The Poker Zoo Podcast

T.S. Eliot famously stated that “there is no method but intelligence” when asked about his craft. Poker is like this, too, so when a savvy player doesn’t make it work, the postmortem is always interesting. Nate Serisky, the “new pro” DGAF dubbed “Tom Brady Jr.” in one of his session reviews, stopped playing poker at the end of 2024. A staked and studied mid-stakes reg, he was not who you wanted to see at your Wynn table. Nate liked taking his time and took every hand, it seemed to me, very seriously. Yet the story behind the story is always complicated. Beyond appearances, Nate was in fact struggling to establish a satisfying win-rate. We get into it on today’s Poker Zoo. (I say today’s Zoo like I’ve been just pumping out podcasts.) I respect the people around Nate and am sure he had all the help he could ask for; I met Nate, after all, through Chris Konvalinka and Christian Holden, each talented players with some role in the story, no doubt. Yet I wonder about Nate’s references to study and so does he, referring to theory and what was best for the live games. Nate sounds like he could have been falling into the trap of thinking outputs are theory. We can become consumed by the microfibers of equilibrium data when more basic and flexible ideas are what we need for the real and very different equilibria around us. A major theme of this blog for the past year has been variance and the misinterpretation of it. Swings in poker are difficult to accept and might not even mean what we think they mean. In our first podcast, Nate spoke of taking a lot of time off to recover from rough outings. Looking back, he questions this. “More volume,” he says, was surely one of the answers. Maybe so. How to persist is one of the hardest tasks to master in poker and seems like a big part of what happened here. Overprep is a dangerous thing when the joy of the game lies in confronting the challenge simply and at ease. Still, signs point to Nate returning to poker. He sounds like someone who is processing an experience, not leaving it behind. We cannot know the future until we know what we want. When he calls his current gig as a slot stalker a “profession,” we know he is not taking himself too seriously, given it is not a profession. We all go through periods of just needing income. Of course, the transition could simply be to his current preoccupation, music. That’s a glorious way to live, of course, but a way with just as many or more demands. In any case, I hope you enjoy this bookend podcast. So many are going through struggles and changes; really, all of us. The post PZ103: Persistence, Real and Fake, with Nate Serisky appeared first on Out of Position.

Jason Su, mental game and performance coach for an increasing number of poker players, returns to the Zoo. While poker is a game (not “just” a game), there is something a touch more serious in this visit. Why is this? Perhaps because the money involved in poker is increasingly scarce and so every edge has become important. Actually, it’s worse than that. People are leaving the online scene and rolling the dice in live MTTs or private cash games at a new clip. Nick Howard has gone AWOL and become a concierge for desperate poker nerds. Scamming and scammers have never had it better. So, do you need a mental game upgrade to deal with it all? Maybe. My first impression of The Joy of Poker is that this is a book about the ego, not in the pop psychology sense, but in the Freudian sense. The ego mitigates the unconscious and reality. The ego is, as Jason would say, present. This mental awareness of ourselves is not only what makes us conscious but helps us deal with all the pressures of our irrational desires and what society tells us. Freudian or not, Jason puts great stock in being in touch with reality and ordering our response to it. Credit to him, you can hear his measuredness, his lack of hysteria, on our podcasts. Ok, so what? One big assertion he makes is that mental game has made no progress since some undefined point. This seems doubtful to me, but in conversation, Jason seems convinced enough. Still, everyone now has a little meditation app or something now. Everyone knows to breathe. Go crazy, you oxygen addicts. While I don’t get into on the podcast, as I expect the reader and other pods to handle certain details, Jason provides a methodology to handle the stress of the game. Read the chapter Clear the Path to get down to business. Instead, I focus in the interview on an introduction to his ideas and on the culminating chapter, Master of Luck which he referred to in an oblique tweet several months ago. Can you make your own luck, really? At first, he seems to mean something else, and that the argument is more semantic in nature: you don’t make luck, but you can experience it. Fair. Then, I stumble onto something more important: a human approach to embracing variance, which has always been the key to the seemingly impossible goal of playing with a sense of peace. After reading the book I realized the answer to Jason’s supposition that no progress has been made in the mental game department. It’s a slippery area of the game which has been promulgated through so many empty words, true, but progress has indeed been made and Jason is making some of it. Jason means that the way out of pain is not around but through, both in poker and in life. Words are not enough for the human emotional experience; they are signifiers but not actions. Jason wants you to take a sequence of action steps, which you can read about in the book. So, while the field’s methodologies have been dodgy overall, Jason has refined the answers, both in print and in practice. Processes that allow us a modicum of acceptance are the progress we’ve made, however imperfect they are. We must fully embrace the swings of the game and thus the feelings associated with them, just as we already know we must max out the corresponding and primary challenge of the game, the challenge of poker strategy. In other words, to interpret Jason correctly is not to merely hear him say, “you must be willing to win big.” No, you also have to be willing to lose. Perhaps he doesn’t say this enough, given that “willingness to win” always sounds paradoxical. And so this is where emotional availability – presence – meets up with Mason’s critique through knowledge alone – and explains Chewy’s curious quote, for that matter. We thus demonstrate a human way forward and it is for those primarily with the proper skills already. Mental game is for those who need it, and those who need it already know how to win. How to do it is the problem. Tendler’s “inchworm” is here, Mason’s focus on the strategy as answer is here, and the contributions of many other thinkers are in here as well, however hidden. The Joy of Poker presents a strong case for, and argument about, mental game. Have a listen and find out. You can find Jason on Twitter or here at his webpage. The post PZ102: Jason Su Wants to Unmisreg You appeared first on Out of Position.

It’s early in the back nine for the Poker Zoo podcast, so it’s time to focus on what we want to accomplish. I have a fitting guest today in Sara O’Connor, a mid-Atlantic player and writer who has gathered some attention through her book, A New Queen’s Guide to Poker, and through some social media expertise. Sara has a lot of drive. I was introduced to Sara through my friend Jason when he bit off a little more than he could chew in the course of his regular Twitter trolling. While Sara and I discuss many things about her life in poker, her first book is or was the original focus of the interview. I think she has done a great job in acclimating the novice to specifically live casino poker. Explicatory passages such as this could do a lot for the unfamiliar: The game is played with a dealer in the center of the table and two to ten players. Seat numbers start from the dealer’s left at seat one and usually end at eight or nine but may go all the way up to ten. Currently, my favorite seat is seat five, but never become too attached to one seat. You never know which seat you’ll have to start playing at, and attachments can lead to feelings of jinxes which must be avoided. That said, you can ask for a seat change button if you’re horribly uncomfortable and playing a cash game. With a tournament, you’re stuck with the seat you’ve been given. We’ll talk about the nitty gritty details of each of these table positions later. This is far more practical than many, drier introductory texts. Sara conveys much of the real game and the concerns of its new participants. That’s the “good for poker” stuff everyone yammers on, right there. When it comes to the strategy discussion in New Queen’s, my response is a little more complex. I think of Dan Savage’s “campground” rule, where he posited that in certain relationships, you must leave your partner better off than you found them. In essence, much of my coaching practice lays in correcting concepts and their misapplication. Does A New Queen’s Guide to Poker and other such novice guides to strategy help or harm the player in the long run? Does she follow the campground rule? I tend to think the answer is that there is little harm here in the end, and that Sara answered my question during the podcast well enough. Things are going to be wrong, inevitably and everywhere; you’ll recover from your middle school texts no matter how careful they are in addling your brain. The so-called “ladder of learning” is not just straight up and up – the process of learning and relearning also matters. That’s real enough and leaves the writer some reign to describe things that need to be introduced even if those things will need to be corrected later. And of course, I like teaching poker and its theory! Bring on your confusions. Really, though, I want to skip all that and focus in on what I liked hearing about at the end of the pod: Sara’s coming poker fiction. Ideas start with books and stories, and usually only then proceed to reach popular culture and its bigger, more splashy mediums where huge profits and big picture trends develop. The current debate over poker media is reductive and misguided, as I have written, in both how influence works and what makes it work. So, if Sara is going to give us some “smut,” it’s good news because she will be generating “content” that really matters to real people with real desires, rather than doing what the poker world flagellates itself to do every few years: weakly manipulate culture with “PR” no one wants. The writer or communicator is the usual if hidden origin point of cultural products and movements because the word is the basic unit of shareable thought. You can contact Sara on X or at her website. Coming next, popular mental game and performance coach Jason Su returns to the Zoo with a new book – The Joy of Poker. The post PZ101: Sara O’Connor Does Things appeared first on Out of Position.

For our milestone episode, I talk with old friend Steve “ChipXtractor” Catterson. I met Steve through the defunct Red Chip Poker forum, and we have been more or less in touch since. Steve and I go over some stories, but it seems to me that the present in this case is more interesting than the past. Steve is working on his game and that means becoming more interested in the game. Teaching, in turn, makes me more interested in the game. The reason for all this is that when we see what is possible or what we have been blind to, the world regains its color. I’m obviously not just talking poker here. The way to overcome loss is to see what still lives and what you have been missing from the bigger picture. Less seriously, it’s fun to hear hand histories from South Point, which can be a fun, popular local’s place. Soon Steve will be moving up from the cheap seats and will get involved with the notorious shit regs of the “Jewel.” Good luck with that. Here’s the hand discussed: The theme of this podcast is sociability. From Steve’s angle, poker is a part of one’s real, physical, meaningful life. Otherwise hard-tack players need to remember that. I regret my many rudenesses at the table and have been trying to make up for them for some time. For those currently embracing misery and its spread to others, I suggest you rethink your approach. You don’t have to embarrass that old guy who doesn’t want to show his cards. You don’t have to fight over who straddled when. You don’t have to wander the room looking for exact right game to worsen. Thanks to Dean for all his work on the pod. Thanks to Porter, Julie, Burge and anyone else who put in some editing time. Congratulations us. If you want to join Steve in relearning the game, use the coaching link or email me. Have a great week, Chris   The post PZ100: Poker as Social Good, with ChipXtractor appeared first on Out of Position.

As we roll into 2025 it’s well worth checking in with Zoo member Jason Burge, aka Jambasket. He’s a tough online winner in the active Michigan online games but is also a hidden superhero on Twitter (I’m not calling it X, c’mon), where he trolls the hell out of poker’s puffed-up personalities and various engagement beggars. Students in the Zoo have a lot of questions about how to Jambasket, so we go through them all. Should be valuable for the aspiring: how do you make a living in your underwear these days? We also talk poker culture. One thing that’s important this month is the Global Poker Awards and their coming award show on February 22. Anyone (who is fair) can see that Eric Danis and company do a pretty damn good job overall. I have no complaints and enjoy helping out by voting. Because the awards are really the promotional arm of a poker business rather than some non-aligned committee, it’s easy but incorrect to get upset when some corner of the industry isn’t included or perhaps is passed over. One of those debatable corners is the podcast scene, where the usual suspects keep shuffling in and out of the finalist nominations. Those selected are worthy candidates who serve the needs of the poker industry. Yet one of the few podcasts of any real lasting worth, Sessions, isn’t likely to ever make it out of the first round, never mind win the award itself. Jason and I talk lightly about this problem for a bit. After seven seasons of diary-meets-storytelling, Billy is still in a tough spot, but he continues to stretch out a grand story arc. His is not really a podcast in the sense GPI voters mean, but a kind of oral history, one which represents an entire vein of the culture. It’s hard to compare Sessions to a half-hour interviewing the latest tournament donkstar, in other words. Jason and I also go over the recent Faraz Jaka queen-nine of diamonds hand, tournaments in general, and a few other fun things as well. Jason has made several appearances on the Zoo, here’s another one to check out. He also has a series of amusing trip reports documenting his days in Las Vegas, check them out through searching my website. Here’s one. Hope you enjoy this one as much as I did. Thanks, Chris The post PZ99: Jambasket FAQs, GPIs, MTTs, & LOLs appeared first on Out of Position.

The five things you need to do to win in 2025. The roadmap to poker success in 2024. Three tips for crushing poker in 2023. They do it all day, every month, every year, but what if we turn them on their head and listen carefully: You’re not winning 20 bbs/hr at your live game because you didn’t listen to us. You’re not trading pots with NL500 regs because you didn’t take our program. You’re not heads up because of our ICM class that you skipped. Sirens, our poker masters, yet sirens who compete heavily for our sailors. The proliferation of information and poker knowledge has never been greater, and so the big poker educators say with more and more confidence and more and more fear, we have the way to win. A few authors pitch in, too: look at this fresh batch of Poker for Dummies. I’m sure they all bring some value. Yet the exact same people say, out of the other side of their mouth, that only a select few actually win. In other words, come to be vetted and culled. Is this how coaching should work? If all these poker educators are doing their advertised job, we should, by 2025, be seeing the Great Evening of Poker, where win rates plummet and loss rates improve, but the evidence is not clear. Instead, the migration to tournaments may be the ultimate expression of the Evening and its tighter margins, where more and more money is agreed to be flushed out of the player pool and into the supportive but parasitical industry. Hey, here’s a mystery bounty, dummy! Come over here! My win rate, for instance, is the same now as it was then; the Evening of Poker is not affecting me in some respects. In fact, certain faces never seem to leave, while newbies come and go like the tide. Moreover, the primary public-facing success of the poker industry, the story of the tournament luckbox semi-genius, continues its tale of an unstated minimal return floated by an increasing volume of staking cattle-calls. Further, while the channels do change, the themes do not: just as we once loved Andrew Neeme’s tour of how soft 5/10 Vegas was, now Marc Goone fascinates us by showing deep 5/5 games which seem to be as full of fish as the Hudson was in 1609. So how do we resolve the essential contradiction of the poker educators, who break the rule of good business and prefer to promise more than they can deliver? After all, the best students are those already destined to win, but they compose a tiny fraction of the student pool. What about the try-hards, don’t they count? More importantly, what if that try hard is you? Today our guest is James Tichenor. He’s played poker over a long time period. He’s getting there, but it is a struggle many of us can identify with. Almost everything he was doing when we started working together, I considered backwards – yet he didn’t just make it all up on his own. No, he came from all the usual schools and classes and coaches and poker celebrities. Didn’t the tips work? Did he not read the menu? Are we supposed to blame him or them? Is everything that simple? What happened and what’s next? Today, we find out. The post PZ98: Behind the Facade of Poker Education appeared first on Out of Position.

