to the casuals

my activity kind of dropped here, due to me not getting much utility and also people taking a negative attitude when i threw a tantrum since i got more disciplined my roll has been growing well.

However what I fear is that online poker may die ive expressed this fear before eventually making my efforts obsolete. with the new release of jack pot sit and goes and the likes there are scary prospects, the competition getting tougher and the recs reducing.

then it came to me crystal clear from my finance degree poker is like any other industry in sense a simple concept called efficient market hypothesis.

in its simple sense it states that if an industry is over paying a cash cow, lots of people go to invest buy shares it pushes the share price up and now the return you can get is greatly diminished due to the high price and thus in theory all markets end up balancing out.

how this relates to poker is it does have a cost in time and opportunity cost someone doing poker for a living or to top up there income could easily do another job weather thats account or kitchen porter or doctor whatever.

if the games become to tough eventually people will drop off to pursue other things if they become to easy people will jump in and eventually it will fluctuate slightly but will maintain a steady medium. I do believe it still hasn't balanced out and will only get harder and tougher but i do believe that eventually it will reach its peak.

the un accounted for element though isn't the pros or grinders i just simply explained that part of the eco system that is just simple economics or even biology. the other factor is the casual players.

so those that arent grinders or professionals etc heres my general questions,

what sort of games do you play, do you stick to $1 $5 etc or do you go for $30 $40 etc do you play hyper turbos mtts more cash games etc.

im trying to get at will a casual player ever play a $100 hyper turbo or is this only ever full of pros and grinders, either regs or those taking a shit etc.

do you use a HuD Luke and tracker softwares etc?
If I had the bankroll I would play $100 sit and go's
I only play once a week these days and yes I feel so bad at poker I dont use HUD or anything.

Generally the range is $15.00 and below

I still get the coolers close to Final Table in the Big MTT's still go deep. But every single time I will get coolered its unreal I just cant cash 4 figures online.
I genuinely laugh when I look ahead at pocket kings and see a snap call I know it's either aces or i'm losing to a set of Jacks.
it's the same with Aces, Snap call in the last 30-50 of 4,000 runners and I know I'm probably losing.
my statistics for losing with bigger pairs in the final 50 of a huge MTT is not right. something is up there for sure I keep track of every beat at that stage in a tournament online.

I also believe the games will get too tough, with so much software out there now and crushing strategy's post flop poker is becoming a thing of the past in tournaments.
Within a few years more of these players will come through and it will just be full of players pushing all in, forcing aggressive players to re-think their game, which will cause poker to adapt
and it will be a whole new situation and an entirely different feel to the game.

(Also My 777th post. 'It's a sign') ;-)

I can see were you are coming from. Jackpot sit'n'gos, Adreneline rush, these type of games are made for fast paced poker & get players on site to have a go. I think thats a good thing.
I won 2 tickets for the Jackpot S'n'Go freeroll promo & turned it into $70. Dont get me wrong, Im not about to grind away at these or ever play them again once the promo has finished, but, it was good for my BR.

I play tight BRM.
ATM, $3.30 Tourneys are my limit & when I do get a good day in. I will also play some 2-5c Rush or ring games depending on time & how many tourneys im in at any one time.

If your good at sit n go's it has to be a no brainer.
some are paying 50,000 for 6 wins in a row on a 6 seater table

yes i do use hud. i guess a better question would be with what bank roll so you play 15s but with what roll do you require for that 150? 1500? 15000?

etc i go super nitty and have a 300 buyin rule but thats because hypers can be really swingy.

there are two types of sit and goes refereed to as jackpot sit and goes.

type 1.
as mentioned you get a bonus for winning 6 in a row few people have actually done there homework on this. ill illustrate

assuming your 100% break even pre rake youd finish first 1 time in 6 exactly or 0.166666 now the odds of hitting 0.1666 6 times in a row is 1 in 46656.

dont get confused though that doesnt mean it takes 46656 sngs on average to win the jack pot it means it takes that many blocks of 6. so multiply that by 6 and you get 279936. of course it is true to say as you pointed out a winning player would have an edge. winning 20% would be doing very well. but assuming we stick to that then we have the figures of 1 in 15625 so it would take 93750 games on average for someone with that figure to hit the jackpot.

now a full time grinder (5-10 hours a day) can get anywhere from 200-300 turbos in a day. or 500-1000 hypers in a day. this is assuming there playing 12-24 tables ad is obv traffic dependent but on stars in peak hours not an issue.

