The Best In The Business

[booder]

 

[tikay]

I was wondering that, too.

He did say he was told he would have to wait 10 or 14 days for BT to connect him.

[Marky147]

Probably on lockdown in a big cash game at the Hippodrome.

[bagel]

playing tcoop with chipped up doobs on his left

[Marky147]

Good luck, chaps.

[tikay]

Hi Patrick,

Are you taking a Diary sabbatical, or is there some other reason you have ceased updating?

Hope all is well over at Twickers, & you have settled in OK.

[shipitgood]

It was really interesting reading your two plus two thread about your motivation for business and your experience at poker strategy and how this has shaped you in how you run your enterprise.

It would be cool if you could incorporate some of your postings from 2+2 on here, as you have done in the past. You wouldn't want to do it with everything, but there is a great range of content that would fit nicely on Blonde.

It also would help to promote brand bitb and brand Pads.

[pleno1]

Hey, sorry haven't been posting. Hasn't been a conscious thing, just been really busy. I started a thread in 2p2 where I'm posting a lot abit bitB and didn't really want to xpost here as it could seem spam. I don't really see blonde as a place where I'd be spamming anyway, the demographic is pretty different, the only guys I stake from blonde are Ray/Gil but both were already friends anyway. If mods don't mind I can xpost to here, but don't want to be rude.

I'm really into the whole stsking thing now, being the best in the business at poker is pretty tough and hard to quantify, but for staking it's actual a real possibility. Every day working hard towards a goal is motivating for me which is why we set the initial $5m goal at the start of the year.

I'm already thinking about "post poker" and have quite a lot of good contacts built up through friends who have quit poker for real life or business guys I've met through poker. I had an open invite from one of the up and coming huge start ups in San Francisco to come around and check the offices out and they will introduce me and show me around a lot of the start ups there, so that's pretty cool. Apparantly "everybody in SF has a dog" so who knows maybe that will be the best place I move to!

Was actually reading back on this thread this morning. Page 323 onwards if anybody wants to read. Almost everybody was begging me not to get into staking. And now whilst I really don't want to do a "I told you so" I do think it's really important to concentrate on what you know and understand rather than trying to diversify for diversify sake.

Anyway, will try to get round to posting some stuff from earlier in the year in here if mods don't mind. Or people can follow the other thread and I'll update here more often.

[tikay]

That's good to hear.

There is no mod or spam issues with posting BITB stuff here.

I'd rather not drive our people across to 2+2, so the more you post on here, BITB or otherwise, the better.

[pleno1]

Thanks Tikay, will try to post from Jan onwards.

[pleno1]

If you have not yet heard of bitB, we are an online poker staking company that I co-created along with €urop€an and Elmerix with a goal of building the best poker community (initially I wrote “biggest” but this is not how we measure our success) in the world, while also building a brand that is recognized for its high quality content.

2016 was an amazing year year for us. Our focus was to create the best coaching roster in the world, that paved the way for our horses to exceed their expectations and crush the online poker scene 24/7. We shipped every major weekly tournament, final tabled 20+ WCOOP events and crowned 5 champions all within our humble team of 70.

Learn more about bitB by watching the Poker News interview with me hosted at the last EPT in Prague: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtI6lw7us8A


Why a PG&C thread?

We want to set a goal of 5M$ profit at the tables from our players in 2017 and we want to let you guys in on the journey on how we are going to make this happen.

We want to share what it is like to be a part of fast-paced, study driven poker stable. We will be sharing certain knowledge, i.e. key hands from our coaching sessions, with an aim to transfer our learning environment to 2+2, and facilitate a platform where can improve and learn from each other. Furthermore, we want to let you in on the whole experience, so we will be sharing both the progress as well as the tough times/setbacks and how we deal with them.

Why will this be a challenge?

First off some online operators are making poker tougher to beat with the ridiculous new formats and rake increases and then there's bots, scripts, piosolver, people stealing money, best players leaving to play for themselves etc.

Why follow?

To motivate you guys to follow and contribute, for every reply itt posted before 31st Dec 2017, that is at least a sentence, we will give $1 to REG charity and will double the amount if the thread reaches 5k replies. We will also give forfeits, further to be established, that will add up to the total donation number.

How to be involved

We will post hands here on a reguarly basis from ourselves to try and encourage discussion, randomly we will give out free access to our content or free 1on1s for good contribution in this thread. You can ask any question about staking and I’ll try to answer it in here.

Content

Whilst we're not going to go completely "Doug Polk" we will aim to create a lot of quality content. Video blogs, hand history reviews, maybe some twitching etc.

To keep you guys excited in the coming weeks we promise to record and share the WCOOP main event HH review done by myself and a few guest coaches and I will also record my WCOOP win hand history from start to finish and make it publicly available.

Cheers and vamos 2017!!!

[pleno1]

Another backer was pretty surprised our "better" guys stayed with us after getting big bankrolls for themselves.