We are happy to close our best year of interviews with Poker Zoo stalwart Greg Porter. We not only cover his swingy year in the games but address the many interesting things that happened in 2024 poker culture. First, though, remind me what they were again? One thing that does actually matter to a serious player who needs to produce is dealing with the increasingly gatekept public/private games. Greg tells us about his experience managing expectations and keeping the games alive. That also brings up the inevitable novelty games that help sustain the action, such as the notorious Stand-up, aka Nit Game. (And look at that friendly guy in the podcast photo – don’t you want him in your game?) For those dealing with the stress of performance, Greg talks about hiring Jason Su for mental game coaching. Here’s our interview with Jason that I mention, and here is that essay on mental game from way back. Two notes on the close of the podcast. While we joke around about some of the foolish “women in poker” discussions that happen among the thinkfluencer types, it’s worth underscoring that there is no inherent reason for women to play worse (or better) than the men do. There are always, however, personal issues for both men and women and these are far bigger hurdles than immutable characteristics. To that question, Greg provides some classic, unheeded, and excellent advice on how to get to his level – it’s the theory, stupid. (If you need a more in-depth discussion on why there are so many bad takes on the woman in poker subject and why it is women are slow to take up the game as their hobby, I wrote heavily about it here.) Second, I meant the question of what is the good poker book or good poker writing of 2024 rather literally. I’m out of touch on this subject after a year of closely following politics instead of poker. Other than yet another solid Dara O’Kearney intro to strategy text, is there something great I should check out before the GPI Awards process starts? Let me know. Here’s last year’s interview with Greg if you want to hear more from him. Thanks for listening and putting up with me. Special thanks to Dean for all his work and to SDJen for the recording space and her general helpfulness in all Poker Zoo matters. Have a great 2025, readers and listeners. Chris The post PZ97: Relax, Greg Porter is Not a Poker Pro appeared first on Out of Position.

Merry Christmas from the Poker Zoo! To celebrate, we bring on (depending on your point of view) gadfly or pest Norman Chad. Mr. Chad is indisputably one of the true co-pilots of poker commentary and the boom itself. There are many myths that surround the poker boom, such as it being triggered by the 2003 world series champ, but we’re not going into that today, because Norm is still alive and kicking and screaming and yelling at the clouds, here in post-Covid, dumpster-fire America. One problem he’s having is that the technology of the social media age allows the audience to yell back. Fortunately, Norman has broad shoulders, or at least a funny suit jacket, and is weathering Elon’s version of twitter and the 2021-24 reaction to the censorious centrist politics of the past decades fairly well. Norm, ever the grumpy contrarian, takes up the cause for institutional standards on a daily basis on X, but also on his revamped show, Gambling Mad with Norman Chad. Gambling Mad is being promoted on YouTube under the preferred two-pronged strategy, leading with a long video and following up with clipped-out “shorts.” For the moment, both are unloved and underappreciated by humans and algorithms alike, but this is a favorite to change; even as this is being written, one of the shorts I mention in the podcast seems to have become a hit on the TikTok platform. Norm has little quit in him and everyone can eventually find their correct YouTube pitch. As I delved into Wolfgang’s extraordinary success, the short form is about precision – every nanomoment truly counts for the “shorts” viewer. The spoiled-for-choice make instantaneous decisions on tone and expectation – literally within seconds – and so far, Norm needs a little more time to fire up his best rant. For this reason, the full show is Norm at his best. We talk about its origins today, including the interesting set he films on. Also, for everyone who does not enjoy Norm or who flames him on Twitter, he invites you to go here, the “worst restaurant in Las Vegas.” However, it might just be that no one ever taught Norm how to handle the tableside music: you don’t pay for the accordionist, you pay for accordionist to go away. Hope you enjoy our show. Dean and I are talking about how we might continue and improve the Zoo. Help us by letting one of us know what you’d like to hear and who you’d like to hear from. Best wishes, Chris The post PZ96: Cloud Yells Back at Norman Chad appeared first on Out of Position.

This year we have focused on very broad issues in poker, both in poker theory and in its statistics, but today we are going to get very specific. Scoop! is a series of detailed books focused on one game in two variants: PLO8 and Big O. Its author, Greg Vail, makes a living playing and teaching these games alone. In Hold’em, there are often cards on the board that are considered to be blanks or bricks that should not help anyone’s hand. This is almost never the case in High Low. Since there are so many combinations of hands in play, most cards on the board are going to help or connect with something or someone. Therefore, we must consider how the “best” hand can fare against the entire deck and the entire run out. Once this is done, the “best” hand is the hand with the highest equity. Most of the time, this is not the hand that a Hold’em mind would consider to be “ahead” right now. Vail, Greg. Scoop!: Big O and PLO8: Winning High Low Concepts for the Hold’em Mind (p. 13). For whatever reason, splitting the pot into two simply blows away many poker players. While I have been preparing a modest class for Double Board Bomb Pots in particular, the Scoop! series by Greg, soon to be completed with volume four, is the seminal contemporary text for big bet omaha games and is emphatically built around split pot concepts. Play for the scoop. We wouldn’t draw to chop in Hold’em, so why would we in split pot games? We will gain most of our profit by exploiting players who do exactly that. We’ve all seen someone River an inferior Flush in Hold’em, pay off a large bet to the nut Flush, and say, “I hate it when I was drawing dead and got there.” That happens all the time in split pot games. Do not be that guy. It is a conceptual series but also a detailed one. Breakdowns like this, of the entire combo, help clarify what you are looking for in a split pot hand. A few more links: Here’s the software Greg mentioned. Greg can be found at doublesuited.com. Here’s a Zoo episode where I argue with Limon about a split pot double board spot. What would Greg have to say about it? Basically, this is a great series, I don’t have a lot to add here. You should just buy and read the books if you are going to play Big O and PLO8. Enjoy the interview! Dean at work. As for sourdough, I use allrecipes.com for everything these days. Maybe Dean will write out his own recipe and post it here. The post PZ95: Greg Vail, Split Pot Expert appeared first on Out of Position.

The straddle is a third blind added to the traditional two blind structure of hold’em and other related games. It’s not always a neutral proposition. The extra blind can help stimulate action or inhibit it, depending on the players and stack sizes. More controversially, the straddle often gets put into play with a certain amount of social pressure. For this reason, in the games I host, I allow unlimited straddling but never allow it to become mandatory – because there is always That Guy who doesn’t want to straddle, and I don’t think a good host forces people to do things. Our guest today Brent Jenkins is that guy who is tired of what he calls “stakes terrorists” prodding him into putting on the straddle. Not a big deal you say? Just say no to straddles, Nancy reminds you – you have the option. Well, as we all know, it’s not that simple. Pro-straddlers can be pushy and unpleasant. There is a social stigma that if you are against the straddle, you are somehow against a “good game.” Objecting to the straddle becomes a form of poor behavior – it is stigmatized. Brent doesn’t think it should be like this and has written what he titles The Anti-Straddle Manifesto. For the TLDR crowd it’s going to be a heavy lift, but I can assure you it is fairly straightforward and marshals many good arguments for his case. In the introduction he even lists the headers for the points he’s going to make, at pains to be clear. To really understand his argument, we have to separate the social pressure aspect and the straddle itself. Brent makes arguments against both, but the former is what is most important to him. Poker is constantly concerned with “what is good for the game” and he makes a fairly reasonable case that “stakes terrorists” are not acting in its best interests. The straddle itself, on the other hand, is going to be a less clear subject. Most players who love it confuse the correlation of action they bring with the incentive the straddle adds to the game, and therefore are under the delusion that they are the “good guys” here, when it is really much more of a grey area. Straddles halve the effective stacks and limit actions, while providing third blind complexity. Tradeoffs. The notoriously bitchy, micro-edge seeking culture of the 5/10 scene at Wynn and other casinos has led to that leading room now removing the straddle from the game in favor of a big blind ante. Brent is obviously pleased by this contiguous development. We’ll want to watch and see how it all plays out. Brent argues the lack of straddles will stimulate players to play at their appropriate stakes size, and anecdotally already reports some of that happening. Conversely, I’ve heard negative rumors as well. In any case, whether you are a die-hard straddler or one of Brent’s acolytes, hopefully today’s podcast makes you think about this hidden big deal within cash game culture. Enjoy the pod. N.B. Dean is occupied, my apologies for the stripped down podcast and any balance issues. The post PZ94: Brent Jenkins is That Guy appeared first on Out of Position.

One of the common twists of fate in poker is the change in personal relationships on account of strategy and results. At one point now nearly forgotten, the entrance of Alvin Lau into the Red Chip Poker forum caused a whole chain of events to unfold. One end result was the rise of Alvin’s first poker teaching and programming, Overnight Monster, as ambitious RCP and other players flocked to his initial offerings. This established Alvin as a strong coaching prospect for low stakes online players. The forum feuding and questions of etiquette in turn led me to become more independent, as I could not deny Alvin’s superior strategies and reasoning in the forums. This interaction later became a series of interviews with Alvin which would become the most popular of the Poker Zoo’s first episodes, as we both agreed and sparred over a whole series of subjects and ideas, from Pluribus to race identity. Today Alvin returns after several years in the Texas poker scene. It’s been a minute for sure, and he’s changed quite a bit: our far-reaching conversation reflects both personal and professional changes. As a coach who has a very straightforwardly successful and straightforward program, he has become popular with those who are absolutely committed to moving up fast online and live. While coaches and players do grumble about their competition behind the scenes, Alvin belongs in a special tier of slightly less-known experts you can count on probably better than anyone in poker yet are still accessible, a unique tier that includes player/coaches like Upswing’s Gary Blackwood, Peter Clarke of Carrot Poker, and now Marc Goone of Hungry Horse. While Alvin had earned a reputation as a difficult person to deal with, relationships work both ways; I was not persuaded his apparent harshness was always unwarranted. Further, his many success stories bely the trouble he’s run into – even with students from my own community. He has also had an obviously huge impact on the vlogger with the highest number of subscribers ever – Wolfgang. We talk extensively about Alvin’s work with Wolfgang today. Being the coach of a near-celebrity poker player means the spotlight is on the student. Alvin, however, is more than ever okay with that, even writing about it on his Youtube page. Yet that’s not the real surprise today, because Alvin discusses a likely reason he has sometimes struggled in the coaching relationship, despite his passion for it: autism. Does this self-diagnosis resolve everything? Alvin, a fierce solver and simplification advocate at the time, was hard on RCP and on a semi-related book project. Under the weight of Alvin’s public fire, the project collapsed, and the forum was retracted as RCP reorganized itself to catch up with the times. Was Alvin unnecessarily cruel or was he just stating the facts, an inevitable agent of the marketplace of ideas? Through the lens of his diagnosis, it was neither. Instead, it was the manifestation of indifference or unawareness of social behaviors that is often the outcome of his condition. I’m not a fan of the medicalization of personality issues that seems to plague contemporary society and especially parents – why can’t he just have these traits without a diagnosis – but it struck me during our talk that if a diagnosis of a trait can bring understanding and peace to a person, and even change their behavior for the betterment of all, who am I to question the label or the process? Our talk goes quite a bit beyond this and Wolfgang, as we get the real deal on the state of Texas NL, the real reason not every great poker mind plays high stakes, and even some strong live poker tell stuff. I hope you enjoy Alvin’s return. A few links: Alvin mentioned Wolfgang’s ownership stake in Home – The Fort Card Room Alvin on the Poker Zoo. The post PZ93: Alvin Behind the Scenes appeared first on Out of Position.

The Poker Zoo continues its latest revival with an interview on a key poker subject: the quantification of winning and losing in games of chance. Going to play a session of poker is gambling, guest Mason Malmuth asserts unambiguously, but the question becomes more interesting and complex over the horizon of time. In fact, the answer now can change – or may not, depending on your expectation. A new edition of his Gambling Theory and Other Topics covers this and all kinds of other poker statistics concepts. It seems like a forgotten essential text because the questions and the math don’t change, nor has the community really added much to Mason’s work that started back in the 1980’s. Gambling Theory and Other Topics has been very helpful in creating my current article series on playing live one three. The interplay of expectation and standard deviation was not previously clear to me before, especially as forum posters continuously toss around arbitrary sample size requirements and myths about “variance.” The final section of the book is unexpected, however, being a long series of short reviews on poker and gambling books. As I went through some of the reviews, I realized how valuable this summary is, should anyone want to get a picture of the history of poker strategy. That said, there are two key books (and maybe others) that are not in the reviews, unless I’m mistaken. The first is Easy Game by Andrew Seidman, probably the finest of all poker general strategy books in overall quality and influence. It’s somewhat dated now because of the precision of today’s tools, but Seidman’s thinking process and his teaching knack remains unmatched. Second, Let There Be Range by Tri Nguyen and Cole South similarly shared high stakes high ideas in the transformative years of modern no-limit. This was a breakthrough read for many. Thanks to Poker Zoo member Kent D. for reading the book with me and preparing questions. Thanks also, of course and as usual, to Dean for putting our podcast together. Now go find some peppers! The post PZ92: Malmuth on Gambling appeared first on Out of Position.

Poker pro and instructor Marc Goone has created a bit of a stir in saying he can beat the low stakes, specifically his local 5/5 game, for at least $100 an hour. Interestingly, it’s been done and is being done – the shock is not actually the number but how few do it or challenge themselves to get there. On today’s Poker Zoo I get the details on the challenge (he’s already well into it) and find out why he thinks he can take the lead in the under-appreciated, temporal excellence of the modest and modest-stakes crusher. After all, if you are good – like Marc is – you don’t hang around here, right? We also go over Marc’s coaching and staking program, Hungry Horse. He’s not the only one out there providing this exact kind of poker education. More and more of your opponents in the low to mid stakes are part of programs or study groups or professionals. That’s the inevitable effect of time, inflation, and shrinking cash game liquidity. Players move down or laterally, looking to find the existing soft games. Hungry Horse is just that, hungry, and is gathering and focusing many names you know on grabbing more dollars. Marc’s recent tweet about content creators being fish probably hit all too close to some client homes. Part of Hungry Horse’s marketing is Marc’s appeal to younger players. With his tattoos, mustache and opinionated yet mildly ironic attitude, Marc presents the slimmer, more contemporary face of live poker, a scene which is often otherwise filled with alternating slobs, fitness lifestyle freaks, untrustable social media baiters, and withdrawn or tempestuous shitregs. Hungry Horse is not aimed at the average the aging boomer or gen-x player who no longer studies and still identifies with a fat accountant’s inexplicable tournament run, but at those who still want or need a growing future in poker. Of course, much of the appeal, as with everything, is in the presentation. Surrounding some intriguing tactics in Hungry Horse’s free Youtube videos are all the classic hits of strategy adjustment: nihil novem sub sole. A few extra notes: it’s worth listening to Charlie Wilmoth’s six month fall from grace and his subsequent time at the $5 games, in a series of podcasts focused on a major, attitude-changing downswing. Moreover, Charlie coaches for Hungry Horse, if I am not mistaken. My latest series on a similar challenge contains some data and statistical stuff that might be of use. Further, a Zoo podcast with Mason Malmuth on those ideas is done and is being produced. Here’s the Aero vlogger I mention who is having big success in my player pool. His style doesn’t look as sustainable as Marc’s but on the other hand, demonstrates the money available and is an argument in Marc’s favor for succeeding in the challenge. Lastly, check out Limon’s interview with Mike Basich, another known crusher of the California five-dollar games, and how he does it. It’s interesting to listen to how little things change, despite solvers and data and all the stuff with which we scare ourselves. The post PZ91: The Marc Goone Challenge appeared first on Out of Position.

