Watch me fight some AI baddies in VR Boxing in my latest post

Most of you who read this blog regularly should know by now that I have been toying with this idea for quite some time. What actually renewed my interest in this?

1. Falling Sick for an extended period of time in March - Since the start of this month, I was having some difficulties with breathing. The ENT specialist who gave me a rhinoscopy said that my Voicebox was swollen and was blocking my airways to some extent. Even after 10 days later I still have not completely recovered. What I realized was that I wasn't in a good condition to play much poker, and as a result my income for the month was gravely affected.

What the doctor did to me

2. Sick Downswing
I had 2 -12k days. One was at stars, and the other was at planetwin365. Wasn't playing my best and was also playing HUDless at PW365 (not willing to purchase pokerplaner). This may end up being my first losing month in more than a year but we'll see if I somehow manage to grind my way back from -10k to breakeven. Total time spent so far on poker is <50 hours

3. Starting an Online Business
I think we all have to start somewhere. I have always been toying with the idea of entrepreneurship since a long time ago. I might have other hidden skills waiting to be discovered but as of now, my greatest skill and asset is my poker knowledge, and my ability to communicate that with others.

Came across this interesting post about starting online businesses. I thought it was pretty cool because I looked at the diagram for the 6 ways to make money online, I noticed that the best choices were Online Courses and Coaching (High Profit and Low Cost) compared to the rest. I thought, "Hey I could do it!"

Even better still, I was surprised to see Primoz's face in my e-mail

My initial reservations about creating a course for mid-stakes players were that I would directly increase the skill level of my competition (provided my product is top-notched). But after pondering about this for some time, I felt that A. My main opponents at 1k are already very good B. My main opponents at 200-500 have many significant leaks but the player pool is pretty huge C. I don't intend to play poker forever. I eventually decided to ignore them and go ahead with the project anyway.

I was brimming with energy and excitement about this yesterday and I started typing down stuff for 15+ hours. With that, I'm almost done with the short mini-series on how to play in a Blind Battle. I just need to touch up on a few things and actually do some recording over the next few days.

Small Blind vs Big Blind
So, this first mini-series is focused on formulating robust preflop strategies for both the SB and BB. I don't cover postflop play, but will do so if I create more video series in the future.

A short writeup on my series, including some sample slides

Let me say that this is by far the best theory material I have ever written, incorporating information from the best coaches and adding in my own research and analysis to the mix. And I'm not one to make exaggerated claims.

Market Research
I would like to know how many of you would be willing to pay for such a video series? I'm also considering whether to sell the first part as a stand-alone course.

Thanks!

hey mbml,

Sorry to hear you are having health issues, hope you recover quickly.

As for the course: It seems like an interesting idea! And from the sample pre flop bvb it seems good.

Some thoughts:

- I would recommend you to have a narrow target audience. In the sample provided you are saying that players from nl50-400 are the target audience (you are also talking about midstakes players here so not sure what it is really).
Whilst I understand that anyone can take something out of anything you are running the risk of being too general and not enough specific to your target audience.
I am sure that, having been a coach for a while, you know exactly what players from different stakes need to add to their game.

- Do find a way to protect your content. If you don't in a matter of days your series will be out there.

- Any others ideas already about what topics you would like to cover?

To answer your last question, I would be interested in buying such a series, depending on price and audience (but 200-500 seems about right).

hey Dublimax, glad to know that there are people interested in such content

Target Audience: In my opinion an NL50 player should be sophisticated enough to understand a good fraction of my material. At the same time, the weaker midstakes players often play suboptimally in many of these preflop spots, based on their stats which I actively exploit on a regular basis. I might have to test it out though.

I suppose the primary difference between opponents at NL50 and NL400 is that
-NL50 players use larger preflop sizes and tighter ranges

Protection of Content: I thought about this for quite some time. I know people are pirating HU mastermind, and even pleno's stuff. Thinking of making it web-based with no downloads instead.

Other topics:

I could imagine this being super complex and tedious to make and if I ever produce such stuff it would probably far exceed all other existing content by a mile. It's probably the type of analysis that world class players do on their own free time and keep to themselves.

Think of what Internet did here, just that I don't just give a single example to reveal the methodology, but try to cover many many positions. Would imagine it requiring 100s of hours to complete.

