How difficult are the high stakes really?

OK I was thinking about this, and wondered how the level of skill changes in the high stakes.

Obviously as you go up through the micro stakes, low stakes, medium stakes etc.. the skill is higher at each level, and players either adjust or go broke.

What I was thinking is, with most things, the ammount of extra skill required to go up a level is usually less than the previous jump. It does require you to have mastered the previous level!! but if you were to plot it on a graph you would expect the learning curve to be steapest at the bottom and to gradually taper off as the level gets higher.

Now everyone reaches their own platea and not everyone is able to go to the next level.

Ok

So when you get to say $1000 NL or $10,000 NL, do you essentially get to a point where it dosnt really matter what the stakes are. If someone opened a $1000,000 NL game would it essentially be a $10,000 NL game with more cash on the table?

I hope what im asking makes sense.

The highest online stakes (500/1000) are clearly much more challenging then say 25/50.

Much of the time the top players will not sit down with other players at the same level, unless there is a fish that the whole table can eat.

Thats basically how guy laliberte funded the higher games and dropped over 10 million there.

So essentially yes, they are so challenging that they require a donator at the table to get action going as the top players dont wish to swap money with each other all day.

I think the biggest thing with moving up in limits is to understand the people that are playing those limits. I think you are basically right in your learning curve graph idea. The difference between having a good understanding of a game, and not knowing the ranking of hands will make the learning curve look like you have suggested.

The hard part about moving up in ranks, is that you have fewer and fewer people that don't know what they are doing. Lets take a typical 1/2NL game at any random casino. Out of the 10 people at the table there are usually 3 or 4 guys that are "good". The rest of the table are usually "not good" (for what ever reason that may be). At the 2/5 generally you now have 5-7 "good" players and fewer donks. At a 5/10 there will be fewer donks and so on.

As you move up in limits there are fewer and fewer people making the bad decisions that are prevalent in lower limits. Because poker is a zero-sum game, people benifit directly from others poor decisions. Because there are fewer of these poor decisions being made at higher limits, it is harder for the average player to benifit from them. Its not to say that there are no fish at high limits, there are, but they are in much less of a concentration than at lower limits. So the people that regularly play higher limits must have better game selection. They need to pick their games more carefully and try to keep themselves playing at a table where they can succeed. Game seleciton is a huge factor in all games, but I beleive its importance is directly related to the stakes. As you go up in stakes, the game selection has to get better or you will have a very hard time succeding.

I'm not following

What Im asking here is there a point where near maximum skill is achieved. Such that a player going to the next level is faced with opponents who are only nominally better than than his current level. And if so, at what stakes does this occur?

Yeah this is basically what I was getting at

It is the same game with different numbers. Of course the skill level changes, but I do not believe in levels. I think that poker skill is determined by the individual and not the stakes.

afaik, it's the exact opposite. getting to the next level is harder and harder as you move up. Any type of environment/sport that is organized with a pyramid of levels with less and less players as you move up means moving up gets harder and harder.

It may not look like that as what you need to learn to move up levels is mostly refining details of your game and not the big basics of the lower levels, but refining those details requires a lot more time and skills than getting the basics right.

Basically how I see it is that at the lower limits, so many people are there "just for fun", they're fish and don't care that they are, it's just a few bucks.
As the levels increase, the amount of people playing "just for fun" isn't quite as large, and the fish decrease.

true, but that's not the main effect. You do find fishes at all levels. And as you move up, the rake is lower and lower, so technically even if there's only one fish at high enough staked table, the regs could still all be making a profit, while at lower stakes you need more fishes to pay for both the rake and the profits of the regs. So in that sense, there would still be plenty of opportunities to move up easily for regs.

What happens, though, is that as you move up the regs are getting better and better. A lot better.

You are right that each level is harder and harder to achieve as it is a refinement of skill. This means that there is less new skill in each level, which was the point that I was making, thus the learning curve is steapest at the bottom and at some point levels out so it rises less and less on each level.