Legendary poker theorist and writer David Sklansky joins us on the Zoo. We discuss Twoplustwo Publishing’s new book, Small Stakes Hold’em: Help Them Give You Their Money, an already controversial strategy work by David and his business partner Mason Malmuth. Freshly published in January 2024, the new book focuses on adaptive play in the softest small-stakes games and against the absolutely worst players. “When I started to play these games,” David writes in the book’s introduction, “which are the large majority of poker games spread today, it was shocking at how badly many of the players played, and this included many opponents who were regulars in these games. A book wasn’t far off from there, especially as Mason was already in the Vegas low-stakes scene and was seeing many of the same things; here’s his PZ interview. Early versions attracted attention on Twoplustwo thanks to some provocatively strange hands that were unsurprisingly misinterpreted; even Bart Hanson, king of live poker training, when correcting a forum statement about wide ranges, felt further compelled to drop some literalist outrage as well as scold Mason over a nitty drawing recommendation. On one hand, everything is fair game, and the examples were not perfectly representative, as David explains in our podcast. On the other, a little unfair given how many ideas Bart (and all of us) has cribbed from the old theorists – think of all those endless podcasts on set mining, implied odds, and effectively value betting that derive straight from Sklansky and Seidman. Ideas, especially in books, are best understood as questions to be discussed. Instead, we have social media, whose arc is short and bends toward conflict. It definitely didn’t go past me that many of the experienced posters in the book’s forum thread didn’t seem to understand certain poker fundamental ideas. One recurrently loud poster kept challenging Sklansky on the expected value of a hand multiway, not understanding where EV comes from or how the game might differ from the “allowed” calls in a solver abstraction. Now what was interesting was that this player is a studied one, a student of the solves and the population data. He probably is quite the online threat. Yet when his conversation extended itself to why we open and to what size, he revealed only further misconceptions. The urge to assume prolific poker authors don’t have some slight idea about what they are doing is odd to say the least, and the ability of players to play in certain environments without knowing what is going on underneath is a fascinating surety. These short interactions demonstrate an interesting leak in today’s poker education culture: we love the model and its outputs, while we are quickly losing track of the theory. The model is not theory; we improve theory from the model’s outputs, but the model is itself mute and is only possible because of theory. Consider how often smart players say to study the big picture, not every detail; what do you think that is really all about? Yet aspiring players immediately run home to check their lines against GTOW, the seductive application which has become as much of a soothing AI doll for regs as it is a strategic tool. Further, consider how often someone in your Discord starts a foolish statement with “in theory we should,” then goes on to refer to some obscure spot in a solve output. No, theory explains the data and is enhanced by the data; we can’t even get out of first gear when we talk so rashly and incorrectly about first things. Small Stakes Hold’em: Help Them Give You Their Money is a book of theory and the attendant primitive math of proofs and samples and suggestions. It is often exploitative and so the examples can look ugly- yet how else would such a word and action perform? The elegant totality of GTO solutions is not replicated here. However, that doesn’t mean theory is not at work in every single spot. In fact, many of the hands are simply unmodeled spots that the reader is not used to seeing. At one point David gets impatient with me as I bridge the gap between his exploit and generally good play. When he the general speaks of GTO, he’s more focused on the big picture of what it is and what are its tell-tale effects; I’m the tired grinder and poker coach who needs to unite disparities into clear directives for myself and the platoon. I find this book to be enjoyable, but you will need an open mind to have that experience. There is a great deal of poker irony in reading about doing some stuff exactly the way many of us learned to avoid; pot-builder anyone? Limp-fold sound good to you? I don’t want to do everything it says, even with bad players as the target, but in taking the ideas on, I get a better understanding of why. If you, on the other hand, are like the posters in the thread, if you need examp

OOP Oberleutnant Greg Porter returns to the Zoo pod for an update on his successful career as poker pro. I can’t believe it’s been six years! Time has really flown since the early days of our little group and teaching community. Greg is an indispensable and senior member of said little community. He runs the OOP training games, providing high-level poker feedback, and specialized coaching. Greg edits my more challenging pieces and, more importantly, provides timely puns in the Poker Zoo chat. On today’s episode, we hear about his games, and in particular about the influence of the Stand-up Game on mid/high action. We then go through some of the highlights of 2023 in poker, the year of Doyle’s departure, Berkey’s ascension, and the long-needed return of produced poker content. Speaking of, here’s that opinion piece where I called for the return of production and writing to poker media. After a short mental game interlude, we get into some hands from his local games. A previous episode with Porter. Here’s today’s hands discussed: Hand #1 10/25 6.3Ke 8h s5 75 s6 c s2 c 88ds Ac5d4h s2 x/f s5 100 s6 c 6d s5 275/c s6 1100 Jh s5 x s6 5025ai   Hand #2 10/20/40 8Ke 8h s7 130/c s8 c/c s1 650 AJss Qs9d8s s1 600 s7 c s8 f 8h s1 x s7 x 2c s1 x s7 2500 Best wishes in 2024. The post PZ 89: Porter Returns & 2023 Poker Review appeared first on Out of Position.

It’s been a long time since I played in Washington, but the scene continues to evolve, however strangely. See, it’s all about the weird rules and regulations. Podcast guest Mannes N. gives us an update on the state of the games. The most important details are the rules for the tribal casinos and the rules for non-tribals, which are particularly hard on the poker player. To complicate matters, the tribes have basically quit the poker business, taking the big bets with them, and forcing all the traffic into small rooms around (but not within) Seattle. Basically, that’s why Eric Persson, owner of many of the small poker rooms, can punt your rake money off at a surprising rate. It’s a great time to own a poker room in Washington State. Mannes regularly plays at the Caribbean and Fortune rooms, two of the most popular in the current Seattle poker market. He occasionally posts on his “Owlkeeper” blog about poker, mainly tournament trips to Vegas. Here’s a post regarding the local games. Living in the Raleigh, NC area, Mickey and I started to frequent bar league freeroll tournaments (lots of fun) and landed in our first home game, a low stakes NL progressive-blinds game upping the blinds every 30 minutes. My first live cash tournament was at Mirage, 2009. I fearfully deposited the $85 buyin and with about 23 runners won the event for something like $575. Needless to say I had no idea what I was doing, played like a passive nit and ran well. In the second part of the pod, we go over a couple hands under the Spread Limit regime. HH #1: – Cardroom: Fortune Renton, 3/5, buyin cap 1,000, betting cap 300. Discuss the 300 constraint and if/how it should influence play. – Stack: 1080 (216 BB) – Setup: 8 handed, Villain is Vpiping higher than most of the table, no prior history – Hero is in S4, Main V is S5 (using the S1=Small Blind convention) Preflop: – S3 limp/call – Hero S4 with A6hh 20 – Villian S5 call, V’s stack covers me – Pot 60 after $8 rake Flop: 652 with one heart – S3 check/fold – Hero S4 check/call – S5 40 – Pot 140 Turn: Qh – Hero S4 check/call – S5 80 – Pot 300 River: offsuit 8 – Hero S4 check/ action to be revealed – S5 250 HH #2: – Cardroom: Caribbean Kirkland, 1/3, buyin cap 590, betting cap 300. Caribbean recently became part of Maverick gaming owned by Eric Persson of high stakes cash game infamy. The clientele is generally older than that of Fortune, it also gets some of the local tech crowd. – Stack 515 – Setup: 7 handed, early in the session – Hero is in S2 (bb) Preflop: – S4 10. This is “Jack” a 70-ish fun player who was once ejected from another cardroom for smuggling hard liquor in his “water bottle”. Likely playing a linear range with a short stack of approx. $110. – S7 call, s approx $400. When he sat down he was introduced by someone else as an “action player” and seemed to live up to the tagline so far. – Hero S2 with AQo call – Pot 30 after rake Flop: A86 rb – Hero S2 check/ call – S4 20 – S7 call – Pot 90 Turn brick – think it was a 2 – Hero S2 check / 165 – S4 40/ call for approx 80 all in – S7 call/call leaving 200 behind – Pot 500 River 5 – Hero S2 check/ action to be revealed – S7 200 all in Mannes is also a thoughtful commenter on my blog, I want to thank him and all those readers who like to leave their thoughts – kind of the whole point, some would say. The post PZ 88: Washington State Poker with Mannes N appeared first on Out of Position.

The poker world loves tournaments in the 2020’s. Online, tournament culture is vital and MTT-heavy while cash game action stalls. GG has challenged Pokerstars with huge tournaments series. U.S.-facing ACR continues to thrive. As for the live scene, everyone is amazed at the action, with WSOP and WPT now vying almost non-stop for your dollars; did I see they were bringing back the NAPT? I give in. Today we talk with one of the best in tournament poker, Enrico Camosci, and hear what it takes to rise to the top of the MTT food chain. Enrico has had a huge 202o’s so far, with an online bracelet and multiple big results, leaving him with about $2.5 million in online wins. In Spring he took third for a massive score at the EPT Monte Carlo high roller; maybe that’s why he’s even started to scale back the grind and hang with the live whales. Despite his success, the only way you may know him is that Enrico was the televised victim of a curious slow roll that got a little attention in 2021. Not really sure what Sam Grafton is thinking here. In this interview I didn’t focus on results and trophies too much, but process. I wanted to hear how Enrico got to the top of the (specifically Euro) MTT world, and so I asked a lot of questions about what he does. In general, it sounds like an intense dive into specific spots but also returning to the spot later, in cyclical fashion, is his studying and coaching key. It’s certainly true that two weeks on a single board BU V BB is going to yield a lot of fruit, for instance, but you must also come back to it to truly own the knowledge. I’m thinking he’s doing it right. If I study like him, can I be a thirty-year old vacationing in Paris, tired from beating the games in Monte Carlo? Definitely. Once a novelty, there is now even a school of thought that tournaments have more complexity than cash games; with changing stacks, levels, and tougher competition, I think they may be right. Hope you enjoy my first chat with Enrico. You can find him on Insta, and also contact him at his in-development coaching site, MTTgod. The post PZ 87: Enrico Camosci’s Tournament Focus appeared first on Out of Position.

Vegas is home to more than just gaming, it is home to the history of those games and to those who created that history. Richie Brodie, lifelong “poker bum,” has played with all the greats, from Doyle and his “southern” crew, to the Mayfair’s Erik Seidel, to California’s rising 1990’s NL scene with Bobby Hoff and Barry Greenstein (along with an apparently more reluctant Dan Harrington). Today we hear his story and the story of a whole age of poker, from the pre-internet obscurity of the late seventies to a comfortable seat at the Sahara deepstack game of the Covid era. Richie starts in upper New York but is soon drawn to the Nevada games, led by his older brother, a gambler and expert sports bettor. I say Nevada deliberately, as there is a great deal of less-told history surrounding Reno, Tahoe, San Jose, and the rest of western cards; Las Vegas just wasn’t the only place. As Richie emphasizes, the games moved, and the players followed, from famous rooms to forgotten obscurities. (One of the casinos Richie mentions, Harvey’s in Tahoe, was even bombed.) It sounds like a lot of fun: a bunch of guys who love poker gathering at Caesar’s Tahoe for two weeks of around-the-clock-play. Think again. This is serious business. The approximately 100 entrants in the casino’s third annual Superstars of Poker tournament huddle intently around the fifteen tables in the roped-off tournament area. Their concentration is so intense it is nearly impenetrable. Neither the smoke hanging heavy in the air nor the persistent clanking of coins in nearby slot machines is enough to jolt the players out of their poker-induced trance. A television broadcasting a college basket all game goes unnoticed for hours. Finally, a passing cocktail waitress turns it off. from the Reno Gazette-Journal, “Poker More Than a Game for Tournament Players,” probably early 1990’s For point of reference, when Richie first started playing seriously in the late seventies, David Sklansky, with whom he would soon be playing against, had just published Hold’em Poker, one of the first modern poker books. Doyle Brunson’s Super System would not appear until 1979. I think I missed some questions that poker players would like – the real details of the games, and I mean down to the nitty gritty: what were the sizings, how many players per hand, and such. We know Bobby Hoff introduced a lot of three betting, but what about the others? Yet Richie hints at the answer during the interview, “in reality,” he comments, “the games haven’t changed that much, but the number of players who know what they are doing has.” I think we know what that means. Enjoy this interview full of poker history. The post PZ 86: Richie Brodie appeared first on Out of Position.

Picture late 2019. Britain was finally Brexiting, Trump was somehow still presidenting, and general protests for a more liberal, freer society were happening all over the world- remember Hong Kong? Remember life before mask and vaccine discourse? That’s when I last talked with Gerard S., aspiring pro and studied player who had worked with a number of noted pros and organizations, including Fausto Valdez and Solve For Why. Gerard had a poker blog, a girlfriend, a residence in sunny Florida, and was finishing up a year cleaning up at live ring games and MTTs. Then it happened: Covid went from zero public awareness to a full-blown hysterical crisis that would shape the next decade. Covid would also trigger a sequence of events that changed everything for Gerard and his poker life. Soon he’d be signed up with Poker Detox and battling not only to beat the games, but to understand them at a new level, all while making rent. Today, we find out where he’s at and what he’s learned. As any poker player will tell you, a significant element of skill is involved in winning at the tables long-term. However, it’s also important to acknowledge the role luck plays in poker too. We have zero control or say over the poker hands the dealer gives us. Nor do we have any control over the community cards dealt on the flop, turn and river. These variable outcomes can cause short-term volatility in your poker results, known as variance. Game selection has a major bearing on the cause of variance in poker. If your preference is to enter vast, multi-table tournaments with fields of hundreds or thousands of players, it’s fair to say your poker bankroll will encounter immense variance. That’s because these big-field tournaments carry so much volatility. If you’re playing for hours or even days, it’s possible to experience run-good and then run into the brick wall of a downswing and be knocked out before you’ve even made the money. -from “What is Variance in Poker?” by poker.org The Poker Zoo often visits with Coaching for Profits players, check out episodes such as Episode 43: Luka turns to CFP and Nick Howard Episode 40: Coaching for Profits with KYT Episode 36: Odb_Blackbaron/DLF on CFP PZ 71: More Coaching, More Profits, with Luka V – Out of Position (persuadeo.nl) and others, including from a coaching perspective.   Food in this episode: Hot Pepper Jelly 2 C Green Bell Peppers cut into pieces for the food processor 1/2 C Jalapenos, chopped – Seeds & webbing removed For a red version, substitute red bell peppers and just 1/4 C thai chilies Combine these in a food processor and mince accordingly Ingredients: Pepper mash from the food processor 5 3/4 C Sugar 1 C White Vinegar 1 Bottle Certo (or 2 pkgs) This is just Sure Jell or any fruit pectin Combine Pepper mash, sugar and vinegar in a sauce pan and boil for 5 min, then turn heat off and leave for 20 minutes. Add fruit pectin and boil hard for 2 minutes. Ladle into small canning jars (we use pint size) and can using typical water bath canning procedure. For a quick appetizer for parties, you can simply serve over a block of Philadelphia cream cheese. If you have access to a smoker you can take it to the next level by sprinkling some BBQ rub on the cream cheese and smoking it at low heat (190F) and then serve in the same way as above. Pepper Jelly also works well for Holiday parties (thus the red and green colors) on a charcuterie tray with other cheeses and ‘Nancy’s famous cheese ball recipe.’ 8 oz Cream cheese 1 C Colby cheese (grated) 3 oz Chipped dried beef (or country ham chipped) 1 t Garlic powder 1 t Onion powder 1 t Accent Outer covering: ½ C Walnuts, chopped 2 T Chives, chopped Mix all the cheese and seasonings together and form into one large ball or 2 smaller balls. Chill until ready to serve Thanks for listening. Be sure to rate the Poker Zoo on Apple podcasts or elsewhere. The post PZ 85: Gerard Moves On appeared first on Out of Position.

