Downsides

[peterbirks]

I don't think of myself as an overly pessimistic person. I know that many other people do, but I see myself more as a "prepare for the worst and hope for the best" kind of person. In a way, it's borne me pretty well over the years, although in the biggest game of all that is life it has probably made me a little bit too risk-averse. Women have another phrase for this -- they call it "petrified of commitment". The problem there was that I have seen so many people (men and women) declare one year how much in love with a person they are, how this is person "is my best friend as well as my partner" etc etc etc, only for them to split up 10 years later. Wow, you think to yourself, that was one fucking bad move.

But then perhaps this is a definition of pessimism. Because I know a number of other couples who haven't split up, who are still together after 20 years. They took the gamble, and they won.

Anyway, back to realism: Felicia posted this morning about Vegas and the tourney circuit. Half-way through came this:

The one constant theme with a lot of my friends is that they are running bad, running out of money, running out of steam and need sponsorship to keep playing. I was so, unbelievably hurt for them. Poker is changing. No longer is the top pro making a score out of every 50 tourneys or so. It's more like 500 these days, due to the fields literally going up 1000%.

To every one of them, I said that brighter days are ahead, sponsorship is coming, a big score is coming, things will turn around.

The thing is, if it's a constant theme (and, let's face it, there have been a fair number of players who ran well up to 2005 but who, as I warned, are finding things a lot tougher this year) might it not be the case that something fundamental has changed? In other words, might it not be the case that brighter days are not ahead. That the brighter days are, most definitely, behind?

Americans are, in the main, enviably optimistic and upbeat. It's one of the attributes in them that I can't help but admire. No matter how many times you beat 'em down, they remain convinced that, the next time, they will hit it big. I've met ex-executives serving sandwiches in a casino deli, perfectly happy to talk about losing their six-figure job and how they have plans to do this or do that.

However, although I admire this attribute, mainly because it's a good way to keep yourself sane, in many cases any dispassionate observer would see it for what it is -- self-deception on a grand scale.

The question is, how long should you go on deceiving yourself, and when should you accept reality? No, that isn't the question. The question is, at what point can you conclude rationally that, even though you might have been unlucky, the odds favour the conclusion that you are no longer a long-term winner?

Sklansky et al are, as usual, not much use here. They just say that you should constantly check your figures. If I look at my numbers for the past 12 months, I'm a long-term winner. If I look at them for the past three months, I'm a long-term marginal winner. If I do the same for the past eight weeks, I'm a break-even player, and if I do if tor the past five weeks, I'm a loser. Standard deviation saves the statisticians from the accusation that "well, basically, you are no fucking use at all, are you?"

Poker is a bit like golf. If you start tinkering with your swing, then all the other bits, which used to come naturally, suddenly start feeling strange. I read an interesting thread on 2+2 yesterday, mainly relating to how frequently you should continuation bet on the flop. However, I chose the wrong time to try to implement it -- in the middle of a downswing (neat extension of the golf analogy, huh?). All of a sudden I was floundering all over the place. Moves that were automatic (and you need a lot of automatic moves when you are multi-tabling) became "thinkers". I was a mess. Note to self, if you are going to tinker with your game, cut down on the number of tables that you play.

So, although I am 95% certain that "things will turn around", there remains the nagging 5% uncertainty. Perhaps Americans have that doubt as well, but they seem to think that admitting to its existence is a bad thing, that by denying its possibiility, they make its reality less likely. They hide it away. To the outside world, they are eternally optimistic. Until, eventually, reality cannot be denied. At this point some kinod of massive internal shift occurs, and they go off somewhere else, saying that "I decided that poker wasn't for me".

With reference to Russ Boyd, Paul Phillips wondered why Boyd stuck at poker, when he had screwed up so much and when there were so many other fields of endeavour available. I think that this says a lot more abbout Paul Phillips' attitude to poker (and to life) than it does about Russ Boyd. I don't have much (for which read, "any") sympathy for Russ Boyd, but I can understand why he can't just say "oh, I failed at that, I'll try something else". That's the kind of thing that the Phillips of the world do. relentlessly clever in a particular way, they succeed at one thing, get bored, succeed at something else, get bored, and so on. I can think of two others who have entered and (mainly left) the poker world in London who were like this -- Guy Bowles and Demis Hassabis.