If it were the opposite of what I was saying then the curve would be exponentially rising. Since all endevors are limited by human ability I doubt that anything relating to a human activity could display this pattern as it is a curve that rappidly becomes pratically vertical very quickly. Since there is a finite limit to human ability, I would doubt the extra skill at each level would tend towards infinity so rapidly.

I'm sorry but you make no sense whatsoever. How do you quantify extra skill other than by the amount of work it requires?

The reason I described it in the was I did was I was thinking.. at what point does the next level of refinement not give you much of an edge. i.e player A and B are playing at high stakes. Player B is better than player a by 0.01 BB/100. Player A and B both able to jump into any higher stakes game as their BB/100 drops only very slightly for any higher level as they are at the top of the game.

Or to put it yet another way what is the lowest stakes you would expect to see players like this playing at?
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I have no idea. It was just a theoretical discussion. How do you quantify intellect; is it directly linked to study?

I dont see that the skill is directly linked to the work put in though as this implies that anyone who is willing to do the work is also able to achieve the highest results. This is not usually the case.

To put it simply, people move up as long as they have an edge over the regs. They move down when the regs have an edge over them. They end up playing break-even against the other regs at their level and profiting from the fishes. Unless they're stupid and go busto at a higher level.

The edges i'm talking about are a lot bigger than 0.01 BB/100, so your question is irrelevant, imo.

Belgo

Do yo agree that the margioanl skill diminishes at each subsiquent level.

Im not reall interested in how difficult that skill is to achieve, im just looking at the skill displayed.

No, but even if you're super clever, you will need to put in a lot of work to beat the higher stakes. Being super clever is just the basic requirement. Hard work is what gets you to the top.

OK lets look at this another way.

are the regs basically of near equal ability?

No I don't. Because you do not define a relevant scale to measure skill.

Well I dont think that such a scale actually exists. For the purposes of this discussion we will have to assume that a make-believe one exists.

Yurika!!

I have got the simpilest way of asking the question that I was origionally posing.

What is the lowest level, you would expect, where the players (non-fish) wouldnt be overly worried if sy Doyal Brunson sat down at the table.

Doyal would be a better player than them, im sure, but the level is such that his extra ability dosnt give him much of an edge over those players. They all have a huge edge over the fish.

If he has an edge and is a better player than them does it matter what level they are at ?

If your talking about how many fish are at a table compared to regs. This maximises at about 400/600nl.

600nl has players from 400nl taking shots at it and 1knl players dropping down. 400nl has 200nl fishes taking shot but not many 600nl players dropping down because they usually are 1knl players anyway who play 600nl because there isnt enough 1knl tables open. if that makes sense, the ratio of regs to fish maximises at 400nl

It isnt exactly what I was asking, but the more I think about it, its probably the best answer possible.

As Belgo said, there isnt really a quantifiable scale to measure skill by, other than the stakes played for. I know the law of diminishing marginal returns will apply to poker skill, but have no way of actually relating that to the real world.

So the ratio of fish to regs is probably a better question to ask because its something that can be more easily observed.

So does that mean that 400 NL is the long term profit maximising level because players that play it well do so against a larger number of players whom they have a large advantage over?

well there is ~2/3 fish seats at a table I gather at 400nl then at 600+ 1 fish seat is normal if any tbh. Players from 1knl will also be playing 600nl and possibly some 6max just because they need more tables. So if your good enough to be playing 600nl you need to be good enough to play 1knl first because alot of the 1knl regs also play 600nl. If we are talking about FR not sure about 6max.
I should imagine about 400nl is where casual players can maximise profits if they are very good yeah.

Thats more what I was getting at in my origional question. Does that mean that a 1K nl player (a decent one of course) is good enough to play 2k NL. Obviously his bb/100 would be reduced but he wouldnt be considered a fish.

Im thinking here that there comes a level where even someone like Doyal dosnt have that much of an edge over the rest of the table to make playing at higher levels as profitable as playing at a lower limit.