279936 93750
200 1399.68 468.75
300 933.12 312.5
500 559.872 187.5
1000 279.936 93.75

thats how many days from excel.
first row is break even 1/6 second row is 1/5 which would be exceptional btw.

please also bear in mind that this is mathematically how many games you should need to play before you hit it. in actuality it could be a lot longer or you might get lucky. i highly doubt a hyper turbo player would have that much of an edge.

and these figures are for people that are playing full time, it would be impossible to be a professional poker player when you could be losing/ break even due to the higher rake taken for over 4 years until you hit the jackpot. its a fantasy you might as well buy a lottery ticket and i dont know be able to feed yourself and have a life.

the second type of jackpot sit and go is also a joke this is where a wheel is spun and that determines the price pool. so say you bought in for $2 usually the price pool will be 2 times the buyin and there will be 3 players. the attraction is sometimes it can be a lot more and very rarely you can earn 1000 times your buyin and win $2000 for a $2 stake. that may sound great but again the numbers are very large and you would need to play a lot to get that. i have heard people managed to calculate the rake at 5% from all price allocations.

let me explain now the more hands and more players there are in any form of sit and go the bigger the possible edge that can be had. this is simply due to more opportunity. generally speaking 4% roi for 6 max hypers is very hard to achieve but can be achieved at the micros generally speaking rake is 5-7% depending on stake level on stars.

by the time you get to the top levels 2% is phenomenal infact the vast majority of grinders or pros there are negative rois before rakeback or vip program thats with a rake of under 4% its just over 3.5% at the $100 games.

if we reduce it to 3 players this edge dissipates rather quickly. 5% is huge rake for a 3player hyper turbo. in fact i highly doubt its beatable at all. if the worlds best was to play against fish at the micros for these though i wonder why they ever would, they would probably struggle to beat the rake. i dont think its doable.

now some you may talk about heads up hyper turbos go check the rake there i just did the very bottom stake 1.50 is 4% the next 15s is 2% and 30 is 1.5%
with the very top stake charging 1.1%. this is because if they put the figure at 5% unless you were constantly playing total idiots youd never beat the rake.

the whole point of poker the thing that seperates it from other forms of gambling is the fact if you put the work in you really can make money from it you really can profit. so many sites claim to sell the secret to beat roulette anyone with a basic understanding of maths though knows this is literally impossible there's only one way to beat roulette and thats get lucky.

when people talk about poker as if its in the same class as roulette i argue with them however i wont be able to if main stream poker becomes jackpot sit and goes.

simply put it would be near impossible to make a living from jack pot sit and goes. if the play is seriously fishy you might be able to average a few cents a game, but you wont see that profit until you have run literally 1000s of $ in the red and finally catch your break. further youd need to do it full time to make it realistic to catch your break within a 5 year period.

further still your annual income if you did this would be worse then the average wage in Uganda note i have not looked up the average wage for Uganda but simply substitute Uganda for any third world country and your probably on the track for working out what your average wage is just take there's.

I have tried to explain this to the poker community and no one seems to grasp it or care. assuming the games offered continue to be offered and continue to run the an income should still be attainable due to efficient market hypothesis. however if those games are eliminated and replaced by jackpot sit and goes and the likes no income will be attainable online poker will become tantamount to scratch cards.

there is a big threat with monopolies been created the fact is poker stars has been the biggest site for some time however they had the rival full tilt then black Friday happened and then poker stars bought out full tilt. now the company that owns on game has bought out poker stars and full tilt. this means 3 of the biggest networks poker stars ongame and full tilt are all owned by the same company. thats scary it leaves the only competition of ipoker and party poker and it may only be a matter of time before they get absorbed too. there is no protection for the consumers against such monopolies. it means poker stars the poker sites can do whatever they like since they have no legitimate competition they have a monopoly. thus its reaching a situation that if poker stars were to only do jack pot sit and goes or something similar no one could stop them.

this is a major issue that many people are currently missing.