But for people like Russ (and me), poker isn't a choice, it's in the blood. Even as we come to hate the very site and sight of the limit table, we know that we have to struggle on and maintain that possible fiction that the light will be at the end of the tunnel just as we turn the next corner.

We survive, battered, scarred, but, with that eternal phrase, "I'm still here".

Comments

[jellymillion.livejournal.com]

Even within poker, the Phillips/Boyd dichotomy (usage? sounds like the basis for a learned paper nonetheless) applies. The good tournament players still have the same EV edge, if not bigger, but the time it could take for them to realise it in $ terms has gone up massively. In the long term, they'll make more money. Trouble is, the long term might now require reincarnation.

So they need to adjust. I suppose they have to manage variance down, which means forgetting about lotteries like the Main Event. In their shoes with $10K of WSOP entry in my pocket, I think I'd be looking to play the small to medium buyin tournaments. That way I get five or size shots at a cash. If I have the same amount plus $10M in a Post Office Savings Account then what the hell, let's gamble!

Oh, and I'd be setting aside some of that bankroll for satellites. Reducing variance again. It might help if they can use a computer, too. I see Trumper's not too proud to go hunting for a cheap seat.

[ribmeister.livejournal.com]

Trumper is a fish though. He is one of the large quantity of players who thinks they can live the dream, but never actually win anything. They rely upon entering all the tournaments, getting their win (which makes them break even for the year), then claiming that win makes them a solid tournament player and that they should be sponsored because people care about them. The sponsorship is the only way to (realistically) make money on the tournament circuit.
Meanwhile, the real poker players sit down in cash games online each day and take home very real dollars (Did I mention i'm up $35,000 last month just from cash games online). Tournaments chew away at the soul, variance destroys players who bubble, causing them to doubt their ability to play the game.
Cash game players need only look at their balance every day to know if they are any good. Good tournament players may never win, whilst terrible players who do win, piss it all away within a year and never think they are bad (after all, they won a tournament so they must be great!)

[jellymillion.livejournal.com]

Well, yes. A talent for self-promotion can't exactly hurt one's prospects for non-bankroll entry fee acquisition.

$35K? Blimey. You could play a lot of tournaments with that, maybe win some real money. (g,d&r)

;)

[peterbirks.livejournal.com]

The obvious way to manage variance down is to collude. Except that they don't call it collusion, they call it "swapping a piece of each other". As far as I can see, if I am in a tournament and I am only 50% backing myself (financially) while I am backing five other players to the tune of 10% each, then financially I am playing a team game. In metagaming terms, it's collusion. In microgaming terms (in the sense that you play your best to win the tournament and do not softplay any of your partners) it is not. But the major point is the metagaming concept, not the microgaming concept. By reducing your variance through swapping an interest, you can play more riskily around the bubble.

Many of these guys are tournament players for sponsorship and for ego. Offer them medium buy-in tournies with a greater edge and no TV coverage, and see what response you get.

PJ

[peterbirks.livejournal.com]

Hi Ribbo.

In answer to your parenthesised question: Yes, you did mention it.

If you play massive low-variance games (and a lot of hands) I guess that you can measure how good you are at the end of the day, but my graph has show periods of flatness (or just a gently upward-sloping curve) lasting up to six months, followed by a couple of months of upward zoom. I think that the best that I can hope for in Limit Hold'em is to be able to measure how good I am at the end of the year.

But for the big MTTs, it's more like measuring how good you are at the end of the decade.

Oh god I hope Hellmuth doesn't win today, although I have a hunch that he will do. He will be unbearable.

Do you think that the players this year have got just good enough to be more easily beatable? Or have the top players adjusted to the new style of dead money? Certainly the "names" seem to be performing better at this year's WSOP than they did in 2005.

PJ

[ribmeister.livejournal.com]

I personally think the reason you say so many names are doing well, is that there are a HELLUVA lot of names these days...
And as each new person wins a bracelet, it adds to the list of names....

[peterbirks.livejournal.com]

This point did occur to me. We have "new names" and "old names", and it's actually the "new names" in the main that I am seeing (e.g., Neverwin). I think that these guys are far more likely to know how to rip up the Internet tained dead money. The old names are better at ripping up the live game trained dead money.

PJ

[ribmeister.livejournal.com]

Of course the real pisser is all the Americans who want to be a "pro". So those that do win have to pay taxes, now that's a huge rake to beat! Ewwwwwwww.

[jellymillion.livejournal.com]

Well, yes. A talent for self-promotion can't exactly hurt either.

