Confidence at an all time low so playing badly and clueless.

[DaveShoelace]

I don't understand why people are arguing with Honeybadger, he is clearly 100% right about everything he has said, and has explained everything really well. It would be more efficient spending time trying to understand why he is right than considering why you think he's wrong.

You say that because you have a solid understanding of variance and have played thousands and thousands of thousands of tournaments online. What he is saying is going to be proper this



and this (Dont watch it if you plan on watching Lost ever)



and this



For some people

[kinboshi]

How many £300 & £500 deepstacks have been run since DTD opened? It'd be interesting to see how many different winners there have been during that time.

Also, there will be quite a few people in profit during that time who aren't actually that good and plenty of good players who aren't in profit. I think I'm right in saying that Nick Hicks, Neil Giblin, Andrew Hulme and Ben Vinson have never won one of these (apologies if I'm wrong). But I'd rather back them than some players who have won it in the past, and some of them have won it more than once.

[smashedagain]

I don't understand why people are arguing with Honeybadger, he is clearly 100% right about everything he has said, and has explained everything really well. It would be more efficient spending time trying to understand why he is right than considering why you think he's wrong.

i hope its not seen as arguing and just people openly putting their point of view. Stu is obv devoting a lot of time and effort to contributing to the thread. I also appreciate the other people like Rob, Glen and dare I say even Aaron because they are having the balls to go against what everyone "knows" to be correct but are saying what a lot of people are thinking. If we are to believe that live poker at Dtd is just one luckbox fest then what is the point of playing.

Here are a few points I want people to have a go at answering.

1. Is live poker a game of skill or is it luck. For years people have been arguing this and many cases have gone to Court. I have always been in the skill camp but you are making a very good case for it being all luck.

2. It is possible to take low variance lines when playing hands, is it generally accepted that these are losing plays in the long term.

3. A top online player once told me some stuff about the top players playing poker to such a high standard that they played almost perfect always taking the correct lines so that they were not able to be exploited. If you knew exactly how this player played everyhand then surly you must be able to exploit this.

[MANTIS01]

Yo, I agree with nirvana. Variance is like riding a roller coaster, you strap yourself in and away you go. Sure, you could have a guided tour of the roller coaster before you set off and learn all about the mechanics and why it wont come off the rails. Then you have the knowledge to identify spots on the ride where the gravitational pull stops the cars coming off the rails due to various theories about speed and bank. Or you can embrace the ride by just putting your arms in the air and screaming and laughing wildly as you go. Either way everybody is on the same ride and are free to choose whatever attitude they want, the actual ride never changes.

We have already established people wont play enough live comps to make the data statistically relevant. I also think any semi-intelligent player can appreciate when he played well but got unlucky. So really talk of variance and understanding the mechanics of variance is all very irrelevant, in fact it is all associated with ego imo. The title of this thread is 'Confidence at an all time low so playing badly' and most of the talk has been about variance. One of your biggest weapons in poker is confidence and without it you probably will play badly. Once you are playing badly any talk about variance is even more irrelevant. So working on and understanding your emotions and behaviour and anything else within your control is a much more productive use of your time.

[smashedagain]

Loving the thread. Sooo many heros giving advice and opinions, just need RedDog to honour us with his presence and we almost have a full house.

[david3103]

Hellmuth says it's 100% skill and 50% luck

Gus summarised his Aussie Millions win in Every Hand Revealed by saying he was lucky. Paraphrasing it, he described the various combinations of luck as having good cards (AA in final hand, I know how it feels to be the wrong side of that scenario); other players having nothing to call him with when he was stealing blinds and making moves; and other players having good, but not good enough, hands to deliver big pots to him. Ultimately though he rode/used his luck to good advantage.

Maybe, if it weren't for luck, there wouldn't be any skill?

Having said all that - remember the Gary Player quote? "People say I'm a lucky so and so. Maybe I am, but the harder I practice, the luckier I get"

[Honeybadger]

I don't understand why people are arguing with Honeybadger, he is clearly 100% right about everything he has said, and has explained everything really well. It would be more efficient spending time trying to understand why he is right than considering why you think he's wrong.

Whilst your words are very kind - and correct lol - don't be too disappointed that many people are unable to instantly accept the truth about variance. It is a very difficult thing for the majority of people to understand.  We are conditioned to thinking about the world in terms of cause and effect, input and output. And in order to make sense of our lives we need to see a direct link between our actions and the results of those actions. We learn by trial and error - a young child touches a hot stove and gets burned, he learns not to touch it etc. The problem of course is that this link between input and output is very, very tenuous in gambling - especially in the short term.

