If you can't play.....write about poker

Originally posted by TinoLaan
Hi Barry, great blog, got yourself another follower

I actually really enjoyed the first episode. Not quite at the level of the first two seasons (yet) though, I agree.
Got to admit though, that song turned that scene into arguably the most awesome bridge montage ever shown on television.

And I never expected I would ever use the terms "awesome" and "bridge montage" in one sentence.

My only concern with Fargo is that each season is starting to look too samey - we have the out of their depth criminal, the way too good for middle america cop, the weird supernatural event etc.

Originally posted by tonypmm

Originally posted by BarryCarter
Satellites have always been a format I've done well in, I've won a fair few live event tickets before and back in the 'glory days' I used to make a reasonable side income grinding satellites and taking the T$.

Btw, could you please explain why there are so many sats with >9 seats gtd? Don't they give recs a really horrible experience of bubble stalling that doesn't happen that much in SNG sats that award 1-4 seats?

What matters most in a sat imo is not the field size but the ratio of the seat value to the buy-in - the more the ratio, the more the variance, the more attractive the sat is to a rec.

Most of the time the guarantees/buy-in sizes are based purely on the rooms analytics of who is online and how much their roll is. Cant speak for any network of course but I think thats your answer

Originally posted by BarryCarter

I've put on a bit of weight, I weighed in at 214lbs a few weeks ago, when I usually weigh about 196lbs. This was because I had some real problems with my knees for about 18 months, which put a spannner in my gym plans. I have sorted my knees out (Cod liver oil amazingly) so back at the gym. To motivate myself short term I have made a forfeit - I have to donate £100 to the UK Communist Party if I am not under 205lbs by May 1. If it's not clear already, I am NOT a fan of communism, hence the negative reinforcement motivator. I'm already at 209lbs so I'm on track. Sticking with a high protein diet and lifting weights. Prior to my knees going, I had got half decent at weight lifting so I hope to get back on track there.

Got there

So my bet with myself was to get under 210lbs by May 1 (Ignore the numbers about, we do things in the metric of stones so I got confused) and the terms of the bet was once I get under, the bet is over. So I was really close yesterday and my wife said she would buy me breakfast today if I got under with a week to go.

So this morning I put on four layers of clothing, walked the dog for an hour, then ran up and down the stairs for 30 minutes until I sweated my way to 209lbs.

Assuming I don't pass out, I am now off for the best breakfast ever, and will be making a new challenge right after.

Yay, now go under 200 lbs!!

Thanks for the Blast mental game article - I'm flattered

As for other interesting poker formats, obviously, tourneys with large bounties (incl. Party's Sit & Go Hero and Stars' super-KO SNGs) are fascinating, though I've chosen not to play them professionally as of now because recreationals are likely to have a decent intuitive understanding of the correct strategy (LAG as a big stack to win bounties, TAG as a short stack to get the maximum chance of doubling up vs a big stack player who'll hardly ever fold anyway) and therefore lose a bigger fraction of their deposits to rake than to me and the regs.

The asymmetry of range widths (between chipleaders' 100% ranges and short stacks' 10-20% ones), which is much more dramatic than in non-KO formats or those with small bounties relatively to the BI, gives rise to a lot of memorable suckout stories

I don't remember if I've ever won a correct preflop all-in with 32o (have to look it up in my DB) but I do have 92s and T3s wins (as the 4-bettor or overcaller over shortstack shoves) under my belt.

On a side note, seeing as poker sites have started adding 4-max games - what number of seats per table (non-HU) do you consider optimal in the light of mobile poker development and expect to be the most popular in newly created online poker formats in a couple of years? (I've never played poker on a mobile app so don't have firsthand experience.)

6-max must be looking decently on devices with a 4:3 aspect ratio such as iPads - I can state that because the desktop tables have the same ratio - but by far the most popular aspect ratio is 16:9 and I'm afraid that the placement of 6 seats with the auto-centering of Hero's seat at the bottom, like in the Nova and Mercury themes, with 2 rows of seats at the sides, takes too much vertical space, and 4-5-max looks better as it requires only 1 row of seats at the sides. 3-max is a bit too shorthanded to my taste and seems to use the screen space as efficiently as 4-5-max.

Originally posted by tonypmm
On a side note, seeing as poker sites have started adding 4-max games - what number of players at the table (non-HU) do you consider optimal in the light of mobile poker development and expect to be the most popular in newly created online poker formats in a couple of years? (I've never played poker on a mobile app so don't have firsthand experience.)

6-max must be looking decently on devices with a 4:3 aspect ratio such as iPads - I can state that because the desktop tables have the same ratio - but by far the most popular aspect ratio is 16:9 and I'm afraid that the placement of 6 seats with the auto-centering of Hero's seat at the bottom, like in the Nova and Mercury themes, takes too much vertical space, and 4-5-max would look better. 3-max is a bit too shorthanded to my taste and seems to use the screen space as efficiently as 4-5-max.