Swirling beneath the never explicit politics of the poker scheme is the treatment of so-called “recreational” player. A lot of condescending, hypocritical stuff is said every day, on every platform, by every talking head about this source of all poker income. Occasionally, however, that tension is resolved when one decides to stop donating and start taking his own, or in this case, her own. Jen Gianera is one of those players who decided to turn it around, and to great effect. Since taking on actual poker theory and not the Tips & Tricks clickbait that fuels the mediocre and parasitical poker training industry – APT is still, almost unbelievably, shockingly grabbing novice dollars – Jen has flown through the ranks and is now profitable at all the cash games stakes she has tried. Of course, nothing is that easy or simple. Jen already has the advantage of being both more hard-working and more curious than many poker players. She also has the time and leisure to play and study on her own pace, having retired to Las Vegas after a busy and successful career serving the law and the people in southern California. On today’s pod, we talk about her process of coming to be a winner. We go over the Las Vegas low-stakes scene, which has its hot and cool spots. Jen talks about the Sahara game, now coming to a pause after nice long run: can its success be duplicated elsewhere? (Unfortunately we missed covering her rungood at slots and such – how do they do it? No one knows.) We finish by reviewing an ambiguous spot from her run at the Monster Stack in this year’s WSOP – with competing incentives, how and why do fundamentals solve our problems for us when we are potentially destined to lose no matter what? Monster Stack WSOP 300/500/500 9 handed 50Ke me 5 1500 7 c 9 c (villain) 1 c QJss 2 c Flop Jc9s6d (8000) Xxxxx Turn Ts (8000) 1 3000 2 f 5 f 7 f 9 c River 4s (14,000) 1 6000/? 9 18,000 The post PZ 84: SDJen to Vegas Grinder appeared first on Out of Position.

Few are able to get themselves banned from social media sites like Abe Limon, guru of west coast live poker and advantage gambling. Our last pod with Abe was a little rough on the ears, so we make up for it this time with good conversation ranging from his online arguments, why the WSOP is not meaningful for poker, his take on abortion, and even to a little split-pot strategy sideshow. It’s incredibly funny to hear that Abe, while wandering the social mediascape in the midst of a lifetime ban from Jack Dorsey’s Twitter, found himself in Gab Social’s animism of Christianity, social conservatism, and white nationalism, one which operates under a flag of free speech. I’d really love to read those threads he speaks of and find the abuse he doled out, but it’s a hard slog and I’ll need a few more hints. Torba does seem to have absolutely scrubbed the @limonpoker handle, but what of his other ones? Censoriousness always sucks yet left and the right each appeal to its short-term utility far too often, and usually while professing the virtues of open discourse. The regrettable secret is that it’s hard to maintain and often plain bad for business. Further, as the curious “Carl Beijer” Twitter and Substack account has made clear there is a nice game-theory argument as to why the sides of a debate have a prisoner’s dilemma-like incentive to further censorship if one side is “cheating,” not to free us from it. The world may break everyone, as Hemingway wrote, but maybe their principles are what crack first. Briefly freed under Elon’s simultaneously more liberal but messier and controversial regime, he is presently serving another short ban. Why must he do this? Why can’t we all just get along? Because lies deserve “no quarter,” Abe explains, an old-fashioned and noble answer. Yet how do we know what’s a lie? What does he get to be so sure? One way is to set terms, and to bet on it, and that’s where, agree with him or not, Limon shines. It’s a good approach and one about which we in the poker world may claim some credit. When we close, it’s to talk about the same hand I discussed with Matt Ossi. I don’t describe it very well this time, as we talk mostly in useful generalities, but Limon bets in position and gets raised and reraised on these flops to a committing SPR: what to do. I also don’t do a complete job in describing the strategy, however. To be clearer, the flop bet is a potential mistake, but calling off now expecting better than two-to one likely breaks even or is close- we’re behind overall but have a price. Bankroll matters and bomb pots put huge pressures on financially limited players. Limon isn’t one of them – should he have gambled with his whales or is making tough decisions with a good attitude still a part of a host’s gameplan? What additionally matters in this case is that when we do take our half we’re not the ones being quartered given our exclusive nut draw on top rather than commonly shared straights on bottom. Nuts Exclusivity is big in split pot games and is part of what makes this hand both marginal and compelling. Either way, my original point and one reason I contacted Abe is that I’d much rather not make this flop bet and instead use position against my opponents on the turn rather than have to gamble – in a way, this whole situation is about the difference between expected value and equity. Despite what they tell you, PLO, NLHE, and their bomb pot variants are deeply linked in themes and mainly differ only in micro-level implementation. If you struggle in one but not the other, it’s possible you don’t understand either one as well as you think you do. I will be offering Bomb Pot Deliverance, my strategy seminar on the subject, later this year. The class will clear up the basics of the game, delve into misunderstandings about multi-way action in all big bet flop games, and help make anyone competitive in them. Good luck in the series, and thanks to Abe for coming on the Zoo again. The post PZ 83: Limon’s Back, For Now appeared first on Out of Position.

Welcome back to the Poker Zoo, now a little long in the tooth but looking to finish strong. We never really left, of course, but I did need a personal break to focus on writing; Dean, my co-host and producer, was suffering a significant personal tragedy concurrently. So, a pause in the action. We persist now, and I am hoping to do about twenty more poker zoos before moving onto something different – consider this season two. Or maybe it’s season three… why do podcasts have seasons? To restart, I’m pleased to get back to our roots and talk to members of our poker community, always the primary and original purpose of the Zoo podcast. Mathew Ossi, aka Clayvision or Clayfish, has made big contributions in the OOP Discord for the past year. We’ll soon be talking to many of the original podcast guests and seeing how they are doing. With Mathew, I discussed the eternal question of learning poker, focusing on how mixed games can be a great help. Matt is strong mixed player but apparently aware of his weaknesses, mentioning to me after recording that “the real idea behind why O8 is one of my weaker games is because I feel I am misapplying concepts and missing details postflop.” With split pot games on the mind, we bring up the esteemed Greg Vail, including his surprising essay against bomb pots for no-limit games in the once-ambitious Stacked Magazine. We relate this and other ideas to an interesting bomb pot hand poker legend and troll extraordinaire Abe Limon played. In the second half we review two hands Mathew played, then close with some related thoughts on limping. Hand 1 150bb deep 8 players, 3 relevant in hand 1/2nl 6d6h BTN PREFLOP ACTION: limps to me I limp behind and it’s a literal family pot seems like a pretty standard loose passive 1/2 game at this point FLOP: 3s 5s 2c Action: SB bets 12, utg calls and I raise to 42, 2 calls TURN: 8c Action: I bet 65 and get 2 calls RIVER: 9d Action: checks around Hand 2 150bb deep 8 players, 3 relevant in hand 1/2nl 6d6h BTN PREFLOP ACTION: limps to me I limp behind and it’s a literal family pot seems like a pretty standard loose passive 1/2 game at this point FLOP: 3s 5s 2c Action: SB bets 12, utg calls and I raise to 42, 2 calls TURN: 8c Action: I bet 65 and get 2 calls RIVER: 9d Action: checks around To get in touch with Mathew, find him in the OOP discord group. Xavier “Vintage” Robles put together the ‘Vision’ photo art to celebrate Matt’s Las Vegas trip. The post PZ 82: Split Decision with Mathew “Clayvision” Ossi appeared first on Out of Position.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! For our final episode of 2022, Dean and I talk shop and how it’s going for him. We discuss poker swings, education, and the unpleasant, hard reason why some players succeed while others keep running in place. The conversation branches off into the plan, or lack of, for the Poker Zoo. Oops, letting the outsiders know what we’re thinking. Then, Dean interrogates me over what’s behind my return to poker writing. Has the new stuff changed in tone from the old? Here’s a bit from Here and Back Again: So, instead of focusing on relationships, I have been determined to ride it and my mission here out, to lie in my bed like the cinema nouveau Samurai, rising only to carry out my task before returning to the literal darkness of my dwelling. I’d also hoped to leave sometime soon, to not commit, and that half-measure has influenced me, but a feeling has been coming over me that my life elsewhere is over. I dream constantly of my past, of my home, my friends and enemies, not as if beckoning a happy return but as if they have been sublimated into the challenges of the present. I almost fear sleep, knowing it comes at the cost of nightmares and memories I’d rather forget. It sometimes seems that I am always awake, always sore, and always tired. We went over some of the Sahara game experience on this episode, you can compare it to this talk with Dean from 2021. We close with a couple fun hands from Dean’s cash games. 2/5 8 handed $900 eff 3 (1000) b20/c 4 c/f 6 (900) r115 KKhd (260) 985ccs 3 (885) x/c 6 (785) b85 (430) Jd 3 x 6 x (430) 4s 3 (800) b175 6 (700) c ——————————————– 1/2 8 handed $300 eff 3 limps to me 1 (300) 1/r31 7 (450) c/c 8 (400) r15/c AQdc (99) Q78hhd 1 (270) b25 7 (420) c 8 (370) c (174) Qs 1 (245) b80 7 (395) c 8 (345) c (414) 5s 1 (165) x/shove 7 (315) x/f 8 (265) b125/c The post PZ 81: Family Business appeared first on Out of Position.

Yes, the Poker Zoo returns amid the poker crisis, but not the one you think. Previous guest Fernando is back, troubled by developments on the casino floor caused by the lack of top-notch dealers. That doesn’t keep me, having restrained myself from much commenting during the most heated days, from getting his thoughts on the Hustler “cheating” scandal. Manager, please! We touch on all the aspects of the dealing issue, from the bomb pot explosion to the bigger economic picture and the labor shortage. When we move to the “cheating” blow-up, Fernando focuses more on the “marketable” aspect of the issue. It’s a touchy subject, one that is different from “marketing,” because looking more at the spectacle itself can seem to minimize what actually happened. However, when we accept that there was never more than a one-hands sample, and that there are no clear answers, we realize how wise this view is. The poker community leapt on the scandal and in most cases, not in good faith: a marketable moment, a moment for popularity and comment. We discuss this and few other aspects of the uproar, including the noxious “PokerKaren” account and others making scurrilous claims while riding the unending wake of the scandal. Sometimes we really do need a manager, it seems. Today’s episode is sponsored by Manscaped. Use ‘zoo’ as a discount code at checkout for twenty percent off, a free travel bag and anti-chafing boxers. If you do this in support of the Zoo, not only will I thank you, apparently your balls themselves will thank you. That’s a lot of thanks. Fernando’s blog, “Embrace Risk” is quietly one of the best remaining in poker. He focuses on the intersection of the market and our game, usually in very short form. Fernando also has a piece published on OOP. Fernando’s nascent Youtube channel is an introduction to options trading. The podcast people holler and whoop for blood, but that is not justice. The idea of punishing people on any side of the struggle, whether Kade, Bilzerian, or Kenney, for taking Nagy’s money, for watching poker streams but demanding the participants all file quarterly with the IRS and salute the flag, is on its face preposterous. Where does the money come from, after all? What feeds the beast? Yes, it’s from you, from the players who support everyone they shout down. From every scummy tournament grinder that ever chased down the dragon, every self-medicated bum-hunting buzzard, every upstanding bot-owner who avails himself of the ACR watering-hole. From every chatpro, every Twit, full of dread, who slavered over some outclassed woman abused by everyone else for some unknown and brief personal putsch. Public stream games exist because the economy has a gray zone: who do you think benefits, who is finding games, who is advertising their eligibility for the games that really matter? And who runs those games? – from “Higher Love” The post PZ 80: Fernando Talks to the Manager appeared first on Out of Position.

The poker vlogging movement is only ten years old but has probably done more for keeping poker in the public eye than any pro celebrity of the era: the vloggers matter. It all mostly started with Tim “The Trooper” and few other experimenters and click revenue hopefuls (including the unfortunate Mark Ari). Then, the number rapidly expanded into the more popular second wave featuring the now ascendant Andrew Neeme and Brad Owen, who have been correctly rewarded with amazing gigs and business opportunities. Andrew’s production quality, including the drone footage novelty, changed everything with its electricity, tour of real Vegas games, and a personal story full of cosmopolitan interests. Almost immediately dozens of vlogs sprung up in imitation. However, the grass-roots nature of the product is gentrifying fast: I’m not even sure the most popular vloggers even do their own editing now. Big names like Daniel (who has an additional claim to being one of the first vloggers) and Doug participate in the vlogging scene, too. In other words, vlogging is a real and potentially profitable business, to the amazement of the old school curmudgeons, and helps connect poker to the short-form video, social media generations. The third wave, currently headed by Mariano, Ethan, (the revamped) Jaman, Greg, Lex et al – everyone knows them by their first names, that’s how influential they are in poker – comprises the largest number of vloggers yet and with more disparate styles. While I have tried some coverage, I can’t and won’t track them all, as I do for podcasts, but one of the best new ones has gotten my attention: Slow Poker. Jon – he’s still keeping his last name private for the moment – has a novelty take on the poker vlog, where he speeds up the action and narration, turning poker into a bit of a Youtube variety show. He hits all the jokes and puns he can and escapes long before you could ever get bored. This kind of production takes some editing chops beyond b-roll in the parking lot and a hand history template. Jon continues to work at it and each vlog is an improvement on the last: we likely haven’t seen his best work yet. On today’s Zoo episode, we discuss the origins of Jon’s vlog, the legendary 2+2 Vlog thread, as well as his enjoyable first trip to Las Vegas for the Series and some serious schmoozing and selfies. Jon also made it out to the Sahara game, which is vlog friendly. Hopefully he got some footage! (If you are a vlogger, consider booking a session.) We get in some old-fashioned strat as well. Here’s his two hands we went over: Wynn $2/5 Assume we both have $1,000 in stack. Hero in HJ with AsAc, raises to $15 CO calls, the rest fold Flop: 9h5c7h I bet $15, CO raises to $50, I call Turn: 2s I check, CO bets $80, I call River 6c I check, CO bombs for $400, I fold Sahara $2/3 CO ($900) raises to $10, BU calls Hero in SB with JhJd ($1,200) raises to $40 CO and BU call Flop: Jc9h3s I bet 50, CO raises to 150 I raise to 310, CO folds The post PZ 79: Fast Times with Slow Poker appeared first on Out of Position.

