But there’s only so much a computer can anticipate. It can tell you that yes, given your holdings and the board there’s an X% chance that you have the best hand and so should call, but it can’t tell you that the player in seat 4 always bluffs the turn when everyone checks the river, or the player on the button held onto his J3 because it was suited and hit his flush on the river or that the guy who raised UTG just lost three big pots in a row at his other table and is now tilting like Don Quixote. Poker isn’t just a game of numbers. It’s knowing who you’re up against, it’s playing against the percentages when you have a read, it’s making moves with nothing to set up a later play, and so on. And frankly there’s no way that someone is going to have time to punch into a software program the specifics of an entire table and get a response in the time allotted to make an online play.
I’m pretty confident that I could beat any software in the world, and certainly players above my skill level can.
Poker is an extremely complex game, and computers don’t do it well. You could write a bot to beat incompetant players, but there’s no way you’re going to beat really good players with one.
All of what you said is true, Otto, but how often do you know what you’re up against when you’re playing online.
How about 2 or more guys playing at the same table on different computers, in the same room (or on cell phones), ganging up on some sucker? Sharing tells, setting up plays, etc.
When you’re playing at a casino, you at least see the opposition, and I imagine it’s harder to cheat in that environment.
It is easy to cheat. That’s a real danger.
Online? At a casino? Both? Please amplify.
Online. Collusion is simple. Most people are too dumb to understand the proper implications of collusion, so it’s pretty harmless at low limits, but with skilled players at higher limits you really have to watch out.
Are we talking collusion at the levels you play, then?
Yes, it’s dangerous and hard to detect. Just something you have to live with… and watch out for.
On World Poker Tour, they kinda quietly introduced a suffling machine in some of the shows. But I don’t remember seeing it on WSOP or other poker shows.
It wouldn’t be at all hard for a dealer to stack the deck for hold 'em.
Has anyone else ever wondered if some of the games we see on TV are rigged?
When I was fooling around with closeup magic, I got to the point where I could do stack the deck for five-handed draw poker, replete with false shuffles, false cuts, etc.
In hold 'em, we’re talking just 2 down cards per player and 5 community cards. And I never see any player cutting the deck.
It’d be an absolute cinch to rig it for one player. Just give him excellent hole cards and let the percentages take it from there.
And the fact that the dealer must burn a card before the deal, flop, turn and river, is of no consequence to a skilled cheat.
Perhaps this is too personal a question, but I am curious as to how old you are, if you have any plans to make a career change, and if so, how you are preparing for it and how you might use the skills you have developed as a professional poker player to give you a jump start in your next career. (Common issues for many sports professionals.)
Of course when I said “bluff the turn when everyone checks the river” I meant checks the flop.
Not for a moment. WPT and the casinos who sponsor the various events would have nothing to gain and everything to lose by rigging a game. Were any of them to be caught running a crooked game it would cost them millions in lost business, more millions in fines, and years of their lives in prison. And for what? To throw a tournament to someone who is just as likely as anyone else to win without cheating, when every televised tourney gets hundreds or thousands of new people interested in playing? Foolishness for them even to contemplate it.
The only televised tourney I’ve seen using a mechanical shuffler was the Fox Sports Poker Superstars. Presumably they’ll use them for Superstars II as well. Haven’t seen them on WSOP or any WPT event.
- I don’t have any plans for a career change, because, as much as I’m dissatisified with this, it beats my other options. I don’t know what I’m doing in life.
I don’t think the skills will really transfer over… mostly just that the skills required to be a good poker player will also prove useful in a lot of jobs.
And I certainly wouldn’t refer to myself as a “sports professional”, I always thought the push to try to make televised poker more sports-like is silly.
You’re 23?!?
Maybe it’s the vodka talking. but this strikes me as almost incomprehinsibly sad. The idea that someone at the age of 23 could feel the way you do…
In all seriousness, seek professional help.
Ex-pro poker player checking in. I agree with those who say it’s a very difficult lifestyle, for the reasons in the OP.
At a ‘real’ job, no matter how bad your day goes, at least you can go home knowing you made money. But you can have days at poker where you have obnoxious people blowing smoke in your face, laughing at you, mouthing off about how much better they are than you after getting lucky with cheezy hands, and in the end you lose money and would have been better off if you had just stayed home. Do that four or five nights in a row, and you’ll be talking to yourself.