I think Doyal might be a bad example here as fish may seek him out and play him just to say they have played Doyal Brunson. There are probably more than a single table's worth of these players in the world so Doyal plays tham at the highest stakes he can get a table's worth to sit down. But in this case the stakes do not directly represent skill, rather the cost of meeting Doyal Brunson.

tbh, even I wouldn't be worried if he sat at my table, at least as long as he wouldn't be sitting too close to my left.

One very good player sitting at a table does not remove that much from your edge at that table, especially when you play full ring.

IMO the difficult leval of high stakes isnt really all that different.
It is just the swings that are tough.
I have watched millions of high stakes games online,involving such people as zigmund,durrr,erilk lingren,and so on.
And have seen them call with middle pair on fourth street,granted these people are great players and have proved that,but I have seen them make alot of bad calls just like they were playing micro limit.
Again its just my opinion,but I think its just the money swings.

http://www.pokertableratings.com/overview/durrrr

http://www.pokertableratings.com/overview/omgclayaiken

I guess 7BB/100 is a good enough edge... no need for them to drop down limits...

What you say makes sense for the simplest forms of poker, like heads up limit holdem or turbo STTs, where the optimal unexploitable strategies are simple enough to be solved by game theory with the help of computer simulations. At a high enough level everybody would play unexploitably and nobody would have an edge.

Fortunately, deep stacked NLHE and PLO are a so complex that nobody really has a clue what the optimal unexploitable strategies would really be like, so there's always the possibility to find a new edge.

Just because you don't understand a call does not mean it's a bad call.

I do understand making calls.
But I dont think so much of it is about understanding calls,its about understanding your other players at the table.
And I think anyone who watches high stakes online,can agree there are quite a few BAD calls that happen,just like in the lo limt games.

I definately agree with you that the game is so complex that its unsolvable. Going off topic here.. there is a research group that has designed a computer simulator which now plays very good heads up poker. About 2 years ago it was considered tough but beatable, now its started to win quite a bit.

It dosnt yet do FR, just heads up. FR is a long way off.

I find this facinating, not because its a bot.. this research isnt being done to scam money from online poker. Rather, because poker is a game of imperfect infomation, this is seen as a modle for researching artificial intellegence as the machine has to make decisions based on imperfect infomation.

So one day when robots rule the world, we can actually say the game of poker was actually responsible for this!! LOL

Like I said FR is a long way off but its interesting that poker is being used in the developmen of AI

To be clear: a call is good when the pot odds you get are good enough given the equity of your hand versus the range of hands your opponent could have. You, as an observer, have no clue whatsoever about this range of hands as you don't ever play against these players. They, on the other hand, play each other continuously and can make very accurate guesstimates of these ranges.

Ergo, you judging the quality of a high stakes call is just ridiculous.

Heads up limit HE. No limit HE is still much to tough for computers.

I thought it was playing no-limit, but have just been looking at a couple of the hands played and it looks like limit. Most sources dont seem to say if its limit or NL but from the hands i think it is limit.

Yeah I guess NL will be the next hurdle. Though as you said its much harder than limit for a computer so I think we will all be safe for a decade or two!

EDIT: if anyone else is interested. Its called polaris

The Skill is higher. But a lot of it has to do with being able to withstand dry spells so you dont lose your ass.

At least for the small stakes I've heard that the biggest jumps are 25nl -> 50nl, 100 -> 200nl, 200 -> 400nl, and 600 -> 1knl.

Also I'm pretty sure the higher you go the bigger those jumps are. Like to go from 25 -> 50nl you just have to learn how to better exploit fish. When you go from 600 -> 1knl you have to be able to play very well against regs and really exploit the 1-2 fish at the table.

And lol at people saying because a HS player calls down with mid pair it's bad. People do these things called bluffs a bit more at those games and especially on drawy boards a lot of the time mid pair is ahead of the opponent's range. Who knows maybe it was a bad call, but first off it was probably very close, and second off, neither you, me, nor anyone else without all the history between the players is really qualified to judge on whether it was a good/bad call. Saying the call was bad because it was middle pair is pretty much level 0 thinking. The HS regs are thinking a bit higher than that .