I mean, poker isn't like financial markets as you can't short poker, nor can you really compare popularity to stocks. I mean poker has an entertainment value which immediately gives it a positive expectation of playing at equb, whether that is less or more than now idk

duggs said:

I mean, poker isn't like financial markets as you can't short poker, nor can you really compare popularity to stocks. I mean poker has an entertainment value which immediately gives it a positive expectation of playing at equb, whether that is less or more than now idk

Click to expand...

this is definitely true also people play online bingo and theirs no salary expected from that. however for people to play seriously and put in the work there has to be a proper incentive otherwise few will. there will always be a few who will no matter what but thats the exception. the fact is regs will diminish or increase depending on how hard and soft the games get.

I'm deffinately a casual player. After my return to poker I have decided up to this point not to invest any of my own money, rather try and win some and build a small bankroll from freerolls.
So I suppose your question doesn't apply to me. I do think though that many of the concepts written in the poker books no longer have any value for the addrenalin monkey who just play any two cards to see the flop giving no regard to position, at least in tourney play that is at the lower stakes.

Martinez said:

I'm deffinately a casual player. After my return to poker I have decided up to this point not to invest any of my own money, rather try and win some and build a small bankroll from freerolls.
So I suppose your question doesn't apply to me. I do think though that many of the concepts written in the poker books no longer have any value for the addrenalin monkey who just play any two cards to see the flop giving no regard to position, at least in tourney play that is at the lower stakes.

Click to expand...

depends what sort of concepts your talking about, ive played games like this before the way to beat these games is annoying but, simply ABC tight poker and bluff rarely if ever.

that works but yeah it can be frustrating. I assume your referring to things like range merging and sophisticated bluffs/semi bluffs. these concepts can and do still work against more serious players, however the game is always evolving and what worked yesterday may not work so well today.

LukeSilver said:

this is definitely true also people play online bingo and theirs no salary expected from that. however for people to play seriously and put in the work there has to be a proper incentive otherwise few will. there will always be a few who will no matter what but thats the exception. the fact is regs will diminish or increase depending on how hard and soft the games get.

Click to expand...

But the inability to short in poker pretty much ruins the perfect markets comparison,

i hear you druggs but efficient market hypothesis would happen to some extent a significant extent in the financial markets with or without this. although it does increase it drastically.

perhaps staking players or buying pieces of other players action could be considered similar perhaps if there was also the ability for players to bet against your action eg some sort of reverse staking deal then it would have all of this.

but lets not derail the main point. I think most people get the general concept i was getting at.

I agree it has gotten tougher and will only get worse as people actually learn the game.
I play less now than I have in 5 years, just so hard to get a decent hourly return, and in US, even harder to get your money.

To overcome the rake in say a 6 seat double-up(don, whatever) you have to be better than 4 of the six people to make a profit...usually there are 2 gamblers and 4 other players of similar skill....really hard to make it worthwhile.

Seems I am usually better than 1, luckier than 1, and bubble.

ev and forum games seem to be drying up also....far as I know, cc the only forum left when I used to play 4 forum games a night.

whole situation very depressing....maybe the stock market is the new poker.

LukeSilver said:

i hear you druggs but efficient market hypothesis would happen to some extent a significant extent in the financial markets with or without this. although it does increase it drastically.

perhaps staking players or buying pieces of other players action could be considered similar perhaps if there was also the ability for players to bet against your action eg some sort of reverse staking deal then it would have all of this.

but lets not derail the main point. I think most people get the general concept i was getting at.

Click to expand...

Ie bank of timex. Other crucial element is immediate adjustments in values where as in poker there are rigidities and search costs

duggs said:

Ie bank of timex. Other crucial element is immediate adjustments in values where as in poker there are rigidities and search costs

Click to expand...

ok druggs i concede poker is not exactly the same as the stock market. my point was there are similarities.