Our retention rate is really high, we had 2 guys who left us, they both made 300k+ by WCOOP and one of them didn't really have the right mindset for coaching. He could only really study 1on1, he was an amazing horse and will do well by himself. The other guy was Portuguese and there was a regulation and he's not really playing much anymore.

We have a bunch of guys with $100k+ bankrolls, guys who have won live tournaments for $300k and had all their own action etc. I think they just believe in what we're doing. The way it kind of works:

1. Our guys send their hands to our main data guy who analyses them

2. He finds population tendencies and understands which plays make more money than others. For example whenever anybody with 24% turn probe probes they make 1.7bb, whenever anybody with 32% turn probe probes they make 2.4bb. He brings to us and we see why and if it makes sense and then adjust all round game plan, node lock in piosolver to develop the strategy deeper and then once we're pretty confident of it roll it out over the stable

3. Population generally starts doing what we're doing 1-3 months later. By that time our strategy has kind of already adjusted slightly.

4. Over those 1-3 months our guys are engrossed in the strategy, posting hands in mini study groups, posting hands on the forum, coming to reviews, EVERY main stable player gets a 1on1 with one of our main 13 coaches working specifically on their game.

The second big thing is that we have a MAIN and a DEVELOPMENT stable. Our best players (generally best) in the main stable coach the guys in the development stable and get paid really well (% of their profits) so even if they have their own rolls, we are guaranteeing them a salary each month from coaching. Poker players love that opportunity.

The system of information flows as follows:

Data analyst ->
Pads/Elmerix/European speaking about it, seeing things in game, saving hands and discussing high level between us ->
We speak the strategy through with our 13 elite coaches ->
They coach our main stable players ->
Main stable players then coach the development stable players

Lastly, we're a big community, we go on holidays together as a group. We for example went to Budapest for a weekend of socialising/partying/degeneracy/drinking, railed each other on deep runs in Barca/Prague etc, when leaving bitB, not only do you lose coaching, but you lose the community and support group which imo is even more important.

[pleno1]

2016 brags :/

Click to see full-size image.

[pleno1]

Some "behind the scenes" on how we operate/our model.

We developed a system last year where we have 14 tiers in the stable. Each tier has the same games allowed to be played, tier 1 is playing epts, suoer Tuesday every week etc and tier 14 is playing micro stakes. We generally don't take anybody on under tier 11 but if we get an amazing application from somebody super smart with no experience etc then we may give them a whirl in tier 14, but it's extremely rare. Each players goal every month is try to get closer to the next tier. We have had guys go from tier 12 to tier 1 in less than 6 months, if somebody works hard enough they can move up tiers very quickly, if somebody gets lazy then they can also move in the opposite direction.

Why tiers are important to us:

1- it gives our players something concrete to work towards in a variant that is hugely impacted by variance, it shows our players that other things than results will be rewarded
2- it allows us to maximise the ev of every single horse. By huge scrutiny it gives us the power to know who is performing at exactly what level and how close they are to higher stake games. Remember, if we have a guy who is not playing in a game where he's making money, were effectively making a mistake and costing ourselves money. I don't like costing myself money.

So at the start of the year we had to evaluate every single guy in the stable, we have one large scoring rating system which has 6 different factors with 6 different weights, so for example could be something like:

1- stats (25%)
2- 1on1 coaching reports (15%)
3- results (10%)
4- volume (10%)
5- community contribution (10%)
6- investors instinct (30%)

In terms of stats we have 60 different stats in pt4 and our players know how we want each of them to look, we evaluate them every month or so and it gives our players something to look to. Currently were in the middle of making a video for every single stat. So for example I may make a 3 minute video showing how to improve fold to turn probe and we have 60 or so different stats/videos for them to continue working on. These are stats we believe are optimal vs population tendancies.

Coaching reports are basically just all of our private coaches reporting back on their monthly 1on1s with each individual horse. If they were lazy, unprepared, not focused etc then this is marked down, if they prepared some really interesting things and were engaging and followed up then this is generally great news.

Volume/results is self explanatory. We expect a minimum of 400 games/month on average, but we expect more from guys who really want to succeed. Results are not just profit but evbb/100 on different sample sizes and different blind levels. People look at evbb/100 overall, but I only really look at it for blinds 400+ as too many huge pots that are somewhat irrelevant early on in tournaments can greatly skew.

Our community is our biggest strength. Coaching is great, our hard work is good and helps prepare and put things together but it's the guys themselves and how hard they work together and their combined attitude which ultimately makes them crushers. Everybody is expected to contribute on discord, on the forums and overall and this is taking into account when giving people additional games.

Finally and probably most importantly is investors instinct. This is basically me, European and Elmerixx overall feeling for the guy. Maybe he has amazing results, plays 900 games a month and stats looks good, but if we just have a bad feeling then we have a bad feeling and it's very hard to ignore and in general our instinct has always been proven to be somewhat correct, so we value our own opinion and instinct and count this quite heavily in terms of tier organization.