Sir, every question you ask me makes me want to write an artcle about it

My gut says 4, three seems too slow, lots of recs dont like HU, 4 is a good mix of plenty of action, option to fold and nicely fitting on a small screen.

Week 3:

60 tournaments
+$69
Bankroll: 150.60

Just finished reading this

450 pages, could have been 200 pages were it not for the fact the author insists on bigging himself up every 5 sentances. A great book but a real grind to read. This is Sam Harris quite perfectly giving an idea of what to expect from this author:

Now started on this and I am blasting through it, which is always a good sign

Poker wise I have been playing a lot of Beat The Clock for my next 'mental game of...' article

Originally posted by BarryCarter
Poker wise I have been playing a lot of Beat The Clock for my next 'mental game of...' article

I don't really see mental game issues with it other than the really high variance and the risk aversion in the last of the 5 minutes (recreationals' attempts to survive until the end at any cost, for example, by stalling). The reason why I pointed you to Blast was that it's a hybrid of Spin & Gos and Beat The Clock (BTC) - it triggers the mental game issues typical of BTC as well as the Spin ones.

BTC would be much more fun if it turned into an all-in shootout after 5 minutes elapsed, as 888's BreakFAST! MTTs do after 6 minutes. As it is, with the chip chop at the end of BTC, it's plain boring.

But I see why Stars don't want to make an all-in shootout with a fixed prize structure - it would lead to much more stalling in the last minute because there would be a bubble.

To be perfectly honest, I think that Stars has done a rather poor job in terms of rolling out exciting games in the last 12 months (since KO Poker came out). Its latest addition to the top-level tabs in the client - BTC - is only moderately entertaining as explained above.

The PLO Spin & Gos are such an easy product to develop (once NLHE ones are in place) that it looks like they're Stars' excuse for not producing anything more exciting this spring.

I'm still waiting for Stars to produce Spin & KO (a hybrid of super-KOs and Spins). I'd like them to be 4-man with 2 BIs paid to the winner and the rest of the prize pool (1.6-1.7 BIs) being randomised bounty prizes (determined by a spin after someone wins a bounty). But obviously, I can't influence Stars' decisions.

There are a few interesting wrinkles to them from a MG perspective, I'll leave you waiting for that though. Ultimately and this is my final point, most of what you get from Beat The Clock is done better by Spin & Go, IMO.

MG = management group? I don't quite understand the abbreviation

mental game

Ah, of course... forgive my stupidity.

Anyway, I'm puzzled by Stars' decision to set a 10% rake on BTC.

In my understanding, a gambling venue prices each of its offerings according to how well that game entices a customer to deposit: it can afford to charge a higher house advantage on a jackpot slot than on a non-JP one because a JP slot is more addictive.

In poker, pricing is slightly more complicated because recs lose money not only to the house but to the regs too, and it's the sum of the rake and the losses to regs that should be kept reasonably low in order to prevent the rec from losing the interest in the game.

So the act of charging more rake for BTC than for Spins means that Stars believes in either of the two things: 1) BTC retains rec customers better than Spins, 2) regs don't have such a big edge over recs in BTC as in Spins. I actually think that Stars believes in both, but both are questionable.

Especially at the $1 BTC, recs time out quite often and are sat out and so they lose a ton of blinds during their disconnections because the dealing is Zoom; and those losses aren't fully compensated by the fixed duration of the game - surely, those who sit out but manage to survive until the end, do win some cash, but those who get disconnected early in the tourney just get blinded out very quickly and get nothing.

Thus disconnected recs don't have as much chance to cash in BTC as they do in Blast, where the dealing is non-Snap and even much slower than in Stars' non-Zoom games. (This Tuesday, I found myself in a Blast tourney where both my remaining opponents got disconnected, but alas that happened when the timer was already low, so both survived into the all-in phase, and one of them ended up winning the tourney ).

To clarify the 'recs don't lose slower at BTC' statement - the 'problem' with BTC is that the big blind is a much larger fraction of the starting stack, so if a rec makes even smallish mistakes for like 1.5% of their stack on average per hand, and plays 12 or so hands per tourney, then the rec does lose 18% of the buy-in to regs on average. Adding the 10% rake to that, we see that recs still lose at a brutal rate.

On the other hand, the house then gets only about half of their deposits, forfeiting the other half to regs. (In a 48-man, 3.8-4 BIs are collected in net rake - 4.8 BIs with the VIP rewards given back - while the 30 or so recs lose 0.26 BIs (post-rakeback) each for a total of 7.8 BIs. That's of course pure speculation, I don't know any insider info.) Maybe that's why the rake is exactly 10% at all the stakes (a round number as opposed to 'quite random' percentages like 7.36-8.6% in 18-man super-KOs) - I'm feeling as though Stars would readily set the rake to 15% if the customers were ready to approve of any rake higher than 10%, but the price expectation among the customers is 10% like in MTTs (though there have been precedents of 11-12% rake in microstake SNGs).