This week Dr. Robert Samuels returns to the Zoo to talk about the latest round of poker cheating accusations and scandals. Robert recently polished up an old solution – can the online game operators work together to fight cheats? Can there be a governing body to adjudicate poker? While I cynically don’t find this sort of organization feasible, Robert makes some compelling points. He also reminds us of the symbiotic nature of online and live play – it’s important for each to be healthy for the sake of each other. This seems important, whatever we do – or if we do nothing. Mason Malmuth’s thread on preventing cheating in live games. RTA software example. Dr. Samuels is the author of Bad Beat Therapy: How to Be a Better Poker Player and Person, and appeared on the Zoo last year in episode 67. Connect with him here. Most know what multi-accounting is and why it is obviously against the rules, but RTA or ghosting may be new terms to some. RTA, or real-time assistance is any chart or program that helps a poker player with their decisions while a game or hand is in progress. These RTA programs use a game theory optimal (GTO) approach to the game, allowing players to stay perfectly balanced and make mathematically-correct and unexploitable plays. This results in an edge that can add up to millions of dollars each year in these high-stakes games. While RTA programs that scrape the online poker site for data have been easier to detect, players can make it tougher for sites to spot by using a separate computer and manually inputting the cards themselves to find the answer they are looking for. Ghosting is a form of collusion when one player takes over for another in either a cash game or a tournament online. Sometimes a better player will “buy” the account from a weaker player, or a coach will just instruct their player on what to do. Other times a player will simply use a different account to hide their identity. Dan ‘Jungleman’ Cates was accused of ghosting in 2020 by fellow high-stakes cash game player Bill Perkins. Cates would eventually admit the wrongdoing, but stated that the practice was rampant on the sites the games were running on. -from CardPlayer, “High-Stakes Poker Community Rocked By Onslaught Of Cheating Accusations” The post Poker Zoo 78: Scandal Therapy with Dr. Samuels appeared first on Out of Position.

We stay in the live streets this week and talk hands with Ralph B., a low-stakes cash game reg I know through Red Chip Poker. As for many players, Covid shook up Ralph’s poker life, and in his case, decided it was time to turn a break-even passetemps into a winning habit. Today, we find out how the new approach is doing and get into some strategy. We also get a little deeper into the Detroit and Michigan poker scene, feeding off the Jambasket episode. Now, Ralph claims to always be the tightest and most aggressive at the table – maybe it’s true, maybe not, but it’s a style that can work, especially in a full ring game. However, is he doing it right? Ralph sent in two hands to go over: HH1 My stats are 18/12, meaning I am almost always the tightest player at the table as well as the most aggressive. I rarely limp in unraised pots. My higher aggression numbers result in players playing back at me when I raise from EP, either donking or raising me on RD boards. My counter is making sure I play hands on a randomized basis which provide board coverage from EP. I play 50% SC’s down to 45s, and 33% PP 22-66. Also play A5s 100% of the time. My overall EP range is slightly under 10%. Hero is UTG with 4c5c. Eff stacks 650. V is a LAG in the SB and has me covered. V likes to semi bluff and squeeze. Live $2/5 8 handed. Hero raises UTG with 4c5c to 15. Folds to MP who calls 15. Folds to LP who calls 15. SB raises to 50. Folds to Hero who calls 50. MP and LP fold. Two players see the flop. Pot 135. Calling this 3 bet seems to a sticking point for many. I am calling 35 to win 95, and we are deep. But the SPR will be 4.6, lower than ideal. SB 3 bets are supposed to be really tight, but I back off on that a little based on observed play. Even still, using a 10% 3 bet by SB, Hero is a 68%/32% dog. Continuation will be obviously board dependent. Flop 3h 4s 6c. This is not supposed to hit either of us but has actually hit me pretty good. My flopzilla EQ is up to 67% If I was on the BU, I might get jiggy with a c bet from the SB, but since I’m under the gun that story doesn’t sell as much. SB bets 75. SB is betting about 55% of the pot, a standard c bet at $2/5 heads up on a connected board. Hero calls 75. I plan on shoving on any turn club or card completing any of my other draws. Pot 285, 1.8 SPR. Turn Ac. I said I was shoving any club turn, but I lied. Picked up club outs as long as SB is not on clubs. Ac now on the boards drops possibility of SB being on clubs significantly. But the A has me concerned. SB could easily have a broadway A that he c bet on a whiffed flop. Now has he hit? Flopzilla EQ drops to mid-50’s, mid 40’s if you keep more A’s in SB’s range. SB bets 220. Pot 505. I’m getting 2.3- 1 to call. If all 20 of my outs are good, I’m a 60/40 dog, and there are more chips to be played for. Hero gets alligator arms and just calls. River Th. SB checks. Hero??? HH2 Am I maxing EV by shoving a flop with an SPR of roughly 2, or betting something closer to my theoretical EQ on the flop and looking to shove the turn? $2/5 8 handed. $535 eff stacks. Hero has been quiet recently, after having back-to-back hands where he doubled up with AA vs. AQ and losing $500 set over set where V hit a two outer on the river. Neither player in this hand was involved in the earlier hands. UTG here was lose, but had not pulled anything like this. UTG+2 has been relatively quiet. UTG limps 5 UTG+1 raises to 25 Folds to Hero who 3 bets to 75 with Qs Qc. Folds to UTG who CALLS 75 UTG+1 calls 75 Pot 225 ish We’ll pause our regularly scheduled program to ask the question WTF does UTG have that limp calls 75??? Flop 7d 8s Ts Checks to hero. Hero has 460 behind. Hero bets??? I have thought about this hand a lot. I lost my discipline on the flop, got rattled by the limp call. Options are 1) check or small bet 2) jam 3) middling bet like 150 which accomplishes absolutely nothing. Hero bets 150. Utg folds, does not show. Prolly AK. utg +1 calls. Turn 8d. Hero shoves. V tanks and calls. River Kd. V shows Td9d. Some thoughts on poker education for those in Ralph’s position are here. The post Poker Zoo 77: Tight Ralph Raises His Game appeared first on Out of Position.

Dean is unleashed this week and talks with a familiar face, east coast tournament grinder, limit player, and general smart-ass Yaser Al-Keliddar. If you’re on the tournament joyride, you know Yaser or should get to know him – he’s a great table presence. In today’s pod, Al-Keliddar recounts his rough introduction to the game involving the Trump Taj, a reluctant vehicle, and his parents. It’s all downhill from that, of course, and his Hendon has grown impressive – including a coveted WSOP bracelet. Yaser plays in Dean’s Charlestown games and gives us the downlow, in case you, too, are lost and end up there. (Dean will occasionally interview players in his area – here’s Chase Bianchi. I myself met Al-Keliddar in my tournament reporting days, where I ingratiated myself by telling him his name was funny, and soon we collaborated on this gem. For some reason, they don’t want me back at Borgata. Stuff Dean mentions in the pod: Standup routine on YouTube Day 1a WPTDS Maryland Chip Leader – Yaser Al Keliddar interview Here’s a selection from an interesting old article, “In Defense of Limit Poker” Limit Poker Opens Door to More Poker Games Fourth, if you get interested in Limit play you will suddenly discover a lot of other poker games that are only played with fixed stakes. In recent months I’ve become a big fan of Stud, Stud/8 and Razz. It all began when I started playing in H.O.R.S.E. tournaments and discovered that most of my opponents do not know how to play the Stud games. In fact, the discrepancy in skill here is so great that I’ve hit on a workable strategy, which I offer to you free of charge. During the Hold ‘em and Omaha/8 rounds, only play premium starting hands and never draw to anything but the nuts (always good advice in Omaha/8 where even the nuts can get you quartered). Try to break even here and build your stacks on the Stud rounds. To get you started on your education, try: Stud: Konstantin Othmer’s Seven Card Stud – that’s right, “Othmer.” You almost certainly never heard of him, which is good because your opponents won’t have either. It’s the best book on Stud I’ve seen. Stud/8: Todd Brunson’s chapter in his Daddy’s Super System 2. Razz: The chapter in David Sklansky’s Sklansky on Poker and Linda Johnson’s chapter in Championship Stud co-authored with Max Stern and Tom McEvoy. I’ve had so much fun in these tournaments that I’m now putting in more hours playing cash Stud games. Not only has it been good for the bankroll, it has been good psychologically. The post PZ 76: Yaser Al-Keliddar Beats Captive Audience appeared first on Out of Position.

Vagabond vet DGAF called him “Tom Brady Jr.” but in reality, the story is more interesting than just always getting there at the right time. Las Vegas live pro Nate Serisky takes us through his year – well, not of living dangerously exactly, as he’s on stake and decent with money management – but of truly being a poker player and making it happen in a pool that has drowned many dreams. We go through Nate’s hot start in the city of sin, his far cooler runnings for much of 2021, and then at last finding his rhythm again among the curious Resorts World crew during the WSOP. The real life of a cash game player involves downswings and breaking even for long stretches. For this reason, Nate goes in depth about mental game, sharing some beneficial guidance from Chris Konvalinka, an earlier Zoo guest who has handled notable bankroll trials with grace. The always-underrated importance of having a community comes up during our talk. (Are there really any lone wolves left out there? Let me know.) Nate mentioned two types of tilt; Tendler in fact defines seven in The Mental Game of Poker: Seven Types of Tilt The following list briefly describes the most common types of tilt: Running Bad Tilt: The tilt that’s caused by a run of bad cards is not actually a unique type of tilt. Instead, one (or more) of the other types of tilt happens so frequently in such a short amount of time that your mind can’t reset itself before the next time you play. As a result, tilt builds up and hangs over your head like a dark cloud. Injustice Tilt: Bad beats, coolers, and suck-outs are prime examples of triggers that make you feel cursed and make poker feel unfair. Hate-losing Tilt: Many players hate losing even though they realize how much variance impacts results in the short run. Wanting to win is not the problem—the problem is how you handle the inevitable losses. Mistake Tilt: Making mistakes is frustrating for many logical reasons; these reasons just happen to be flawed because of inaccurate views about learning. Entitlement Tilt: Classic Phil Hellmuth tilt is caused by believing that you deserve to win for X, Y, or Z reason. Winning is a possession and you tilt when someone undeserving takes it from you. Revenge Tilt: Disrespect, constant aggressive action, and opponents thinking they’re better than you are just a few of the reasons why you seek vengeance at the table. Desperation Tilt: The urge to win your money back and get unstuck is so strong, it makes you play monster sessions, force the action, and jump up in stakes. We close by going through an interesting hand where a goofy non-new-pro puts Nate in a spot.   The post Poker Zoo 75: That New Pro Life, with Nate Serisky appeared first on Out of Position.

Thomas Pinnock of Zenith Poker returns to the Zoo to review his most challenging year in poker. In addition to releasing a controversial new set of exploitative ranges and taking on a six-max challenge, Thomas kicked up a series of related kerfuffles with a video mocking many preflop ranges. Trouble followed on multiple fronts, and I get some of the details from him – including whether any of this has changed his perspective. Agree with him or not, Pinnock is an increasingly important poker influencer – more and more, the ranges your opponents are using come from this twenty-six-year-old medical student’s basement. Here is some of the controversy, comically covered by the clickbait site “pokerguru,” in a careless article which mistakes former Zenith Poker coach and acolyte Josh for Thomas. (In a small world moment, Josh did make an appearance at my Sahara deep-stack game early in 2021). Here’s Pinnock last year on the Zoo. We didn’t talk about this on the Podcast, but it was also in 2021 that Upswing removed some of Thomas’ excellent articles on their site. Here’s a remaining one. …but because out-of-position, we should weight our range towards hands that work well out-of-position in the smaller SPR pot – hands like suited connectors will go down in strength. Using larger RFI sizes allows us to take the pot down more often pre-flop when we raise and mitigate the button’s positional advantage going forward. In this blind structure, it is even more important for us to 3-bet or squeeze all of our continuing range, because if we call we let the button/straddle in for a cheap price and they will have position against us for the rest of the hand. Keeping our range uncapped is important here – If we were to have a calling range, then the button can squeeze aggressively into our capped range with position. When 3-betting our entire continuing range, we can use a smaller raise size closer to 2.5x instead of the usual 3-3.5x. Three-blind games have become a big part of contemporary live NL. I’m not certain Thomas would still agree with the specifics of this advice, but note the sensitivity to bet sizing. The post Poker Zoo 74: Thomas Against the Simps appeared first on Out of Position.

Today we go behind the scenes and talk to Shaun Yaple, General Manager of the Hustler Casino in Gardena, California. I find out what it takes to run a card room and where does poker fits in. We discuss the unusual ecosystem of L.A. Poker, including some advice for all struggling card rooms and poker rooms. Shaun also tells us about the origin of the freshly popular Hustler Casino Live, L.A. poker’s newest live stream. For more industry talk, here’s Poker Room Manager Steven Pique on the Zoo. I used to play here a couple of nights a week. I move since then so don’t get back anywhere near as often. They hosted a Meet Up Game (aka MUG) by Andrew Neeme and Brad Owen of YouTube fame. I don’t know how many people showed up but there were at least 15 full MUG tables that I could see with a number of people waiting for a seat. They have cleaned up the place since I was last there. Parking is the same (mostly free with some reserved for premier players), they used to have valet but I think with the pandemic has but that on pause. It’s a nice sized room but also one of the smaller poker rooms in the LA market. So, if you are relatively new to playing live poker, this would be a good place to start. They have all levels, from $1/$3 to pretty darn high limits. If you are looking for a specific type / dollar size game, I’m recommend calling in advance. -elite Yelper “Glen” offers his thoughts The post Poker Zoo 73: Hustler Shaun appeared first on Out of Position.

On the cusp of a new year, new ventures. One is returning guest Michael Lukich’s two-pronged effort to improve your game through better solver and data study, Solver School. It’s still in creation, but Michael has burned the ships: we find out that he has quit his day job and is committed to poker and poker consultation. The question I ask him is, in a now crowded marketplace of trading sites and solver aids, what can Solver School do for you? Michael on Poker Out Loud, and previously on the Zoo, episode 44. Check out his main website, featuring poker writing, data analysis, and teaching products here. I’ve decided to call my project Solver School, as an ode to the tool that we’re all so fond of using. I’m still figuring a lot out, but my overall mission is to teach others how to use data analysis to dive into the game tree and lean more about poker. I have the website up and running. It’s a shell at the moment, mainly there as a placeholder and to build an initial interest email list. I also have some branding and a logo designed (as demonstrated to the right), which I will be showcasing on some hoodies and t-shirts while I’m in Vegas next week (more on that below). There’s not much more to say than that my plan is to launch in January 2022, and that I’m very excited to share my 20-years of data analysis expertise with the poker world. As I have more updates in the coming weeks, I’ll share them both on here and on the Solver School website. But eventually, all the work for that project will stay on that platform, keeping this site separate. So make sure you sign up for the mailing list over there so you get all the latest timing on its launch as soon as it comes out. You can also follow my new social media channels on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. There’s nothing there now, but more to come very soon. Dean’s recommendation: 1 lb sauerkraut 3/4 lb Kielbasa link, sliced on bias approximately 1/4” 1/2 lb smoked sausage, sliced the same 1/4 lb smoked pork chops, diced 1/2” 1 medium onion, sliced 1 apple, cored & grated 1/2 tsp caraway seeds 1/2 tsp coriander seeds 1/2 tsp fennel seeds 1/4 tsp black pepper Salt to taste In a large sauce pan, sauté meat in bacon grease or oil of choice. Add onion & sauté till golden. Add sauerkraut, grated apple & spices. Simmer 1/2 hour or longer. Enjoy with garlic mashed potatoes The post Poker Zoo 72: Michael Lukich’s Solver School appeared first on Out of Position.