Also, when we look at the world we can see patterns everywhere. Often these patterns show us the truth. But just as often these patterns are just random outcomes. And of course, we sometimes also impose our own narratives on the data that we see - in other words we create our OWN patterns when we look at the world.

Rob has got data on tournament results at DTD. He looks at this data and sees certain patterns, and thus makes certain conclusions. The vast majority of people who looked at this data would likely make the same conclusions. Some of these conclusions are wrong. And this is because the vast majority of people do not understand how to analyse data properly and have no knowledge of important statistical concepts like survivor bias.

I have tried to explain these concepts, and to show why simply spotting that maybe 20 players have had consistent results in DTD tournaments over the last 5 years means very little (and it is in fact INEVITABLE that there will be a group of consistent winners even if poker was 100% luck-based - see the monkey cardcutter story). I think I have done a decent job of explaining all this, and I appreciate you complimenting me on it. But this stuff is so difficult for most people to 'get', it goes against all their prior conditioning, that I would not expect every person to simply say "Oh wow! Yes I get it now." Plus of course, many people simply don't want to accept these things. There are not many people who both fully understand variance, and then can accept it and 'forget about it' in their approach to gambling. These people have the ability to become very successful gamblers.  

[DaveShoelace]

Who is HoneyBadger in real life? He is owning this thread at the moment? Is it Barry Neville?

[Honeybadger]

Jason, I am going to go through your points systematically. Ok, first two points:

If we are to believe that live poker at Dtd is just one luckbox fest then what is the point of playing.

AAAAGGGGHHHH!!!! No-one has ever said it is 'just one luckbox fest'. There is skill involved in live tournaments. But the point is that the VAST majority of people massively under-estimate the amount of luck involved, and also massively under-estimate the amount of time it takes for this luck to even begin to even out.

What is the point of playing? I am assuming you are talking about live tournaments, not cash games. There are lots of good reasons to play live tournaments. Here are three of them:

1. To satisfy your competitive and sporting instincts.
2. To have fun.
3. A good result can be life-changing.

All these are very good reasons to play live tournaments. And, of course, if you are a good player, then another reason to play is because you have a positive expectation through playing. So you are not making a 'bad bet' in order to have fun or try to win life changing money. If you enter the lottery you could also win life-changing money, but it is a bad bet. The beauty of a poker tournament (if you are a good player) is that you can 'enter a lottery' without having to make a bad bet.

However, some people have another reason to play live tournaments - "I want to make regular money to keep my family through results in live tournaments. I want to be a live tournament professional". This is NOT a good reason to enter poker tournaments. It is a completely unrealistic objective, even if you are +EV in the tournaments you enter. There is simply too much variance involved, and it is just too likely that you can go several years as a 'winning player' without actually doing any winning. If you need regular money coming in then you simply cannot achieve this through live tournament play. This is the reason I started all this stuff about variance, to try to explain this to you. I hope I have succeeded.

1. Is live poker a game of skill or is it luck. For years people have been arguing this and many cases have gone to Court. I have always been in the skill camp but you are making a very good case for it being all luck.

Poker is a game of skill AND luck. That's what makes it such a great game.

If I played tennis with Roger Federer it would be no fun at all. I'd not be able to return a single serve, and we'd both be bored within a couple of minutes. And if we played a full match I'd not win a single game from him, and in fact would only win a point if he made an unforced error. For this reason, I would never ever play Roger Federer for money. I would be GUARANTEED to lose. Neither would I play Garry Kasparov at chess for money. Or Tiger Woods at golf for money. You get the idea, right?

However, let's imagine I challenge Phil Ivey to a HU match. This would be the equivalent of me playing Roger Federer at tennis. Would I be guaranteed to lose? Of course not! In fact, if we started the match with only 40 big blinds each I believe I could simply open shove every single hand without looking and I'd be something like 40% to win the match (this won't be 100% accurate BTW and I can't be bothered working it out; a HU SNG specialist like Dan Morgan could no doubt give the exact figures). And if we just both played 'normal poker' I would win a decent chunk of the time. Of course, if we played 1000 times I would be a net loser. But it is perfectly feasible that we could play 20 HU matches and I would have won more matches than I would have lost.