Preflop for most positions in 6max - SB vs BU, BB vs BU, CO vs BU/SB/BB, MP and UTG etc. Every single position possible.

General Postflop stuff - Bet size, Different board textures
General information is easy to produce. You just say stuff like "Use a smaller bet size when villain's calling range is inelastic (like on AXX flops), since we want to bluff cheaper with our bluffs, and we will have more air combos than value combos so allowing air hands to bluff cheaper is more important than maximizing value with value hands."

PostFlop Gameplan - Classifying board textures into a few categories, coming up with a reasonable postflop gameplan including how to play hands with entire ranges

E.g. I open 60% in BU and BB 3bets me with 15% range. How should I proceed with my entire range?

PF: 4bet 15% of hands, Call 30% of hands, Fold 55% of hands

F: There are 4? different primary board textures. On dry textures we probably want to have a 0% raising strategy on the Flop, on wet textures we probably want to raise 15-20% of hands on the Flop. What hands do we call? What hands do we fold? I will use CREV to breakdown the optimal ranges we should probably use against an unknown or balanced player.
-One High Card and 2 Low Cards: A22r/K83r
-All Low Cards: 632, 554
-2 Broadway Cards: KQ7
-2 Middle Cards: J85

T: There are all sorts of different possible Turns. What do I do on various possible Turns with various parts of my range?
-High Card which helps the PF3b range like an A/K
-Pairing/Coordinating Card which may help the caller's range more
-Flush completing card
-Blanks

R: Same as Turn.

Galvin hope your health improves very soon man!

Regarding the course, think that is awesome idea and would be very interested in purchasing it in future.

What is the estimated price range for it in pre-production ?

I like the way you lay out things.
I also gave all my students assignments to formulate post flop game plan on various flop textures a while back.
I think you can add to those flops Semi wet an wet.

It will definitely take a lot of work but once you do the course it will just keep bringing in cash - so its one time type of project/investment.

Could definetely sell this stuff easily over 1k if you compare to other stuff like HU mastermind which already sells at a high price

If you still want to become a Stars pro, give away your stuff for free.

@Manu:

@WillyD: That's what I was thinking - Produce the very best content and charge a premium. I could also split up the courses into smaller sections and sell it at a lower price for each individual component

@IvicaIliev77: I have not decided on a price yet. If I'm actually going to do everything I stated above I would imagine having to charge >>1K because such content would be way more advanced that what Gordon/YourDoom is producing and they are already charging a lot. Of course if I broke the videos into smaller components then it would be at a lower price. Haven't thought too much about it so far for now as I'm trying to finish the first part and see how it goes.

-------------

I spent another 5h+ recording and adding some additional content. So far I've produced approximately 2/3 of the BvB video series and it's 2 hours long at the moment, containing mostly preflop theory. I will try to finish the final 1/3 on open limping and formulating a complete limp/react strategy with some suggested ranges against 3-5 different opponent types.

I'm thinking of some ways to make the advice a little more practical, maybe mixing it some live sweat videos focusing purely on preflop decisions, OR filtering for starting positions for ~20-30 hands in BvB and talking about how I would approach these spots, and maybe doing some database analysis to see if I'm making good preflop plays with my limps and opens and raises etc.

Originally posted by mbml
I'm thinking of some ways to make the advice a little more practical, maybe mixing it some live sweat videos focusing purely on preflop decisions, OR filtering for starting positions for ~20-30 hands in BvB and talking about how I would approach these spots, and maybe doing some database analysis to see if I'm making good preflop plays with my limps and opens and raises etc.

I think HH Review>> live play for this purpose to get maximum focus on the topic w/o any other distractions.
DB analysis is also good.

Oh and +1 to your stuff for free ♦

EDIT: Regarding protecting your content I think some kind of watermark is the way to go. Web based videos only is def not enough as there are ways around it.

I'd pay for it, depending on price/topics/quantity of course.

I think success of a venture like this relies more on marketing than quality content. IMO the reason yourdoom/gordon have been so successful is not because of what's in the courses, but how aggressively & successfully they are marketed.

edit: i'd prefer a standalone course rather than segments. Its's probably worth providing both though.

theres always a way to download if its online. the only way is to watermark videos like how yourdoom poker does it! good luck!

