Hey all,

Sorry about the lack of updates. On the one hand I find it flattering that 200k people have read this ridiculous blog, and on the other I find that a bit terrifying. People seem to like it though and I find having an audience makes me more excited to write things down, and makes me think more clearly.

As far as poker is concerned, I just started back as of January 2nd after about 25 days with no poker. No particularly great reason for it, just a combination of downswinging and wanting to be completely free to spend time with family/friends over the holidays and then some nagging finals from school. Not much to say about my personal life, most blogs I've read involving people's personal life are either fun to ridicule from behind the safety of your screen or just mind numbingly mundane and boring. Also, you won't find me flying to exotic locales or having threesomes with Thai Ladyboys, mostly I just live like a college student and gamble for a bazillions of dollars while i sit in my boxers which is pretty damn fine. I think. Poker-wise, I'm still getting destroyed but feel very good about my game, I've been plugging some leaks I didn't really know I had which is always a good feeling. I'll save 2011 goals for another time, but the immediate goal for January is to win some flips from Urubu who is paying me 2%/pop to do 25k flips with him. Good hourly imho.

Ok, so preface to the X-post. A recent thread was put up on 2p2 called "Getting sites to improve their hu policies". I spent the last two nights after my poker sessions making long posts in the thread which I think are kinda interesting and I'm curious if you guys agree or disagree with me. So here are my two posts in the thread:

1. I'm really sleepy, but here's kind of a convoluted argument I think might be right or kinda right.. If nothing else it's original.

Answer: The problem lies in the sites' decision to offer too many options to the casual player, as well as with the sites' refusal to cut down on the number of +ev lowrisk bumhunting options available to pros. The end result of which is less amateur players, which is worse for everyone. There need to be less games, lower stakes, more action, less waiting.

Here's why
First, I just want to compare an online cardroom to a brick and mortar room. One obvious difference is just that the online room does not have to conserve resources in the same way as the b&m room, which allows the online room to spread basically infinite numbers of poker variations. e.g. nl 20-50bb fast tables, an entire A-5 lowball lobby with 14 stakes and no players, etc. At first, this freedom seemed to me to be a huge advantage for the online room, which could cater to what everyone said they wanted all at once. "If we can give everyone what they said they want in a poker game, then the most people will play poker at our sight." This seems pretty plausible, especially when it's nearly free to implement, but I think it is actually hurting online rooms like stars and ftp.

The different thing about a b&m room is that I've found there is at least a tacit and maybe explicit (after all I play pretty much all online so I don't really know) agreement between the regulars and the cardroom managers. The regulars of course aren't prop players exactly, but it benefits the cardroom that they play everyday. They tip the floorpeople, but not all that much, and of course the regulars make the fish go broke faster. But really what happens is that everyone works together with a wink and a nod for the most part, and fun games form which fish know how to play and want to play. Even when no fish are playing at the moment, usually something is running, so that if a fish walks in the room the door is open and a game is waiting. Achieving this sort of atmosphere requires a good bit of altruistic action on the part of both the managers and the regulars, but the net result is that it benefits everyone and keeps the room running.
Obviously, there are exceptions to this sort of picture. It's just what I've observed at Turning Stone (when the room was healthy) and at Commerce and at Bellagio. I think a lot of this cooperation is the result of face to face interaction and a relatively small manager-player pool. The rest is because resources are expensive/scarce. Dealers have to be paid, rake is high shorthanded, there are only a finite number of physical tables therefore regulars/managers need to agree on a (relatively small) number of games/stakes to be run. This kind of collective action seems kind of second nature to old live players, if I understand them correctly.

Back to online poker...

The cardroom type atmosphere, which I think is really great at getting fish to play and keep playing, doesn't really exist in online poker right now. e.g. the cluttered lobbies, instantly breaking games, constant empty tables, pros drooling over fish in chat etc. I say the online room needs to try to imitate the casino a bit more, except online, there isn't any face to face everyday interaction between any of the parts of the cardroom/regs/fish, so they need to do something a bit differently. I think, maybe counter intuitively, that the rooms need to drastically cut down on the number of possible games available at high stakes where the player pool and accompanying fish pond is so small. Like, maybe, 3 or 4 hu tables at 25/50 (empty or with one person sitting, respawning when there is action), 2 or 3 6max tables and a couple full ring tables. Also, the sites need to have people actively managing the cardroom and having a dialogue with the regulars, so that there is the appearance of constant action on the site at all stakes and the fish sees people playing poker and money flying around, not 195 pros waiting in line frothing to take his money. The best example of this kind of cardroom management online was at Party Poker back in the day where there were tons of pros rolled to play higher than 10/20 and 25/50 and chase the fish had games been available, but everyone was sort of forced into the same box and had to play 10/20 together since Party wouldn't open up more games. I think this is especially true now at the 5/10 to 50/100 level where the number of regulars just dwarfs the number of fish, especially hu. All the nosebleed action on FTP definitely is good for the game overall which is a key exception to this rule, although at 500/1k there really aren't too many regulars and the regulars aren't afraid to play each other (Ivey, Durrr, Antonius) which is kind of insane but totally awesome. The sites need to look at the fish pool and regular pool for each stake and decide what games/how many games to offer and how to incentivize regulars to play in such a way that fish want to play, since the regulars have shown that they aren't going to do it themselves and will mostly try to maximize their own personal EV (and minimize their risk) at each moment, even while making -EV cooperative decisions for the future of their cardroom/player pool/stake.




