bottle the other elements and add them to a format, itself more appealing to a much wider audience. It was no surprise to see some non-poker skill games-for-money (Skilljam, Virgin) following this route. Came up with a non-poker variant myself that I've played with mates, still trying to hone it.

good luck.

I love the luck factor in poker, its what fuels the poker economy...everyone is a winning player in their own mind.

online poker is rigged, everyone knows it...

I bet that you've patented the elimination of "the river", and I'm all for it.

I hate those damn suck-outers, where do I sign up ?

So what I can maybe see happening is that once it's realised by some big firms that the massive boom in online poker isn't so much to do with the game of cards per se, they may try to bottle the other elements and add them to a format, itself more appealing to a much wider audience. It was no surprise to see some non-poker skill games-for-money (Skilljam, Virgin) following this route. Came up with a non-poker variant myself that I've played with mates, still trying to hone it.

good luck.
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I love the above comments - you are so correct in your assesment.  The thing is, we don't actually play poker because we love everything about how the game is packaged and formated. - we simply play the game in the format offered to us. My question is therefore, is poker so good that we dare not even consider changing  it? I think not. I think there are many improvements that can be made. And if these happen to change the maths or indeed any other aspect of the game - so what? What would that matter if the changes enhanced the game and was actually embraced by players?

As it happens, along with every operator I have met with, I (obviously) believe the chnages would enhance the game greatly as well as be apppreacited by players. I guess time will tell.

Every on-line poker site should have an insurance agent...like taking insurance in Blackjack. As a player you can choose to pay a subsidy and if your A-A gets cracked by K-K at a crucial moment or you are runner-runnered after outplaying your opponent you get the appropriate compensation. The insurance agent will always make money because of the unlikliness of this scenario becoming a reality...this will certainly lessen the frustration of continuous bad beats.

Couldn't help but laugh when I read this. Not because this is in fact part of the proposed changes - but exactly what the changes aim to do - LESSEN THE FRUSTRATION OF CONTINOUS BAD BEATS. And though one cannot eradicate the luck element from the game or the bad beat (nor do I wish to do so), I can assure you that that will in fact be the case.   

of course it would do that, but imagine the flip side, instead of looking at it from the point of view of the person getting bad beats, do it from the one giving the bad beats.

If the pot is $100 and some donk goes allin with a 15% chance for $100 and someone calls, the insurance screen would be "would you like to insure your equity for $1.50? this guarantees you get $45 back from the pot".. now, it wont take long before they start to think "well what is this, I bet $100 and I am only g'teed $45?"... giving things like this in stark numbers can only highlight to the bad players why their play is bad.

Clearly some wont care anyways, but plenty will and it can only impact the poker economy!

I am intersted in what your concept is, because I cant see how you can have a thriving economy that helps the good winning players, and harms the losing ones.

This is clearly impractical in a tournament, but might have some merits in cash if you were prepared to pay to reduce variance, but you might find that the cost reduces your profits considerably (particularly if Party brought it in as they would take the biggest % that ignorance could stand).

Also one minor technical point, the sites like Stars that still operate in the US rely partly on their view that they don't take bets from players, obviously taking insurance bets would change this.

Poker is a game whose very nature is to obscure the difference in skill between good players and bad players. As such, the bad players may not realise they are bad players because of luck. The mediocre players may think they are great players because of luck.

Luck is not something to be feared by a good player - it is to be embraced. It is the fog of war which obscures the bad player's true position. It is the oasis on the horizon which encourages the bad player to venture further into the desert to his death.

The long run is king - our target number of hands played is placed at the vanishing point in the distance.

If you don't like luck/bad beats go play chess, where the better player always wins. See how much fun that is.

Luck is not something to be feared by a good player - it is to be embraced. It is the fog of war which obscures the bad player's true position. It is the oasis on the horizon which encourages the bad player to venture further into the desert to his death.


Beautifully put.

ffs, did Stuart Hall say that?

Love it!

And this is after three hours sleep last night, four hours drinking in the park this afternoon, then four hours drinking in the pub this evening.

In vino veritas indeed.

*collapses*

Here's some ideas you can have for free.

Scrabblechess - instead of lining all the pieces on the board at the start of the game, players pick out their pieces from a green bag and play them from a rack in front of the board.

Battlechess - a wall is placed across the board and players attempt to sink their opponent's pieces by calling out squares.

Connectchess - players win the game by getting four pieces in a diagonal line.

Cluedochess - players have to guess from which square checkmate occurs and which piece makes it.

The thickness of the fog can sometimes weigh heavy on a good player's chest though.

Example: Last night I entered 3 tournaments and got done by three 2-outers on the spin...significant time/financial investment and no reward...so a little accumulator on that eventuality would have been nice. Good players can get lost in the fog along with the bad I think. It is fine to embrace the luck elements of the game but we all go through periods when it is almost exclusively bad, particularly in tournament play, and anything that can negate this frustration is probably worthwhile....even if it is just a replacement mouse!