It’s our holiday podcast. When we last checked in with TBR member Luka Vitasovic, he was settling into a long “coaching for profits” contract with Nick Howard’s Poker Detox program. Today, in a continuation of our CFP series, we find out how that’s gone. Is Luka crushing or mushing? Here’s the rest of our Coaching for Profits series. PZ47 with Alvin Lau PZ43 with Luka PZ40 KYT and the Adam Jones Academy PZ36 Francois, aka DLF/Blackbaron The argument for coaching for profits, by Jason Glatzer There are two major coaching dilemmas that students have encountered when paying for poker coaching. 1. Many great players are often horrible coaches. 2. Many coaches that sound good, but what they teach simply does not work in real life. The same reason why many “economy professors” are teaching but have never made any money in the real world. It can be debated which strategy is best and on paper no strategy or business plan has ever failed. However, when rubber meets the road, real life happens. This is why only paying a coach based on your profits is the most fair system and any coach that is confident enough in their skills should offer coaching for profits. Of course, the contrary argument is that there are many more types of coaches… and students, for that matter. Before we pause for the holidays, a sincere thank you to all our listeners: Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! Cheese Ball: 16 ounces cream cheese , softened 2 cups freshly grated sharp cheddar cheese (avoid pre-shredded cheese) 2 green onion , chopped 1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce 1 teaspoon hot pepper sauce 1 teaspoon dried parsley flakes 1/2 teaspoon garlic powder 1/2 teaspoon dried oregano leaves dash freshly ground black pepper 2/3 cup pecans , finely chopped / Almonds / walnuts / chipped dried beef. Hot Pepper Jelly: 3 cups green bell pepper chopped or mixture of green / red / yellow bells ¼ cup seeded & chopped jalapeno 1 cup apple cider vinegar 1.75 oz powdered pectin 5 cups sugar 6 – 8 oz canning jars The post PZ 71: More Coaching, More Profits, with Luka V appeared first on Out of Position.

It’s time to reach across the country and check in with Poker Zoo co-host Dean Martin, who lives and plays on the other side of the garbage heap. How did Dean (and Mrs. Dean) get through the ‘rona and what is he up to now? More from Dean and Persuadeo on learning poker. Unfortunately, we had to cancel, since the recording was made, the December 16th meetup game. Hand #1 2/5 500 eff, 8 handed. Table just opened – 2nd or 3rd hand of the day. Straddle 15, 3 callers, I’m on the BU and decide it’s a good spot to attack since everyone is still getting settled in. I r85 with 84dd BB is a player who thinks I’m FOS about half the time shoves 500 ai. Folds back to me. I assume I only have 20% equity against his range but as a meta strategy don’t want to appear weak by folding. Plus I have the whole session to rebound. Board runs out J374Q He says, I’m sure you won, what do you have? I look several times and finally show my hand and say – “I have a 4?” He shows AKo and the table goes crazy. #2 [sic] 2/5 1100 eff. 8 handed 3 limps to BU (25 yr old Asian male who likes to bet) r20, SB calls (mid 20’s white male who’s been calling everything), I r105 with 78ss, they both call. (330) 654hhs SB checks, I look at the Asian kid and say, “I know that hit your range so I’m just going to check”, he bets 75, SB calls, I call and say “I need a queen.” (555) Qd everyone laughs. SB x/c BB “I guess I need to bet my card” b300 BU calls More BS from me “Now I need an Ace” (1455) Ad SB says “All In” and shoves his remaining 1150 BB only started with 1100 so shoves his 600 or so. dOf course I call. Asian kids says “I was bluffing”, BB turns over A8 and I win a nice 4300 pot The post PZ 70: Dean Escapes Death, Gambling Ensues appeared first on Out of Position.

It’s back to what promises to be a bumpy podcast grind with Zoo favorite Jason Burge, aka JamBasket Poker, one of Michigan’s big online cash winners. We hit as many topics as possible with some drive-by commentary. Burge is already kind enough to offer some valuable analysis and recap on his obscure JamBasket Youtube channel; pretty good, player-observant stuff in a world of often irrelevant solver recaps that anyone and their mom can do. (His theory content in TBR is more valuable, in fact.) We last heard from Jason while bisecting the curious Mindblowing Poker. Today, we cover a fair run of poker topics, from the WSOP to NFT shenanigans, the definition of angling, the Michigan online community, subtle behaviors in victory and defeat, and even an old fashioned hand-review. Sample of Detox tweets: There are certain house rules that, if you ignore them, you can be penalized or even kicked out of the poker room. And then there are unwritten rules that are frowned upon by most who take the game of poker seriously, especially those who play poker for a living. Those unwritten rules, which go against poker etiquette, can fall into the category of angle shooting. An angle shoot is an act that gives a player an unfair advantage, even if that advantage isn’t technically gained illegally. — from poker.org on angles PokerStars Hand #230386842965: Hold’em No Limit ($2.50/$5.00 USD) – 2021/10/15 16:54:43 ET Table ‘Hestia’ 6-max Seat #2 is the button Seat 1: JamBasket ($520 in chips) Seat 2: JdubsPoker ($732.73 in chips) Seat 3: BigRon324 ($792.31 in chips) Seat 4: Bigkidd420 ($1048.58 in chips) Seat 5: DavidKayePoker ($1005.96 in chips) Seat 6: BishPlz94 ($1058.72 in chips) BigRon324: posts small blind $2.50 Bigkidd420: posts big blind $5 ** HOLE CARDS ** Dealt to JamBasket [Ac Jd] DavidKayePoker: folds BishPlz94: folds JamBasket: raises $7.50 to $12.50 JdubsPoker: calls $12.50 BigRon324: folds Bigkidd420: folds ** FLOP ** [Td Qs 8c] JamBasket: checks JdubsPoker: bets $16.98 JamBasket: calls $16.98 ** TURN ** [Td Qs 8c] [3s] JamBasket: checks JdubsPoker: bets $40 JamBasket: calls $40 ** RIVER ** [Td Qs 8c 3s] [3c] JamBasket: checks JdubsPoker: bets $110 JamBasket: raises $340.52 to $450.52 and is all-in JdubsPoker: folds Uncalled bet ($340.52) returned to JamBasket JamBasket collected $363.46 from pot The post Poker Zoo 69: A Lotta Problems With You People, featuring JamBasket appeared first on Out of Position.

Poker, crypto, and the Non-Fungible Token craze are all well-met bedfellows: exciting, profitable, and a little grimey. Overnight Monster and Bluff Barbarian creator Alvin Lau took a flyer on a new NFT project this year, Hungry Ghosts, and this is his story. Listen to him on today’s Zoo describe many of the truths of NFT projects and the interesting culture that drives them. Alvin is a professional poker player and coach, and consistent guest on the Zoo. Here are some links relevant to the conversation: Twitter back and forths between the Hungry Ghost team and Print My Mint Alvin’s statement on Medium Twitter takes up the Trosley Hustler drawings. Statement from Trosley/Jungle Freaks. In February 2021, a 10-second video by an artist named Beeple sold online for $6.6 million. Around the same time, Christie’s announced that it would be selling a collage of 5,000 “all-digital” works by the Wisconsin-based artist, whose real name is Mike Winkelmann. It was put on a virtual auction block with a starting price of $100 — and on March 11 it sold for a staggering $69 million. Beyond the high prices, there was one other fact that observers found fascinating. In exchange for their money, collectors who buy Beeples don’t receive any physical manifestation of the artwork. Not even a framed print. What they do get is an increasingly popular kind of cryptoasset called an NFT — short for non-fungible token. — from Coinbase Not everyone is as enthusiastic: No matter their original intent, it’s abundantly clear that in 2021 NFTs are not about supporting art or artists. NFT minting sites charge massive fees that often outstrip returns on the sale. No governing body exists to enforce resale commissions when an NFT changes hands. Little to no protections exist for buyers. Purchased NFTs still “live” in the purchaser’s “wallet” on the company’s server, and many have already disappeared without any recourse for the owners. Even if NFTs were somehow benefitting artists or museums, there is no justifying the massive environmental impacts of minting a single NFT (or a blockchain itself) on an already urgent climate crisis. And before you think it, here’s the article to send to people when they ask if the environmental issues with cryptoart might soon be solved (spoiler: it won’t, with offsets or otherwise). imagine if keeping your car idling 24/7 produced solved Sudokus that could verify you paid $1,000 for a PNG file — Senior Data Masseuse (@ryxcommar) March 16, 2021 — Eric Longo from the MCN Blog Let’s conclude with a balanced conversation on NFTs led by cultural commentator Sonny Bunch. The post PZ 68: Tokens, Tools, and Fools, with Alvin Lau appeared first on Out of Position.

It’s the end of an era at Twoplustwo, but the conversation, especially on controversial topics, doesn’t stop. Robert Samuels has been a major contributor to the gem of 2+2 media, its monthly magazine, and joins us today on the Zoo for poker psychology talk. Samuels is a double doctorate and professor at UC Santa Barbara who goes beyond rudimentary mental clarity exercises to look at the heart of the poker player and his unusual game. His book Bad Beat Therapy: How to Become a Better Poker Player and Person, much of which is available in selected essays on Twoplustwo, gives us a lot to discuss. Bob, who I believe is working with Mason Malmuth on a revision of the controversial Real Poker Psychology, helps us bridge the gap between the extremes of opinion about where mental game assistance (or even its existence) should belong. The key concept is self-honesty, according to Dr. Samuels. Doesn’t sound easy. I’ve now had a brief recap of his thoughts from Mason, who argues from a statistical and logical point of view for the study of poker as the solution to mental anguish in poker, and a very different perspective from Jason Su, who believes this chicken-and-egg performance question is greatly aided through focusing on the body and person. I suppose as long as there are bad beats to take, we’ll be having conversations like this. As a psychoanalyst who plays poker, one of the most interesting things that I have learned is how people are so deluded about their own personality and behaviors. For example, one time I was playing at the table with this guy who was winning most of the pots, and he had accumulated a huge stack. During one of the breaks, we started to talk, and he said to me, “I love every part of poker, every moment.” I asked him if he still loved the game when he was losing, and told me that it does not matter if he is up or down; he just loves the game. About an hour later, he had lost almost all of his giant stack, and I could see that he was becoming increasingly agitated and loud; finally, after a bad beat, he screamed, and it looked like he was trying to tip over the table. Clearly this guy was not in touch with his own emotions and psychology. As Tommy Angelo argues in his book Painless Poker, tilt can be reduced if you practice meditation; however, there is a dark side to this strategy. While I argue that one can learn a great deal from one’s own bad beats and the bad beat stories of other players, the type of Zen meditation that Angelo discusses can lead to one simply denying the truth of one’s own actions, thoughts, and desires. For instance, Angelo suggests that after a bad beat, one should focus on one’s breathing and try to remain still in order to remove oneself from the immediate emotions of one’s situation. In contrast, I think that one has to learn from one’s emotions and not escape into the bliss of meaningless nothingness. -from chapter one of Bad Beat Therapy The post Poker Zoo 67: Bad Beat Therapy appeared first on Out of Position.

A special episode as the two co-hosts talk together for the first time in a while. Dean starts by getting all the details on the deep stack cash game I started at the Sahara Las Vegas in January. Dean brings up one of the most important questions that can be asked in the poker training field: why is it that so many players get so much help but see so little progress? Then, with a little segue magic, Persuadeo moves to old-fashioned hand analysis in order to help Dean get out of a break-even stretch in his live games. Sometimes, what is most basic is also the most advanced. As it happens, I’ve been away from Vegas for a few weeks and left the games in the hands of the Lounge Lizard and Regular K, and they’ve done a yeoman’s job. However, I’m back this Thursday, June 17th and it’s time to get in the action. Lock up a seat here or just ping me through any channel. Also, be sure to download Poker Atlas. One factual error from the pod: there was a night I attempted to run the PLO game but it did not in April. And a special note: The main purpose of my move to Vegas isn’t the game – it’s getting involved in the intersection of food and poker with the Lounge Lizard, who is a talented chef between projects. If you like great food and want to experience or build with us, this is a sign to look me up. Straddle, call, r40 99, sb calls, straddle calls, mp call AA6. Chk to me, b45, c, f, f1/3 400 eff. 3 limps i open A7dd to 20 in CO, Btn & SB call (70) A86scc 1 (400) x/c 7 (480) b25 8 (800) c (145) 8d 1 x/r260 7 b115/f 8 c/c Find Dean on Twitter The post Poker Zoo 66: The Sahara Game, Dean’s Game, the Learning Game appeared first on Out of Position.