Here's a response by 'Roulette Grinder'

Very good post by sauce123. I am also someone that believes the success of party back in the day was not just due to more fish/lack of ptr. It was also due to limiting the # of tables/stakes (something the OP is also fighting for).

The solution is for FTP/stars to do analytics. I am someone very familiar with analytics and I think that ftp/stars need to seriously consider doing some. Here is an example: a range of stakes (say 2/4-5/10) should have tables capped (or implement what OP suggested) for a decent length of time (at least 1 month). They could then do analysis on the total rake generated, comparing vs. the moving average of previous months (obviously making seasonal adjustments and also analyzing other stakes to account for any idiosyncratic events during the test period). I believe that there would be very little downside risk i.e. i think worst case scenario they will lose out on a little bit of rake (how often does 10+ HU games run on a given stake?) and they run a very low risk of annoying any rake-generating players (fish). On the other hand, the up-side is very large. If they can simply increase rake by 10-20% (I'd expect a much larger bump) the bottom line for them is huge.

As an example, I'm a recreational player that used to play HU a decent amount until the games became a clusterf____. I'd be playing 2-3x as much if i knew i'd get instant action HU. On FTP, I'm so turned off by the HU lobby that I went from quickly looking for action to removing HU as a favorite (so it's not visible).




Here's my attempt to respond to roulette grinder and sum up my first post in a less long winded and unclear way:

3. Agree w/ roulettegrinder. One thing I was trying to get across in my post is that the sites seem to be operating on the model of 'spend $$$ advertising + make pseudo-celebrity pros + give everyone what they want all at once for games/stakes etc'. Some of their innovations are definitely great for poker- like Rush Poker and Stars' Home Game feature. Other things maybe not- and there doesn't appear to be much analysis going on from the sites' end to try and figure out what the optimal mixture of games/stakes/variations is to create the largest player base and most hands over the long term.

I tried to draw a comparison between online vs B&M poker to show how more options may not (and probably isn't in practice) always be better. I also tried to show that because of the huge population of isolated online pros we are all in sort of a prisoner's dilemma sort of situation where pursuing our most +EV game selection decisions individually might hurt the health of the games a ton over the long term. Since we have shown ourselves as a population to be totally incapable of cooperative action, it would sure be nice if the sites could take some steps to husband their rooms- and keep the fish happy/playing.

The sites have so much information at their disposal as well. Roulettegrinder suggested they do analytics. Here's a good and really fun example of analytics done on a population online: http://blog.okcupid.com/
It doesn't seem that hard to analyze all the date they keep effectively- for example to find out if there is a correlation between cluttered hu lobbies and frequency of fish playing the games they could just graph frequency of one-tablers playing hu vs # hu tables empty in the lobby over time. I spose they would have to control for time period somehow to make that accurate, but that doesn't seem too difficult.

As far as the actual hu situation I think the combination of public King of the Hill (like SnGs) combined with the feature to create private hu tables would solve the problem quickly. The amateur can then a) Play the a$$hole internet kid who has been sucking out on him all night if he wants (in an agreed on private game) b) Play his friend amateur2 and c) jump into a hu game if he wants to play hu via KoTH. I think that covers just about everything he would want to do...
This would also solve the cluttered lobbies because there would only be 0-3 tables open at any time with one player sitting and it would give some incentive for regulars to battle each other hu- the regular who wins owns the rights to sit alone at KoTH for his stake and get all the action from the amateur who wants quick game or who wants to test himself against the king. And then if 2 regulars want to play they can of course make a private table as well...
This also would eliminate all of the deception/ickiness of name changes or some other fix...





So yea, do you guys think the combination of KoTH + private hu tables would be a good fix? Pretty much the only group that it would hurt are the bumhunters. The net result would also likely be to direct quite a bit more traffic to the 6max games as well which might be a good thing. Also, I mean, it would hurt me a bit too since I'm certainly not willing to play the very best regulars at some of the stakes I sit (200/400+).

Gl all,

Ben