If someone can watch or read your content they can copy it. End of story.

However i'd love to see a course mbml so please do it!

hI

Theres no way u can save the content from piracy

Even if u use the most advance security company

A guy can record from the monitor with cam + sound device

and its done

That is the big problem of making courses , most players buy 1 and theres 25 guys who will have it lol

So if u sell 10 copies prob 250 guys are having all your info...now think about the $ u are earning

IMO the best is private coaching , it can be recorded also but its harder and u will know who records the stuff obv

So i would do private coach courses with attractive pricin

♦

I agree that it's impossible to completely prevent piracy but I'm thinking about how I could work towards discouraging it, either through some DRM or by having some value-added service for individuals who buy the original content.

Originally posted by mbml
I agree that it's impossible to completely prevent piracy but I'm thinking about how I could work towards discouraging it, either through some DRM or by having some value-added service for individuals who buy the original content.

That seems like a great idea imo.

But you can't do that if you have 10's of people buying your course. What would make sense, is to to have 1 video/buyer, you could change a word or something and make every copy unique. I don't know how doable this is, but this way if your stuff gets online you will know which jerk shared it.

Hmm ok I'll try to finish up the BvB series first and then think about my options for marketing and protecting against Piracy.

A senior from my university asked me for some help about playing poker professionally and I gave him a link to my first blog for the first 1 year of my career (the one before this). I'm not sure if I have ever linked it before

http://poorpeasant.wordpress.com

Thought it'll be pretty interesting for some of you who are just starting to play and want a reference point for where you should be in your career. I blogged really frequently for many of my sessions and I show my bankroll at every point in time in 2009.

3 months = ~1500
1 year = ~10 k

Siiick, nice little addon with the old blog. Gonna be an interesting read, thnx!

This bit gave me a laugh

I think I was very exploitable in several aspects:
...
...
3) Tighten up, better seat selection – I remembered when some faggot kept on giving me trouble, I sat behind him and 3bet the fuck out of him and he was sorry he ever messed with me. 4bet bluffing is way tougher and more expensive than flatting 3bets and playing back postflop.

Hi Galvin!

You mentioned in you video and book that, when a openraiser fold X% to 3bet, we should 3Bet bluff X% vs him:

Fv3B = 50% -> 50% bluff 50% value
Fv3B = 60% -> 60% bluff 40% value

It looks good but then you have to fold to mutch vs 4bets. If you are bluff heavy not just the better regulars start to cold 4bet you, but the openraiser too, because you will have 60%+ fold to 4bet.

common example:

CO:
Fv3B: 70%
Fv5B: 40%

CO OR 3, fold, fold, Hero 3B 10, CO 4B 20

Okay. Did CO 4bet us because we fold to mutch vs 4bets? Or did he have a good hand? He has high Fv3B, but he has low Fv5B... shouldnt I risk or should I fold... Then I'll fold. ♠

I don't think that's a good method, but I merely suggested it as a super simple guideline for beginners to think about this situation.

If villain folds 100% of the time, we want our range to be 100% bluffs
If villain folds 0% of the time, we want our range to be 0% bluffs

Anything in between isn't necessarily linearly correlated to this.

Well you ask me how much? You need to have some assumptions, then go about deriving the right amount of bluffs vs value bets.

What matters here is the raise and 3b and 4b size a lot of the time. We could ignore postflop considerations for now, but it's mostly just to avoid being directly exploitable vs a 4bet.

Assume opponent knows how we are playing and can perfectly exploit us. According to Mathematics of Poker, such a player is called the Nemesis.

He raise to 3BB,
We 3bets to 9BB
He 4bet to 20BB

we want to make him unable to exploit us directly with a 4bet, and let's assume that we never ever call 4bets and we only jam or fold vs such a size (which is probably not going to be true in an actual game but is a good starting point).

He risks 17 more to win the 12BB worth of dead money in the pot. Find the breakeven point (17/29), and then use that as your bluff:value ratio (17:12)

Once again, whatever I said in the video/book was just a highly simplified method of thinking of the situation and is by no means accurate in determining how to derive your 3bet range. Besides, whatever I said then only holds true for the most extreme examples of Fold 100% and fold 0%, and also doesn't take into account raise size, 3b size, 4bet and 5bet stats, actual opening range etc