Just finished this one

It's actually aimed at tech entrepreneurs, of which I am not. But it is a fascinating insight into the psychology behind HOW the major tech companies make us addicted to tech. I firmly believe that 'smartphones are the new smoking' so this book was an eye opener.

Perfect complement to this book which I also recently read and also thought was excellent

I'm now off for a drinking session with the guys, but have this for my hangover reading tomorrow

Thanks for the article about Beat The Clock. I definitely agree that the game is too monotonous - Spin & Gos at least offer a variety of prize pools, though the 70% probability of an x2 is too big and can get on the nerves of a rec - that's why 3-max is inferior to 4-max where it's possible to deliver an x4 or x5 game about half the time (as seen at Party and 888) and prevent x2's from coming in annoyingly long series.
__________________________________________

Speaking of lottery SNGs, poker sites have increasingly been running lottery satellites to their flagship events: WCOOP / Sunday Million / SCOOP Spin & Gos at Stars, Power Series Hero at Party and, since this Monday, Blast satellites to XL Inferno ME.

I'm very jealous and frustrated with this as it seems to me that those sats funnel too much of Spin addicts' deposited money into the MTT ecosystem. Moreover, those sats likely have a smaller reg-to-rec ratio that normal Spins, because not all the regs are ready to suffer the variance of the target MTTs.

I don't know whether the sites keep a significantly bigger share of recs' deposits to themselves this way - a large part of the tourney equity earned by recs in those sats is donated by them to HS MTT regs during the target event.

Maybe these sats make some people deposit more who otherwise wouldn't, but I doubt that this effect is large. The largest result of these sats, it seems, is that the frequency of hits of jackpots of normal Spins drops a bit (because their traffic is cannibalised by the sats), while the MTT guarantees increase.

Is it true that poker operators believe that bigger MTT guarantees give them a better advertisement than higher frequencies of JP hits?

On a side note, the payout structure of the latest version of $1M spins is actually quite reasonable.

Only 4% of each buy-in goes to the $1.2M prize tier at the $10 BI level, and 2.4% at the $100 one. The 8% + 4% = 12% 'effective rake' at the $10 level (assuming that I never hit the top multiplier) still looks beatable.

What's interesting about the $10 structure is that all the multipliers between x10 and x120000 have been removed.

Do recs mind the absence of the middle (x25-x240) multipliers? What do you think of this experimental structure?

Originally posted by tonypmm
Thanks for the article about Beat The Clock. I definitely agree that the game is too monotonous - Spin & Gos at least offer a variety of prize pools, though the 70% probability of an x2 is too big and can get on the nerves of a rec - that's why 3-max is inferior to 4-max where it's possible to deliver an x4 or x5 game about half the time (as seen at Party and 888) and prevent x2's from coming in annoyingly long series.
__________________________________________

Speaking of lottery SNGs, poker sites have increasingly been running lottery satellites to their flagship events: WCOOP / Sunday Million / SCOOP Spin & Gos at Stars, Power Series Hero at Party and, since this Monday, Blast satellites to XL Inferno ME.

I'm very jealous and frustrated with this as it seems to me that those sats funnel too much of Spin addicts' deposited money into the MTT ecosystem. Moreover, those sats likely have a smaller reg-to-rec ratio that normal Spins, because not all the regs are ready to suffer the variance of the target MTTs.

I don't know whether the sites keep a significantly bigger share of recs' deposits to themselves this way - a large part of the tourney equity earned by recs in those sats is donated by them to HS MTT regs during the target event.

Maybe these sats make some people deposit more who otherwise wouldn't, but I doubt that this effect is large. The largest result of these sats, it seems, is that the frequency of hits of jackpots of normal Spins drops a bit (because their traffic is cannibalised by the sats), while the MTT guarantees increase.

Is it true that poker operators believe that bigger MTT guarantees give them a better advertisement than higher frequencies of JP hits?

I suspect big MTT guarantees are losing their efficacy to some extent and we will see a shift towards bigger jackpots.

IMO spins should include tickets to bigger spins as random prizes

Originally posted by tonypmm
On a side note, the payout structure of the latest version of $1M spins is actually quite reasonable.

Spoiler

Only 4% of each buy-in goes to the $1.2M prize tier at the $10 BI level, and 2.4% at the $100 one. The 8% + 4% = 12% 'effective rake' at the $10 level (assuming that I never hit the top multiplier) still looks beatable.

What's interesting about the $10 structure is that all the multipliers between x10 and x120000 have been removed.

Do recs mind the absence of the middle (x25-x240) multipliers? What do you think of this experimental structure?

I like it. People like their x4 and x6 multipliers and we dont want the frequency of them to go down. After that there is a rec mindset that a x25 and a x120000 are both equally likely (ie. unlikely), so may as well just use the biggest payouts to market them