'Chess,' said the Dutch grandmaster, Jan Hein Donner, 'is as much a game of chance as blackjack; or tossing cards into a top hat.' There was a pained silence, then a polite babel of disagreement: it was a game of the utmost skill; a conflict between disciplined minds in which victory would inexorably go to the more perceptive, the more analytical player; a duel of the intellect in which luck played no part. Donner shrugged, lit another cigarette and said: 'Believe that if you like.'

Warning - Do not read on if you can't be arsed.

If your favourite Premiership team concedes a penalty, but then the opposite striker hits the bar, you'll feel kind of lucky. In a similar way, most chess players will talk about getting lucky when their opponent makes a mistake or misses an oppurtunity, even at the highest level. Perhaps then, it could be said that while there can be good luck in chess, there is no bad luck, only bad skill.

But what of a similarly strengthed rival getting lucky against someone whom you do not in a round robin style contest. The absence of good luck in itself constituting bad luck (ala going the whole tourney without AA.) I see this point, but there is something meatier.

2nd Warning - Seriously, the following is kinda dull.


There are many occasions where a chess player (not only the best players, but also the best computers) are not able to tell which of two or more good looking moves is actually the "best" to play. They use their perception and tactical foresight as much as possible, but what is to say that the move they didn't choose is actually the superior. All sorts of different principles and strategic concepts are weighted before a desicion is made, but there is often no certainty (especially in the middle part of the game).

If you are in any doubt that the best possible move should be able to be worked out, remember the news last month of the team of computer scientists who took 18 years and 200 high powered computers running their Chinook program to work out the 500 billion billion combinations of moves possible in the game of checkers/draughts.
“Checkers has roughly the square root of the number of positions in chess,” said Jonathan Schaeffer, who led the Chinook team.
So that's 500 billion billion x 500 billion billion moves.

Now this luck factor isn't huge, I would never beat a grandmaster, no matter how many times I played him/her. However, players regularly lose to those a little bit worse than them, and beat players a little bit better than them. The idea that luck plays absoultely no part in chess, just because it is a game of "complete information" is, I believe, a fallacy.

What may be relavant here, is how chess players minimize the luck factor...When they are deciding the World Champion, they play more than once.

Gotta be something in that. (Make the $10k WSOP main event a rebuy!!!!!) :)

The longevity of chess is such that it probably doesn't need too much sexing up.
Similarly with the game of poker, and the unprecedented success it has enjoyed of late, I'm thinking "if it ain't broke........."

Now I'm sure gimmicks could be a good way of making a little money for a short while, but I think that's all these variations on an already successful theme will ever be.
I don't think that convincing millions of players worldwide to stop playing Hold'em and start playing Giveyourmoneytothebestplayersfaster'em is going to be easy, but good luck to all who attempt it.

Keep the fish lucky i would say.

Plenty of people like playing turbos- because they are gamblers.  They are not interested in playing poker in order to prove they are better then others, but more likely to play to get action and get lucky.


The insurance against the bad beats will remove the thrill of gambling.  More people believe in luck as the main factor in winning in poker.  There might be perhaps a place for improvement in the quality of generators, mtt structures, but whoever plays live a lot get the same amount of suck outs per number of hands dealt.  The difference is our perception.  If you play 100 hands per minute  you will probably feel that there is more suck outs online then in live game as in live game you play 20-30 hands per hour (or whatever it is).


The poker site operators should think more of reducing and fighting cheats (as from what i read recently there are more and more of those)

I want people to get frustrated when they get bad beats, go on tilt and crying; i need to get bad beats myself in order to feel that other people are donkeys.

Let's presume that you can take an insurance against bad beat.  on what basis your premium will be calculated?
 One will also have to first define what is bad beat?  AA vs KK is not a terrible bad beat.  Hitting 2 outer on the river is much worse, but perhaps as a player you let the other guy hit the 2 outer, therefore your claim will be void.

Just played a game where I had a top pair and flush draw; i checked and button pushed all in to my delight but unfortunatelly button hit runner runner straight. Would I be insured against that?  One can claim - probably rightly that my check on the flop showed weakness, the button was on steal and got lucky, if I was to raise and the button called this could qualify for the insurance pay out. 
But then i was only 85% favourite and the insurance covers anything above 90%
In whole honesty how many times we are beaten when favourite 90%?  not many times.

I know because once on different forum we had a competition to post bad beats above 85% off all 50 people taking part over the period of 4 months we maybe counted 5-6 very bad beats i.e <90% where the player was favourite to win.  It did not happened to me. I think the worse one i had was something like when i was favourite  87% ( sorry but this is how i do my calculations- in percentage)


So maybe this is a good start to see how many actually bad beats are there and how many are just product of human imagination or error - this might lead to drawing all the fish away from the pond, not only that but those who believe in bad luck as well, as most gamblers believe that one day their luck will change.

As I am not a great player I want a lot of bad players around me, as this is the only way i can play a bit of poker without going broke. I want poker sites to invite and encourage all the donkeys and gamblers to the tables, i don't need insurance against bad beats, if one can't deal with variance and bad beats they should stop playing poker and do something different with their lives.