I quit playing despite being quite successful at it, because I just couldn’t stand the boredom, the swings, the people, and the thought that I was just wasting my life away. I didn’t want to be 80 one day and look back at my life as an endless series of rushes and bad beats with nothing accomplished in the end. I started writing poker articles and doing other things on the side just to get away from the crushing dullness of it all, and in the end I just gave up and went back to work doing something productive.
Online play, in my opinion, is much tougher than live games. Online players in the higher level games seem to be MUCH better at pre-flop hand selection than live players, probably because a lot of them are playing with ‘helper’ software and books at their side. Plus, the people who play online are already coming from a population selected from techie people who are comfortable with computers and are probably smarter than your average poker player. They still make plenty of mistakes on later streets where software can’t help them, but pre-flop hand errors are a significant source of income. Take that away, and you have to be much better than your opponents in other aspects of the game. Add in the risk of collusion and the equalization of no one being able to read tells and play against the same bad players every night, and it’s just very difficult.
There is some amazingly good software out there. I consulted on the development of this program, and I use it. It automatically compiles statistics for every player I’m up against. It pops up alerts when it spots pre-flop errors, notifies me about tight and loose players, and keeps track of everyone’s stack so I can tell at a glance how much you’re up or down and adjust my interpretation of your psychology appropriately. If you raise, I can pop up a window that shows a history of every hand you’ve raised with from that position, so I know what I might be facing.
If you’re not using a similar program, you’re at a significant disadvantage. Using a program like this is not ‘cheating’, but I’ve heard there are similar programs that can be used for collusion, automatically transferring hand information between partners. Programs like this are going to get more sophisticated, and games are going to get tougher.
My advice: If you’re thinking about going pro, don’t. If you must, focus on short-handed play, tournaments, and live games. You might also think of becoming skilled at games like stud and Omaha, which still seem to be played at an overall pretty poor level. Remember, it’s not enough to be a great player - your opponents have to be making big mistakes. The best player in the world playing against the other top 9 will not make any money in a ring game, but a decent player at a table full of monkeys will make a fortune. It’s getting very hard to find really soft tables at middle limits online, although there are still plenty of good games in the casinos.
Senor Beef, my husband, Sam Stone played poker professionally for a while, as I believe you know. All the things you say about the life ring very true. It’s an inherently dissolute lifestyle, whether you’re playing online or in casinos. And the people you have to associate with, even be nice to (the better to get their money, in some cases), are less than life-affirming.
Sam has plenty of other skills that can be equally lucrative for him, so he got out with relative ease. I don’t know whether you want to get out of the poker life or not. I get the impression you just want a sense of direction.
You can look at poker as being capable of providing you with enough income to make it possible to pursue your “real” interests, whatever those are. I know that poker takes a lot of your time and energy, unfortunately, especially when you’re bleeding chips.
In my experience it is sometimes the first real bankroll-smacking downturn in the EV that will make a player stop playing pro and leave the game in a panic. I’ve seen it happen; it’s not much different from people who give up flying the first time they have a bad scare in an airplane. I used to tell Sam that either he was confident that he was a better player than the opposition, or he wasn’t, and if he wasn’t, he should definitely stop playing (if you know Sam, you understand the effect this might have). The only other possible problem is cheating/colluding. If neither of those factors are killing you, then your downswing will become an upswing in time. I’m guessing you have the skill. You could probably use some help to keep yourself from feeling defeated even before you play, though.
If there’s something you’d rather be doing, that’s another story. It’s early yet.
Ha! Simulpost! My wife and I are in our home office, and we were both responding at the same time unbeknownst to each other. Heh.
SB, there are easier ways to make a six figure income. Trust me.
I agree.
From your OP, Senor Beef, I figured you to be in your late thirties/early forties. You’re much too young to sound this burned out. I know it’s none of my business, but I hope you’ll decide to find some other way to earn your living.
Yeah, right. I suspect collusion.
I’m remarkably burned out on life in general for a 23 year old, not just in poker. It’s pretty crippling.
And I have absolutely no clue what I’m going to do with my life - I haven’t been able to find anything remotely appealing.
Also, Sam Stone - you didn’t respond to the last few e-mails I sent you long ago… did you receive them? Was there a reason for that?