If you play in the OOP deepstack training game, or more abstractly, in any online game, you’ve played a hand with Travis Moss. An increasingly reformed tight aggressive, Travis is a student of the game, with a lot of training sites and study behind him. On reflection, Travis seems like a good example of a taking up poker successfully in middle age. He’s the squeaky wheel, someone unafraid to ask a lot of questions in order to get there. We get into some of those answers he found, and now, the ones he’s finding on his own: Travis also has some interesting takes on how the solver works and how one should use it. Here is some of Travis’ mentioned “rant,” from publicly accessible S4Y discord chat, which is really less of rant than than a reminder that in a zero-sum game of turns, your action can be based on what your opponent can or will do, as opposed to just the equilibrium model of the game: IN the Vlog-cast yesterday a point about GTO was made that exemplifies the wide spread misunderstanding of GTO. Game Theory is a process. It is not an absolute. Rock paper Scissors… Opponent always throwing Rock. Many assume the GTO way to play RPS would be to randomly play each one 1/3 of the time. As stated in the Vlog this would result in breakeven against the Rock only player. But that’s not Game theory. Game Theory would actually say you always play Paper against this opponent. UNTIL, the opponent changes. When they change, we then change, Eventually both players (if they keep changing to the situation) will BOTH end up at random 1/3 mix of each. It is only now that the 1/3 mix is the optimal way to play. Throughout this process there will be countless iterations of the optimal strategy in a particular moment. Now lets take RPS one step closer to poker. Rock wins it gets $3, Paper wins it gets $2, and Scissors wins it gets $1. Right away we see that the times we beat Rock we dont win as much as when Rock wins. So the 1/3 mix is not optimal. The mix would actually be closer to 25% Rock, 35% Paper. and 40% Scissors. Even in this simple example, does anyone think they have the brain power to maintain a randomized mixed that would be balanced in this way over 1000 hands? Not to mention what about all the adjustments along the way that take us from our opponent playing only Rock… to finally playing an EV neutral strategy. And in Poker the worst possible outcome is to end up EV neutral. That means no one is winning except the house when they take the rake. And now poker is just another casino game. Here’s that hand Travis mentions in the podcast: MDLive 5/10 3k cap. effective stack was 9k. Was a friday night and 5/10 had been going for about 6hours. 9 handed game 1 Lag who this was the smallest game he would play, the big games weren’t running that night. 2 2/5 grinders effectively shot taking. 3 2/5- 5/10 good players who would mix it up (I was in this group). 2 lawyers who came every friday and were the VIP whales. The other seat was filled and refilled all night with guys who shouldn’t have been in the game but came to try to double up their paychecks and left broke. At least 4 of us had 15k+ in front of us. I had been running hot and had the table covered with about 19500 and definitely had a target on my back from the other players. UTG straddle. UTG1 (4000) 2/5 rec limps, fold, I have Qs9s open to 80. HJ (17000) calls, CO (VIP) 10k calls, BU (17k big game lag) 3bets to 300. SB folds, BB VIP 12k calls, Straddle calls All calls behind. Pot is 2100. Ridiculous 7-way hand that hadn’t happened a lot. usually was 3-4 to the flop. The BU had been getting way out of line all night. flop was Js 10h 4s. Checks to me and I check debating whether I will x/r or call a bet from behind. HJ bets 1300, BU makes it 3k. BB calls. Pot is now 9400 and action on me and I am baffled what to do. I want to let the BU keep firing a way and keep the BB in but the HJ open behind has me concerned. I decide I have the right odds to just call and will realize my equity so I call. HJ calls. Pot 15400 Turn is the miracle card… 8d. Checks to the BU who bets 5k. this was a very weird bet for him as usually he always bet big. BB folds. I call wanting to keep both players in the hand. HJ rips for 13700 BU folds!!!! I thought for sure he would call. I call 13700 We run it twice HJ had JJ and I scooped both boards. The post Poker Zoo 65: Travis Gets the Grease appeared first on Out of Position.

The question of what makes for a successful casino poker room has been on my mind because it has to be: I’ve been running the unusual Sahara deep-stack game and trying to reseed low stakes PLO as well. Hence this series of podcasts dedicated to questions about the industry including Steven Pique, Mason Malmuth, and Fernando Ortiz, each of whom represent a different but critical role in live poker. So, it’s a no-brainer to extend the conversation with Greg Raymer. The WSOP champ can’t help but have a wide and rich experience to draw from; even better, it turns out Greg is a game creator and host himself. Over the course of the interview, I use some of Mason’s ideas to get at what matters in growing and sustaining live poker. In fact, the question of “luck and skill” that Mason Malmuth and David Sklansky think is at the heart of the game’s success has been specifically on my mind. As a general prescription, it’s hard to argue with or even dispute, but I think there are some wrinkles. After running a private game for years, and now games in the casino, I don’t think we entirely understand the poker economy nor do we give enough respect to the choices of the so-called “recreational players” who essentially fund poker. As I wrote in my update at Red Chip Poker: The game has not cannibalized the 1/2 games at Sahara, which are on the rise, in spite of Mason and others’ concerns. In fact, what I have seen is players seem to behave like more or less rational actors, and include or exclude themselves without much confusion or regret. When it is the case that a noticeably weaker player comes in and gets stacked more than once, he/she tends not to return and potentially risk more. Games and stake levels, it seems, sort themselves out perhaps even more nicely than we might expect, despite fear over “recs” busting and leaving poker. Thanks again to Mr. Raymer for coming on, and to Marc Reeves for helping make arrangements. To be specific, David Sklansky and I feel that the proper balance of luck and skill will allow a strong player to win two out of three four-hour sessions, and the moderately weak player to win one out of three four-hour sessions. So, that’s a rough guideline when this book talks about a proper balance of luck and skill. And for a poker room to be successful, this idea of a proper balance of luck and skill can’t be stressed enough. But there’s another important point that statistical theory tells us. It’s the fact that over time the short-term luck factor will dissipate and the expectation (win rate for the experts and loss rate for the recreational players) will dominate, and this is exactly the way it’s supposed to be. But when saying “supposed to be,” I’m also referring to those games in which the expectation of the experts and the luck factor is in sort of a balance. That is, to say it again, the experts will be sure of doing well after a reasonable amount of playing time, and the recreational players will have their winning sessions to remember. And when this is the case, you can expect the games to thrive in a well-run poker room. Furthermore, games like this are the type of games that the poker room management should strive for. It’s also the type of games that the experts should want to play in to maximize their long-term success, even if it means even if it means that their expected win in their current session might be lower. -from Cardrooms The post Poker Zoo 64: Greg Raymer on the Cardrooms appeared first on Out of Position.

Twoplustwo publisher and prolific author Mason Malmuth joins the Zoo to discuss a disagreement on luck and skill and how it influences the games, but it quickly turns into a broader conversation about what makes casino poker rooms go. That’s in part thanks to Mason’s announcement of his new book, a work in progress tentatively titled Cardrooms: Everything Bad; An Analysis of Those Areas Where Poker Rooms Need Improvement. We go over highlights of his concerns, from the microscopic (the angle of the poker tables) to the essential (what makes for a good promotion), and all of it adds up, in Mason’s opinion, to a successful or struggling poker room. Plus, we go back in time and catch up a bit on how his controversial Real Poker Psychology played out. We didn’t go into the original basis of our chat as thoroughly as I’d like, but having agreed that there is a space for more challenging game structures, such as the deep stack 2/3 game I host at the Sahara, I’m glad we got into the big picture question Mason raises: what makes for an appealing and successful live poker room. After all, if Vegas can’t make poker shine, what city can? His book seems very timely, in the age of Covid, increasingly tough games, and rising rake and costs putting the live scene in peril. As far as luck versus skill and deep-stack games, it’s true a higher stack to blind ratio is a harder one. However, what quantifies the ideal game, and is skill versus luck really only the only question? I would say no. First off, skill is less quantified than imagined – the deeper we play, the less “solved” or less often solved, the situation is. The binary view is not always as useful in the real games, where everyone is a fish to someone. Simultaneously, everyone thinks they have an edge – are we to deny them competitive opportunities to prove this? Second, 100 bbs is rather arbitrary. Who is to say 50 or 75 is really what the game needs? Should we really all be playing tournaments after all – that would involve some irony. Third, what if we simply don’t want to play what they tell us to? Where does love of the game enter the luck versus skill calculus? How do we allow changes in game culture if our baseline is worrying about losers who in fact often have more money to spend than winners? In other words, do we create the market or does the market create us? Finally, have we lost track of essentials – what about rake? Those short-stack games serve the regs and recs pretty well, true, but who, if anyone, really wins? As legendary live grinder DGAF has pointed out, the game I run is actually one of the best around for players in this respect. For another recent perspective on what makes the games go, check live Austin grinder and ponderer Fernando on the Zoo. Part One: Cardroom Procedures Consistent Decisions Buy-ins That are Too Large Transfers Bringing the Wrong Amount of Chips The Must-Move Rule The Third Man Walking Rule The Lunch Break Rule Straddles Lammers New Set-Ups Rack Counts Game Location Call-in Lists Part Two: Cardroom Attitudes Everyone Breaks Even Going to Church Adversarial Relationship Between Players and Management Part Three: Dealer Problems Talking Dealers Dealers Selling Chips — Excessive Fills Dealers Carrying Their Own Trays Failure to Make Change From the Pot Flashing Dealers Dealers Need to Deal Part Four: Management Issues Cardroom Managers — Missing in Action Bad Floor Tournaments or Cash Games Excessive Rake Promotions Cannibalizing Games Forgetting the Regular Customer Player Meetings Spreading the Wrong Games Starting New Games When Not Ready Part Five: Other Cardroom Personnel Props Hosts Brushes Cashiers –a draft table of contents from Cardrooms The post Poker Zoo 63: Mason Malmuth on Live Card Rooms appeared first on Out of Position.

Today we get the perspective of the people who design and run the casino poker show, thanks to guest Steven Pique. Steven has climbed the poker industry ladder in classic fashion, starting with dealing on the WSOP circuit, moving to the Aria, and now running the Sahara Poker Room. We go over the details a poker room manager cares about, including how he picks out games and promotions. Steven remains sunny about the future of live poker; our discussion covering Covid, the state of the poker industry, and getting the picky regs and mercurial recs into the seats doesn’t phase him. The coming wave of rooms moving to Poker Atlas comes up. We also get to hear a casino’s perspective on the controversy about Reserved/Private games which has flustered many pros. I’ve worked with Steven over the past few months to create Vegas’ most interesting low to mid-stakes cash game blend, the 2/3 deep stack time game. We take another step together this week with a different target: making a highly affordable, but action-heavy, PLO game. Since the Linq closed its room, access to low-stakes PLO on the strip has disappeared. The bait and switch of games with bring-ins keep true low-stakes players from being able to afford the Great Game played live. This has driven many PLO-Curious players to the app games. To combat this, we’ll be playing 1/1 PLO with a low 50$ min starting Tuesday March 16 at 6 p.m at the Sahara Poker Room. That’s so you can get your feet wet and gamble and not lose too much. However, it won’t be just a game of short-stacks, because it will be no-max buy-in. I promise I’ll put down a pile of money, and you should try to come take it. Combined with a max rake of 4$, this should be good for everyone. Hopefully, this one is more to Mason’s satisfaction! First, a common promotion that many poker rooms have is a reward for making certain hands of value, usually four-of-a-kind or better, and sometimes the reward money goes up based on the strength of the hand. And who gets this money? Well, if you understand how different people play poker, it should be obvious that in most cases the weak players play more hands than the tight strong players, and the more hands you play, the more likely you’re to make one of these strong hands. It’s also my guess, and again this is just a guess, that about two-thirds of this promotional money will go to the weak players. So, in my opinion, this is a good promotion for a cardroom. Second, I’ve also been in cardrooms where they have seat drawings. I won one recently when my seat was randomly drawn (and the drawing occuring was linked to a casino slot machine jackpot being hit). While this was certainly nice for me, having the money go to me was from a cardroom’s perspective similar to putting putting the money in a wood burning fireplace and burning it. Of course, live players can also win these drawings, so this is not the worst promotion there is, and I would give it a neutral rating. Not good but not that bad either. However, if it was up to me, random cash drawings would never happen since there are better ways to distribute the promotional money. Third, many poker rooms have a promotion where in one form or another, they reward players for playing a certain amount of hours. It can be something like $100 for playing 20 hours in a week, and, if you play a full 30 hours, the reward will go up to $200. Another version of this is that players after putting in enough hours (and sometimes the hours will count double), will earn a spot in a free-roll tournament which of course has value, and in terms of expectation is similar to giving a player money. But there’s a big problem with this type of promotion. The majority of the money is going to the better players and not the live ones. That’s because it’s the better players, and not the recreational players, who are the ones that tend to put in a lot of hours. So, here is a common type of promotion which has the effect of making the games tougher and should be long-term detrimental to the poker room. So, not only would I give this type of promotion a poor rating, but in my opinion, promotions that reward players for putting in a lot of hours should never be offered. My guess is that poker room managers have never thought through the damage that promotions like this do. Continuing on with this chapter, let’s address another more important idea. And it’s the fact that poker rooms need to consider the clientele that their promotions will attract. Again, going back to the late 1980s, one of the poker rooms that I played at offered a promotion where the first person who played 500 hours on graveyard shift, regardless of the game he played, would win a substantial amount of money (and I’ve forgotten the exact number). Also, if more than one person tied by hitting the 500 hour mark at the same time, the promotional money would be split. The idea was that this promotion would add one or two more

Continuing our recent tour of contemporary poker coaches, today the Zoo welcomes Uri Peleg, formerly of Run It Once and now founder and head coach at Guerrilla Poker. Joined by online poker strategy innovator Grindcore, Guerrilla offers a very experienced and compelling take on the GTO/Exploitation paradigm that we’re always working with in contemporary poker. I talk with Uri about several hot button issues, including simplifications versus full strategies, the reality of how strategy works versus how it is often perceived to function, the technology arms race in the game, and close with what Guerrilla is offering. Interestingly, Uri and the Guerrilla team are also applying their minds to the live game, and believe they can help in that sphere as well. Uri Peleg not only comments on the Daniel/Doug challenge, but with unique insight, having been one of Doug’s sparring partners before the match. Here is a video where he reviews their play. The Guerrilla Youtube channel also includes some of Uri’s earlier videos, including this key piece on solver usage which should remain relevant for a long time. For comparative insights on how the solver should be used, check out our interview with Thomas Pinnock of Zenith, or any of our interviews with Alvin Lau of Overnight Monster. The first thing to notice is that QJ is solved as a mixed bet and check. It’s not at all a mandatory bet, and if we look at the villain’s range, we see that villain has a 15% check-raising range which is built mainly around AQ, with a few odd bluffs with hands like KQ or A8. This check-raising range is robust enough to cause the EV of QJ to fall close to 0. So our intuition was indeed correct. On a superficial level, it may seem like there isn’t much more to say here. However, noting that PioSOLVER chooses the IP player’s bluffs from some low pairs and other hands that have some showdown value, and, furthermore, doesn’t necessarily triple barrel these hands on many rivers, we can see there might be more to learn from these choices than it might seem at first glance. This brings us to the concept of “showdown value bluffs.” To better illustrate how these kinds of bluffs work, let’s take a step back and look at another example hand… -from Showdown Value Bluffs on Guerrilla Poker The post The Poker Zoo 61: Uri Peleg’s Guerrilla Warfare appeared first on Out of Position.

Episode nine guest FAO returns to give us the word on the live poker market. After being a Vegasite for most of post-Black Friday, he’s resettled in the suddenly popular state of Texas, where everything is growing – including the poker. Fernando describes his search for the way out of LV and the lure of the Texas games inflamed by the poker vlogging boom. He discusses the games there and how the desire to gamble big in bomb pots has led to excitement but also influenced the games and the game structures offered. He compares and contrasts the two cultures, Austin and Las Vegas, then closes on the state of our culture at large with an interesting analogy. Here’s the DGAF interview Dean mentions. It is a way of comparing how distribution of income in a society compares with a similar society in which everyone earned exactly the same amount. Inequality on the Gini scale is measured between 0, where everybody is equal, and 1, where all the country’s income is earned by a single person. Gini developed his coefficient in 1912, building on the work of American economist Max Lorenz, who published a hypothetical way to depict total equality – a straight diagonal line on a graph – in 1905. The difference between this hypothetical line and the actual line produced of people’s incomes is the Gini ratio. In 2012-13, the UK’s Gini score for income inequality was 0.332, as measured by the Office for National Statistics. Individual cities vary in their equality – London is the most unequal, as measured by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, while Sunderland is the most equal. “The Gini has been around for a very long time, and it’s very technically sound if you want to measure income inequality across the whole population,” explains Andy Sumner, director of the International Development Institute at Kings College, London. “But one might say the Gini is oversensitive to changes in the middle, and undersensitive at the extremes.” – from the BBC The post The Poker Zoo 60: Fernando in Texas appeared first on Out of Position.