As few on this thread mentioned already, poker is a game that gives false impressions of one's greatness, that's what keeps the game alive and exciting.

great post andrew!. Good players will win on the internet if they play for long enough so the varience evens out. Bad players will lose, however not without winning for a little while. Long enough to think they have been unlucky in losing. I love interent poker the way it is. If it aint broke.....

why? i see this done live in important hands in comps, usualy by people that know eachother but the principle works

I'm with Doyle on the whole insurance thing. If you can afford to be in a hand you should never take out insurance as long term it's a losing proposition. if you can't afford to be in the hand..you should be playing a lower stakes game.

;)

Pokerstars press release August 2015

Pokerstars are pleased to announce that the Sunday Million started in August 2007 ended yesterday in a 7000 way chop.  The deal making process that lasted most of the 8 years was finally resolved on the sudden and apparently suspicious death of the player nitbstrd who had insisted that he should get 1st prize because despite having chips of T$0.00065 he would always take insurance on his allins and could therefore not be eliminated.

lmao.

and Tantrum you're right of course.. :)

Andrew T gets this spot on as ever. Andrew for Mod!

Seriously, whenever someone tells me they are "running bad" i chuckle inside. The simple fact is online is far tougher and vastly different from live play.
When i start losing online, i know its not because im running bad, its because im making too many mistakes.

 We all joke about how online poker is rigged but the chances of most part-time (cash) players beating the game are remote. Compare the comparative chances of a guy 10 tabling 2/4 for aliving, who has done his homework and maintains his focus on the game, to a chap who has finished work on a friday, decides to load a table when tired and play some poker. He's dead at hello.

When you start getting into the world of MTT's then you really start throwing the dice.

Embrace the luck, think lifetime earnings rather than session spinups.

All this talk about bad players not realizing they suck is making me paranoid...

This can apply to any of the discipline in life.  The difference is, that the variance enables occassional players to get an illusion of their 'skills' and keeps them within the game.  Honestly the percantage of great vs good vs mediocre vs bad is similarly distributed among the poker players as in sport/musicic/art/bussiness;

Those who think otherwise, delude themselves. 

As to the part-time players - I know few who play decent money, but they treat poker as a hobby - and not a way to become rich.

Poker for many is an equivalent of a gold rush- and as the history has shown - many tried, many went broke - few got rich...

Whenever I hear this, I think of the flight of the bumble bee.

Specifically, the popular myth that it is aerodynamically impossible for it to fly, and that the laws of physics say something with a body so large in proportion to it's tiny wings cannot stay in the air.

It was supposedly begun by some dodgy math, scribbled on the back of a napkin at a cocktail party. It was such a popular idea though, nature defying science etc, that it was quickly accepted as fact, even by some of the world's prominent academics.

Now if anyone was in any doubt, they should probably look at the empirical evidence. If they see a bumblebee, and if that bumblebee is buzzing through the air from flower to flower without buying an Easyjet ticket or anything like that, chances are that it is probably possible for a bumble bee to fly after all.

Similarly, if you look at the empirical evidence in online poker, and all the wizz-kids amassing the megabucks. Year on year the same people doing very well and clicking home the bacon. Chances are that it is probably possible to overcome the luck factor and crush the online game.

Now meaning no disrespect to the talented (more talented than I'll ever be) players who are having difficulty winning at internet poker, but if they aren't beating it, and others are, one could reasonably summise that they aren't doing it properly.

I'm not going to list the dozens and dozens of differences between the live game and poker on the computer, we all know it's a completely different kettle of fish. It could be no coincidence that the best online players today are the youngsters who do not have decades of experience playing in casinos. Perhaps said experience can actually make it more difficult to get to grips with internet poker and start raking in the bucks month in, month out.

So I'd tell any kick ass poker player who is having difficulty winning online to try to forget everything they know about poker, watch Rocky 3 or something.

Can I just say that there is a massive massive difference between cash and tournament poker. If you take a big hit in cash and you are a good player you can always turn things around. If you get hit by a one-outer in a tournament it's over.

Yes it's true that your chances of success in tournaments are thin anyway but if you go through spells where your skill gets you into a winning position and then luck does for you time and time again there is nothing you can do to turn that around.....


....So in a tournament sense getting your money in with pair over pair is not a mistake. But if that underpair draws out on you it is the end of the road. Now if that happens say 10 times on the spin...then that's running bad...no ifs no buts. You can never walk away when you're up playing tournament poker. Beating the tournament game with skill means getting your money in when dominting your opponent...what happens after that is completely out of your control. The cash game often goes right through the streets whereas a lot of tournament poker action occurs pre-flop or on the flop...and this means you are far more vulnerable to the lucky out-draw.

One in Ten?     :dontask:

What a great thread.  ;hattip; to all the contributors.

Apologies if someone has already made this comment but......

The luck factor in poker is vital because without it, bad players would never triumph. They would either get better or stop playing, neither of which is desirable. It sucks big time when some idiot calls you down with king high and beats you with a hand he doesn't even realise he has made, but if that keeps them playing then you will turn a profit long term. I'd rather be outdrawn than outplayed.

To quote a mate of mines book "Bad beats are the good poker players best friend".