Given that the industry wants faces (or at least I assume they do) to help the promotion and consequent fee-gathering and all the ancillary income that's generated, then they must either accept the means by which the established faces survive or create instant new faces (Main Event winners step forward).

I can see no way in which sharing one's action can be stopped, anyway. Hell, there's even LJ's own Team Donkey Patrol, which operates at the opposite end of the spectrum - I played the Stars Blogger Championship under that umbrella myself.

Long-term, the smart ones will get themselves diversified (Camp Hellmuth, HOH, DevilfishPoker for the first three that sprang to mind) in order to cash in any any notoriety that they've acquired. The not-so-smart ones will gradually disappear, to be replaced in turn by new not-so-smart ones.

Something like that.

Pessimist/Schmessimist

[geoffchall.livejournal.com]

"I see myself more as a "prepare for the worst and hope for the best" kind of person."

You're a pessimist otherwise you wouldn't see it like that. Julie (who is probably more pessimistic than you) says that she's a realist and I'm just a hopeless optimist.

Preparing and worrying about the worst is just such a waste of time and opportunity. If you make preparations for 10 bad things to happen to you and as a result you are prepared for the 1 bad thing that happens to you, then you've wasted time, money, anxiety etc on the bad things that didn't happen to you and your sole gain is preparedness for the shitty thing that did happen. So? The shitty thing still happened to you.

I actually have a theory (not backed up by any empirical evidence) that pessimists have bad luck and optimists have good luck. Julie says that he's pessimistic because bad things happen to her and that I'm optimistic because things work out for me. I genuinely do feel lucky (and I'm not so stupid as to start playing poker to try and prove it), but I think it's how my brain processes the events of life.

For me if 5 good things and 5 bad things happen to me, I absorb and accept the 5 bad things on a shit-happens basis and I 'notice' the 5 good things. For Julie (and you?) the opposite happens. The 5 good things are accepted as something won as a right and you notice the 5 bad things. Hence my perception of having good luck.

It's a relative of the 'post office queue syndrome' - where you always join the queue that actually turns out to be the one moving the slowest. This is crap. You just don't pay attention when your queue moves faster, you only notice when it's slower.

I'd guess that long-long-term you'll prove to be generally profitable as a gambler because you'll be sufficiently above average in skill to outweigh the effect of the rake. Interesting conundrum - obviously without a rake of any kind the median-skill player should break even. But where would you have to be to guarantee breaking even on a luck-ignored basis?

Re: Pessimist/Schmessimist

[peterbirks.livejournal.com]

To take your last question first, I assume you are asking, if rake is included, where would you have to be to break even? That's a tough one. The online poker sites seem to think that something like 95% to 97% of poker players "lose", but this might be misleading. For example, if you win at the "work" (say (cash games) and then spend it on the enjoyment of trying to win a WSOP seat, you might be a winner in your own mind, but a loser on the poker site's books.

Similarly, my own lists of players on pokertracker tends to have a fairly constant ratio of 40% of players winning and 60% of them losing. I'm not sure that this proves anything, either, as the sample size for each player is small.

+++++

The strange thing is, I have a rational attitude to things like post office queues and the like. I don't assume that I will be in the slowest queue and I do notice when I am in a quick queue. However, what I don't do is join the queue three minutes before my train is due to leave assuming that my queue will be the quickest. I allow for the fact that my queue might be the slowest. And that, my friend, is "preparing for the worst". Then, when the worst happens, the only shit that ensues is that I have to spend an extra few minutes in a train queue instead of sipping a Barrista's finest Americano Grande, rather than missing my train. By preparing for the worst, I mitigate the level of shit.

The difference, perhaps, is the extent to which I would see the hassle of, for example, as happened to Mr Harrington once, having to wait many hours for the next ferry to Ireland, as a serious or a minor irritant. For John (and, I guess, you), it would just be a matter of "so, we spend a few hours in Anglesey rather than a few hours in Ireland". For me it would be 12 hours of missed holiday in a Welsh town at the back-end of the universe where half the population don't even speak English.

But, if I was a pessimist, by your view I should have bad luck. But I don't. I think that preparing for the worst makes bad luck less likely to happen.