So anyway, everything is scored together, averaged out and then we have a final score of every guy. Now just because a guy has a better score than somebody else doesn't mean he should be in a higher tier. Maybe he's playing $20 abi and crushing hard with big volume, drastically moving him up to tier 1 and playing $150 abi would be stupid. We like to gradually move leople up, let them experience slightly larger make up numbers, make sure their mental game stays strong, make them work with slightly better players in the stable and in general slowly Moulds them into a crusher.

So, after dozens of hours of analysis, discussions, meetings, debate we finally have new tiers for all 70 or so guys and then we have to tell them. Each guy gets a detailed break down of where they were, where we are putting them, what they need to do to get to the next tier and what improvements we are looking for and finally, most importantly, what they are doing really well. Our guys in general are crushers, they work so hard and just constantly saying you need to do xyz isn't good, they need positive reinforcement and high confidence so they aren't doubting themselves.

So, new tiers made.. 5 days later a huge tcoop/XL series/powerfest series starts and as perfectionists as we like to be, we decide we have to look through every single tournament that runs and assign it a tier, will save this for the next post..

[pleno1]

And a little bit more about how we "prepare for series"

Ok, so we sit down on ( I'm going to wildly guess) Monday 12th January. We have hundreds of games we need to look at. Generally the way that j think stables do this kind of thing regarding to series is to blanket players and buy in levels such as:

1- you can play all 1-109s and 11rs and you can seek to anything above
2- you can play all 1-215s and 22rs and you can sell above
3- you can play all 1-530s and 55rs and you can sell above
4- you can play whatever you want, no restrictions

Now believe me, doing this would make our lives a lot easier. But two problems with this, 1) it seems like we don't like making our life easier, 2) the series are the biggest time of our horses year. They play Monday- Friday in July when it's hot outside and there's girls walking half naked so that they can excel at series. Of course they enjoy the grind, but when the big series come along, there's a huge emphasis on the bif prizepools and ultimately, this is what MTT players live for. If we spent 10 minutes preparing schedules for the guys who give everything to us all day every day 52 weeks a year I'm not sure I could really respect myself, and if I don't respect myself or act "proper" they definitely aren't going to respect me or treat our money with as much respect.

So, red bull out, excel sheets open...there is 5 of us in every meeting, me, Tomi (Elmerixx) Sam (European) Felix (German game/data/finance analyst) and Raymond (general manager)

For the first 60 minutes or so we discuss our overall approach for the series. We evaluate makeup numbers, we have a lot of confidence right now because last week we put everybody in their correct tiers meaning that there shouldn't be any mistakes and there's not a guy in a higher tier that shouldn't be there etc. we evaluate everything and discuss our approach. How aggressive should we be? We look at prizepools from previous years, check how tough final tables were, speculate about our potential Rois. We made a group on sharkscope of 30-50 high stake elite regs and filtered for their results in hypers, in turbos, in different field sizes. Much to our surprise the results were actually pretty good. Overall I wanted to gamble a little bit more than the rest of the guys for almost every single tournament. That's the problem with such important meetings. If you wake up and you're optimistic about the world, you've seen a horse completely crush the final three tables of the Sunday million and you've had people donating to you all day on Sunday you can think you're invincible, think we have a machine printing out money faster than Firaldo gets to the bar at the welcome party at EPT and you try to press as much as possible. Another Monday maybe you've lost $15k youreelf, reentries the party 530 more than Lena900 and saw your top horses jam 13bbs with k9 in the cut off and start questioning is this all worth it and how much can I sell my shares to European for?!

For whatever reason, I must have had a good Sunday and I wanted to press very hard in almost every tournament but the others reigned me in a little bit. That's kind of the good thing about having 5 guys, whilst meetings may drag on from debate, in general, the majority will think more rationally than an individual.

So anyway, we go through each tournament. Party $530 on a Friday maybe tier 5 but on a Tuesday it may be tier 2. We look at which other tournaments are on the other sites on he same day, for example if stars only have a zoom tournament on a Friday and 888 has a webcam tournament then it would be a great time to press hard on party poker especially.

Eventually we work out the schedules, we give them to the guys. We don't allow anybody to play anything off stake, the guys have to respect us and believe in us that we're making them the highest ev schedules. Sometimes a player will ask can I play X or y and we will let them play on stake. I know when I was moving up the stakes, sometimes I Jair felt really great and it would make my day if I could play an extra 2-3 tournaments. We offer basically 24/7 service to the guys and their needs/requests and whilst we ask them not to overly request things were ok with a few exceptions. We also monitor every tournament when it's running, if we expected the Monday 6max to have an ability of 83 and all of a sudden were 3 levels in and there's an ability of 76 we will inform all of the guys in tiers X-y they should jump in and we make a mental note for SCOOP that this particular tournament performed great. We also monitor each tournament for overlays. We saved party pokers ass a few times when there was going to be big overlays, we got our guys to jump in and chase the Evs.

Will write in the next post about how we did results wise, and the stupid $100k bet vs the swedes...