Instagram chip pornographer Fausto Valdez returns to the Zoo; has he been following the rules? In any case, Fausto’s been splashing around L.A. long enough to get into the private games and see the real action, plus play some poker. He gives us the lowdown on his run to the high stakes, including a sweet hand where he makes the nuts on the turn versus four-high in a 60k pot: easy game. We get an update on Fausto’s Blueprint Poker Coaching business, which is continuing to evolve into a solid live poker pathway. Fausto tells us a little about becoming a “lone wolf” as he moves out from the shadow of Solve For Why: not bad for some “old dust.” He sees the way the ahead for the true poker pro: diversifying his income, making babies, and enjoying this brief squabble called life. Shouldn’t be hard, perhaps, if only you can turn on your Third Eye. Previous zoo installments with Fausto: episode 28 and episode 3. * Return of the 5$pkrclub: Update on the live, low-stakes, deep-stack cash game As announced, the TBR community will be starting a (hopefully regular) live, low stakes, deep stack cash game at the Sahara Poker Room in Las Vegas. This is based on our popular training game on Pppoker (hit us up about about that if you are interested, as well.) The basic idea is a low-stakes game with a minimum buy in of 200 bbs and incitement to play very, very deep. Here’s the deal, and it might be the best poker structure ever: 2/3 blinds, 200 bb min buy in, no max buy in, with a time rake of 5$. Good luck beating that. I chose the Sahara because it is a hidden gem of the Vegas poker scene. Not only is it a nicely appointed, new room with comfortable chairs and tables, the Covid plexiglass apparati is not overdone – we can still have a great and social game. The first game is scheduled for January 14th at 7 pm at Sahara. Of course you can just show up, but to help us organize, reserving a seat would be appreciated. [contact-form] As I discussed with DGAF, I think deep but affordable games are a part of poker’s future. Hope to see you then. * To close, Gerard S., who appears to be restarting his poker blog, on Fausto: Fast forward two years to now. Fausto and I have attended two S4Y Academies together, played in a handful of 1/2 meet up games, and discussed poker strategy to infinite depths. His coaching has led to me using poker as my primary source of income. Meeting him has led to meeting tons of other poker friends, going to the Academy, and finding many more ways to hone my game. At first, he was just my coach, but then he became my mentor, and now, I’m glad to call him one of my best friends. “Uhh… what just happened?!” Doug said. “That was like… a hurricane.” After my second session with Fausto, I headed straight to the casino. I got there at around 5 PM, bought in for 1k, and four hours later, I was leaving with nearly three times that. I ran pretty hot, but I also know that Fausto’s philosophy of generating action at the table helped me get paid on my big hands. The post The Poker Zoo 59: Fausto’s Third Eye appeared first on Out of Position.

Mysterious poker training philanthropist? Imperturbable doctor who RNGs your diagnosis? Legendary Zynga shark? For our first podcast of the new year, I’m pleased to welcome Thomas Pinnock, the enigma who has created one of the most comprehensive poker learning communities on the web. Zenith Poker features every aspect of serious study, including a learning path, an advanced background text, long-form video lectures, challenging tests of concepts including follow-up teaching videos, a staff of coaches, a busy online chat room, a full sim library, and even the development of its own solver. Most of this is offered at no charge. Sounds pretty great. The challenge, however, is always the same: how do you put all this into action? Thomas gives us the bad news in his best bedside manner: it’s work… but he (and his community) is here to help. Some of Thomas’ strategy writing, pre-Zenith Poker, hidden on Upswing. (Speaking of free stuff, the burgeoning Upswing article trove is excellent, but hey, who reads? More crazy talk.) Regarding the OOP live deep-stack game in LV that Dean mentions: contact me or look for announcements soon. The 50% Rule of Poker (a.k.a Pinnock’s Razor) states that in no-limit games, in a heads-up pot, on any street, the player who is out-of-position (OOP) should attempt to construct their checking and betting strategy in such a way as to force the player who is in-position (IP) to bet or raise at most 50% of the time. The 50% Rule has many interesting consequences for the range construction of both players: OOP should always ensure that their checking range is strong enough that IP should check back at least 50% of the time. If OOP does not have enough strong hands in their range to prevent IP from betting more than 50% of the time when OOP checks, then OOP should check their entire range. If OOP has a betting range, and if OOP checks, then IP should check back more than 50% of their range. On the River, with stack sizes larger than the pot, the 50% rule holds most strongly. In other words, in any River spot with the SPR > 1, IP will check back at least half the time when OOP checks. IP will attempt to bet as often as possible, which means that IP’s betting frequency will be close to (but still less than) 50%. The post The Poker Zoo 58: Pinnock’s Zenith appeared first on Out of Position.

The year-ending edition of the Zoo. Suitably, I talk with The Back Room standby Jason Burge, author of the JamBasket series of videos. We go over his year in poker, and hit some highlights of the greater poker scene as well. (Apparently I already forgot about Phil Galfond: hey, but what have you done for me lately?) Our piece de resistance for this podcast is, however, Mindblowing Poker, a new book by an English professional player. In it, “Professor Poker” reveals his personal poker philosophy and propounds a way forward for the game at a time when its future is consistently doubted. Is he right or wrong? Is that even the question? We break it down and even get some queries directly answered by the otherwise anonymous author. As mentioned in the podcast, the Poker Zoo community is kicking off a series of deepstack, low-stakes games in Las Vegas soon. To find out more and get a seat at the table, contact me through any channel, including my gmail address, persuadeo@. We need players to get this off the ground! Classic HSP review mentioned is here. Mindblowing Poker review starts at 29:00. Q & A correspondence with the Professor on Mindblowing Poker: The public wants, in spite of your wishes, a little more detail on your life in poker: what stakes, what sites, how would you describe your pool, any known crushers/poseurs you play against? Give us something. Firstly, thanks very much for inviting me to take part in this podcast – appreciate it’s strange not to have me there speaking! As you’re aware – I’m very keen to keep my identity under wraps. Let me give a bit of an introduction. A big part of my philosophy is about keeping moving, staying elusive, allowing you to move around and play in a misleading way and move on before the pool will catch on and exploit you. I appreciate that those committed to the pursuit of perfection and GTO aren’t concerned by such players, but in practice I find this a much superior way to extract profits from poker if you can learn about others quicker than they can learn about you, which is my skill. I’m concerned that as we arrive at situations where everyone at the table is playing a near perfect strategy (over the spots they commonly see), then they will eventually all expect to lose to the house. Therefore I move around a lot, finding the ‘low hanging fruit’ first, but this is increasingly hard to find. What I propose players do next is to ‘shake the trees’ rather than spending time plotting how to get the fruit from higher up in the tree. To answer your question then – I have played an incredibly varied set of games since c.2007. I built a bankroll on Pokerstars and 888. Once I had a significant bankroll, I became a live player – I’ve been at WSOPs, WPTs and EPTs and have had strong results there. I’ve cut this down over the last couple of years (partly because I like playing at home online, partly because of Covid). I’d describe myself as a maths nerd but someone who has made a conscious effort to see the bigger picture. You have some very clever people in poker, who love game theory. But the irony for me, is that they can’t see the theory of the bigger game they exist in. They all have an incentive to refine a GTO strategy, but once all players have refined it, the game will die as nobody can win. In terms of who I am, I’ve had Vanessa Selbst, Charlie Carrell, Brad from Chasing Poker Greatness and Will Kassouff all incorrectly suggested recently. The clue I will give is that I grew up in the UK. Questions from the Mindblowing Poker Twoplustwo thread First, Mason seems to very much want to stick to the abstract definition of GTO, while you are arguing, essentially, that players can’t perform at that level of practicality. How we talk about this is essentially the “EV Loss” of our real game strategy vs optimal. Have you tested any of your own strategies in the solver using the limitations of what you see employed, via node locking and real range inputs? Are you talking about theory or actual, demonstrable line development? Are you really talking about player pool adjustments, but just in a different language? It’s important to understand that first and foremost my book is an idea, a philosophy. A lot of the plays I’m promoting aren’t intended to stack up in a solver, unless you were to calibrate for an enhanced EV loss from a villain. If I write a hand example, anyone can run off and put it in a solver and find a solution, but the real test is – how far away were they without using the solver? The point is to push the villain into a spot they wont have seen before, and wont have tested themselves in a solver. In short, we all know what solvers can do, but what my plays do is to focus on misleading the inputs to the solver. If you put ‘garbage in’, you get ‘garbage out’. That’s the underpin to these plays. Where people have taken things I say to solvers that kind of proves my point – if a player needs to have a solved solu

Today on the Zoo I interview Dr. Brian Space, scientist and 2+2 poker writer. Dr. Space came to my attention after Matt Berkey tweeted out the article “GTO, the Value of Information, and the Nature of the Solution to No-limit Hold ‘em,” which supported Matt’s long-held contention that “GTO” poker is not nearly fully explored even in the age of solvers. While I had never spoken to Brian before, we do have a small connection, as both of us are members of the DGAF community forum. This is an unexplored avenue. Such a strategy removes an additional constraint and provides for significant additional information hiding. In discussing ranges above, it was implicit that ranges bifurcate and split even into more discrete parts as the game tree is explored. We might have a river spot where our full houses and simulant bluffs bet one sizing, while straights make a significantly smaller wager. Indeed, optimal solvers find such spots to be ubiquitous and even find that one should randomize certain holdings between the bet sizing ranges. In the new paradigm there is a probability associated that the nut-flush in the above spot might sometimes bet with the full house sizing and another percentage of the time with the straights. Current strategies allow for leakage of information that is far from optimal. It is easy to imagine bet sizing distributions with significantly overlapping tails that make our opponent’s life in guessing our intentions miserable. While solvers already show strategies with “overlapping tails” and just as importantly, we can theorize and and execute these and other principles to reasonable effect, Dr. Space is seeing a bigger picture where more EV is gained when moving beyond discrete bet sizing constraints. My question to him was, essentially, does it matter given what we can do with the tools we have? A complete list of Dr. Space’s poker articles is on his website. You can find him on Twitter as well. Recent Zoo podcasts that discuss some of these subjects include 55 with Alvin Lau and 52 with Greg Porter. The pod graphic is based on Dr. Space’s CO2 over N2 sorption animation. The post The Poker Zoo 56: Space Exploration appeared first on Out of Position.

Professional and coach Alvin Lau of Overnight Monster returns to tackle big subjects in poker. We start with an update on Alvin’s successful move to much bigger games. With that fun news behind us, we advance the discussion Porter and I had on the somewhat exaggerated worries about Real Time Assistance; discuss the noted Brian Space article and the essential difference between a GTO practitioner and a theorist; we talk poker books and why they so many of them just aren’t very helpful (yes, names are named). We close with a discussion about race and role models in poker – a subject that probably needed more time or maybe less time, but in any case, the door was opened. The Prisoner’s Dilemma, a book by William Poundstone based on the work of John von Neumann, describes the evolution of the game theory, and the eventual development of the ‘Prisoner’s Dilemma’ at RAND Corporation. It provides insights on the impact of game theory on war decisions during the period of the Cold War. The prisoner’s dilemma is a situation wherein the individuals protect their own interests, without cooperating with other colleagues, and hence, prove to be of a disadvantage for themselves and others. Betrayal of trust for individual gain is a common phenomenon, and we face such situations everyday. This theory was developed by scientists Merrill Flood and Melvin Dresher of RAND Corporation, and formalized by Princeton mathematician Albert W. Tucker. ‘The prisoner’s dilemma’ is a byproduct of the ‘game theory’ developed by noted scientist John von Neumann. He developed the game theory after being inspired by the ‘bluffing technique’ in poker. Let’s take a brief look at the traditional example that propounds this concept. Two men are arrested by the police on suspicion of committing the same crime. They are questioned by the police in separate rooms. To convict them, the police need testimony from at least one of them. Both are rational, and value their personal freedom more than the other’s. They have two options―to confess or remain silent. If one confesses and the other remains silent, he (who remained silent) will have to serve the full tenure of punishment. On the other hand, if both confess and accuse the other to be a culprit, they’ll share the sentence of imprisonment, that will be lesser than the full term. However, if both remain silent, due to a lack of evidence, the police will have to sentence both to a much lesser period. Thus, the best option for both suspects is to remain silent and not testify against the other. However, neither of them know what the other will say, and a lack of trust and confidence in the other accomplice may compel one of them to testify rather than remain silent. They’re faced with this dilemma, since there is a risk of the other partner testifying against if the other one remains mum. If they have mutual trust, it will be easy for them to have a win-win situation by staying mum. This narrative represents a dilemma faced by all of us in the real world. We all come across such a situation, where we have to make a choice between self-interest and that of the group. Sometimes, choosing self-interest might not be of any value to you, if the others too think of their own profit. On the other hand, if you think of the group interest, and the other members of the group think of their self-interests, you’ll end up bearing all the loss. -from PsycholoGenie The post The Poker Zoo 55: Alvin Moves Up appeared first on Out of Position.

I turn to none other than our co-host and production magic man Dean Martin to get the scoop on the Covid pandemic’s effect on the home game/private game scene. Poker has always been in a grey area legally, but with new wrinkles come new opportunities. Dean takes us through all of it, down to competing food offerings. We also get into some live low-stakes strategy. Speaking of, here’s a related Pro Tip: use your fingers and thumb to count to five. Not everyone stays home, of course; check out this piece on leaving the states for the game. Dean and I have talked together on the pod several times now, including one of the most popular Poker Zoo conversations wherein I break down how to learn poker in a confusing and misleading industry. $2/5 game $10 ‘mandatory’ button straddle 4 (460) hero AdJh r45 6 (650) c folds around (100) Ah8sTh 4 414 B40 6 605 r135 6 is 25 yr old female that often overplays her hand. AT+, 99+ she would typically 3b pre so I put her on smaller Ax, 22-88, Kx,Qx,Jx straight or heart draws I think she sees my smallish c bet as weak and this is a good spot to 3b & charge the draws. Thoughts? Here’s another fun spot $1/2/5 game 8 handed 5 (600) b20 6 (400) c 8 (800) c 3 (450) hero 57dd already has 5 in so puts in the extra $15 68Tdcs (80) 3 (430) x/r145 Hero mistakenly thinks he’s flopped a straight 5 (580) b35/c 6 f 8 c/f Ks (370) Hero realizes that he mis-read his hand. Do you ever bluff shove here to continue the story? The post PZ 54: Local Private Game, Corona Style appeared first on Out of Position.