This is what makes poker so amazing. The luck involved means that even a very mediocre player like me can beat the best player in the world in any one session, let alone any one hand. And this means that weak players are happy to play against much stronger players because they have a fighting chance of beating them in the short-term. And this, of course, is precisely why strong players should CELEBRATE variance rather than hate it. It is what allows them to make a living from the game because it means that weaker opponents are happy to play against them.

So what percentage is skill and what percentage is luck? Well, in the short-term poker is predominantly luck. And in the long-term poker is predominantly skill. I am not going to go through my spreadsheet for the last 8 years, but I am pretty sure that if I did then it would turn out that I win about 3 out of every 5 sessions I play, and lose the other 2 sessions. Which means that if I were to go out to play poker tonight there would be a 60% chance that I came home winning and a 40% chance that I came home losing. In other words, whether you win or lose in any one session is MAINLY down to luck. However, if I play 20 sessions of poker then it is MUCH more likely that I will be ahead at the end of this period of time. Far from guaranteed of course - I have had plenty of 20 session losing streaks in my career. But I am far more likely to be a winner than a loser over 20 sessions.

You get the point? In the short-term gambling is perhaps 90% luck and 10% skill (i.e. in any one hand). In the long-term poker is perhaps 90% skill and 10% luck. Our lifetimes are not enough for this luck to fully even out of course, but they are enough for it to at least START to even out.

BTW if this does not sound right to you, if you think this does not correspond to your experience of how life works, if you still believe that we should reach the 'long-run' eventually... consider this:

Imagine a child born in Africa during a famine. His parents both die, and he spends his life living in an orphanage, constantly hungry and ill. Then at the age of 15 he get captured by rebel forces during a civil war, tortured for a full 12 months, and then eventually dies in agony.

Now look at your own life. You live in the UK. You have enough to eat. You have a family who are alive and (I hope) healthy. You have a roof above your head. In fact you have life so cushy that you are able to spend a good chunk of your time playing a card game and even posting on an internet forum about a card game.

By the time you die it is very likely that you will have run 'above expectation' in life. Just having enough to eat every day probably puts you in the top 70th percentile of lucky bastards worldwide. The fact you are agonising about whether you can succeed playing poker for a living likely puts you into the top 95th percentile! By the time the poor African child dies anyone could look back on his life and say with complete justification that he ran below 'life EV'.

In other words, there is no reason to think that our lifetime is enough time for luck to even out. It isn't.

[Honeybadger]

I'll deal with your next two points later on... I've got to go and pick my son up from school now, and then will likely be busy with family. But I will get to them when I have half an hour spare.

[smashedagain]

Thanks for taking the time Stu.

[EvilPie]

Who is HoneyBadger in real life? He is owning this thread at the moment? Is it Barry Neville?

I don't know if you're serious or having a laugh but either way this really made me lol

[Tal]

In the Grand National, the horses are of different standards. To make it a more even race, the best horse has to carry more weight than the second beat horse, who carries more than the third best horse...who carries more than the worst horse in the field.

So why dont they all cross the line together? And why is one horse 4/1 and another horse 200/1?

If they ran the race a million times, the favourite would win more times than any of the others. But it doesn't mean it will win once in 100 times.

Should you back outsiders for the sake of it because "anyone can win"? No.

In poker, staking Andrew Hulme would be better value than staking me, even if he failed to cash five times in a row and I won five comps ( my analogy, my rules!). Over a million comps, you would make more money.

The problem - taking us back to the original debate (call, BTW) - is that you can't get a million comps!

[NEWY]

Its no coincidence that those who work hardest and are most determined are the "luckiest". This is the case with most things in life

[MC]

Lol I guess you're right Barry. I can't explain it any better than Honeybadger, but just for some really basic graphical evidence.

This is bfizz11's graph for $12 180-man tuournaments in 2010, in which he had an ROI of 20%. For those that don't know Bfizz11, he is an absolute hero at this format, and overall has won $430,000 in 65,000 tournaments online.

If we pretend that we can play 250 live tournaments a year and this is a graph spanning 19 years. Yes, somewhere in Years 2 and 8 he is Rastafish and gets the lot. But there are are about 6 losing years in there, and a least 6 break even.

Of course there are lots of differences between $12 180-mans and live MTTs, namely ROIs and field sizes, but it is still illustrative of a player, who is very +EV in the field, will encounter.