zachvac
Legend
Silver Level
One other question Zachvac. Why do you constantly want to get into a dispute with me? How long have you been playing online and what are your results? Would be very interesting considering you seem to be an expert on many things.
I don't. I posted this topic originally, and you basically said I was wrong. I'm going to defend myself when this happens.
In terms of me personally playing, I've been playing online for a few years but only started winning last summer. I used to do the whole deposit $50 and sit with it all at 50nl thinking that online was filled with horrible donks and thinking I was good because I won at my home game. But one other kid (pretty much only good player at that game I played in) and I have since done a lot of reading, a lot of discussing, and then of course cardschat has helped me get better as well. I deposited $100 near the beginning of the year. Took a long time but I finally built it up to $500, then moved up to 25nl, slowly grinded up to about $850 before losing back down to $450. Took a break, re-evaluated my game, came back, and including cashing in the $2 million turbo takedown ($180 for a strictly FPP entry) I hit $1,000 about a week ago. I have since played at 50nl a little bit, nowhere near a large enough statistical sample, but I've won at 9+ (I think 9.11 but I'm on another computer, not mine that has PT on it) BB/100 over about 4k hands.
But this isn't even poker, I have a lot of experience in math and statistics. Some of it is courses in school but a lot of it is just outside reading for fun that I've done. It's amazing how much about math and statistics the average poker player doesn't understand, let alone the average person. An interesting book I read was "A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper" by John Allen Paulos (doing this from memory so that could be spelled wrong) which describes a lot of general principles about math and statistics that even major newspapers don't seem to understand. So sure there are a ton of people here who've played poker longer than me, and certainly more who've won longer than me, but hell there are plenty of winning players who just don't understand the mathematical concepts of poker such as variance, regression to the mean, etc.
It's possible to be good at poker without understanding the math behind it, but I'm of the school that if you're doing anything it's important to understand why and the concepts behind everything. If you're just doing anything a certain way because someone told you to, I don't think you can truly adapt or be as good at improvising or improving on the method as if you understand what you're doing and why. I'm not talking about poker here, I'm talking about everything. For example when adding, I know many people who were just taught "this is how you add". I was taught using visual representations of units, tens, etc. and we learned about number bases at the same time we learned to count (so we understood the concept of carrying and why we do it at 10, the fact that it could be 5 or 8 or 2, our system just uses 10). Same as with poker, I take it upon myself to understand why we do everything.
And this is why I don't think bots will ever be better than humans, because they can't do this. They can't learn and adapt and apply different concepts because all it knows is what's programmed in, it doesn't have a deeper understanding of anything. So sure you can be a successful player if you don't understand the concept of my OP, but that doesn't mean it's not right and it doesn't mean it's worthless. This advice is not just for the guy who sits in front of his computer for 5+ hours a day multi-tabling. If you are all serious about poker (this is a poker forum, I assume most people are), you will play enough poker in your lifetime to constitute close enough to the long run. Even if you just play a few hours a week one-tabling for 5 years, that's 100k hands. I've heard 10k as a good number for the long run. Sure it's possible to have a bad downswing that long, but not likely. And if you're only playing that long you don't need the money and it's not that bad if you lose. And if you do need the money in the short run, don't play poker. Poker is intrinsically about the long run. I realize you have won in the long run, and if other good players want to they can as well. But if they want to make some quick money, poker's just not the answer. I don't know what else to say.