However, you make a good point that, by preparing for the worst I do put in what might be a lot of wasted effort trying to mitigate the ravages of chance. Suppose I arrive at the train station 20 minutes early (to allow for unforeseen disasters) a dozen times before anything actually happens. That means that I have "wasted" 240 minutes to compensate for avoiding the aggravation caused by missing a train. It's a trade-off. For me, that bit-by-bit "waste" is worth it for the benefit of not letting someone else down, missing an appointment, or whatever, the one time that something crops up to make me miss that train. But I can see why for other people it would not be worth it. Run everything close to the wire and, if shit happens, just get on with it despite the shit. It's a gambler's attitude and, as I have said many times, I am not a gambler.

Where I disagree with you is the line that, by preparing for the worst "you have wasted time, money and anxiety". Time, yes; money, perhaps, although preparedness more usually saves you cash; anxiety, definitely not. The one thing that preparing for the worst does is that it reduces anxiety. And that reduction in anxiety is probably the main driving force.

I don't think that you are lucky, Geoff, or an incorrigible optimist. I think you are someone who is prepared to accept life's randomness. Other people like me, for whetever reasons there might be in our past, are forever trying to control that randomness.

PJ

Re: Pessimist/Schmessimist

[peterbirks.livejournal.com]

I might also point out that joining a post office queue 3 minutes before your train is due to leave is unwise, even if that queue turns out to be the fastest.

"This is the post office, mate. Kings Cross station is over the road. But you won't catch your train now."

PJ

Re: Pessimist/Schmessimist

[geoffchall.livejournal.com]

Methinks I'm actually talking about Julie rather than you. For some people the action of preparing against bad things does not reduce their anxiety, but increases it. I don't think people who bolt doors, set burglar alarms and have the mace by their bedside feel any reduction in anxiety about their personal safety (er, this isn't Julie btw).

If you prepare for shit to happen it makes some people more concerned and thoughtful about it happening. If you just bury the thought then you'll have no anxiety.

One of my daughters told me once that they could tell me and Julie apart by the times we arrived at places. If they had to be picked up at 3pm then they would expect me there at 2.59/3.00 or 3.15. If it was Julie, they knew she'd be outside from 15 minutes beforehand.

Re: Pessimist/Schmessimist

[jellymillion.livejournal.com]

Suppose I arrive at the train station 20 minutes early (to allow for unforeseen disasters)

If you actually arrived 20 minutes early, then you've avoided all the disasters that might have delayed you. Except the next train's been cancelled, so you get to wait 50 minutes instead.

Re: Pessimist/Schmessimist

[jiggery-pokery.livejournal.com]

I think you would enjoy The Luck Factor, a book about which I have previously written (http://jiggery-pokery.livejournal.com/92688.html). It backs up your theory with some more thought; it provides an excellent and plausible rationale for optimism and the ways in which optimistic people tend to perceive themselves as being luckier, if only because they perceive any particular set of events to be lucky in a fashion that pessimstic people would interpret as having been unlucky.

Re: Pessimist/Schmessimist

[(Anonymous)]

There is something I can't understand in Felicia's view:

"No longer is the top pro making a score out of every 50 tourneys or so. It's more like 500 these days, due to the fields literally going up 1000%."

While it's obviously the case that it's harder to 'win' a competition when there are 10 times as many players, it's not clear to me why it's harder to make money. In most competitions about 9 to 11 per cent of the field gets paid. That's true whether there are 100 players or 6,000. So what's the difference? People tell me that the WSOP championship event is now a 'lottery' because of the field size and that it's so much harder than before, but it's now possible to win a million just for coming ninth, whereas in the mid 90s, being ninth got you about $70,000!

DY

Re: Pessimist/Schmessimist

[pb9617.livejournal.com]

So what's the difference?

They aren't cashing anymore :)

Re: Pessimist/Schmessimist

[felicialee1.livejournal.com]

Lots of these guys make the money all the time, but to cover expenses, oy! If they have sponsorship that covers their expenses, it's okay, but most don't.

For instance, Max came in 5th last year in a PLO event. He earned 69k. He said he gets a "salary" from WSEX, and basically gets about 10% of that to keep.

I'm sure you realize that the 10% would hardly cover his expenses up until that point in the series.

[pb9617.livejournal.com]

The thing is, if it's a constant theme (and, let's face it, there have been a fair number of players who ran well up to 2005 but who, as I warned, are finding things a lot tougher this year) might it not be the case that something fundamental has changed? In other words, might it not be the case that brighter days are not ahead. That the brighter days are, most definitely, behind?


Something fundamental has changed. They're getting slaughtered by better opponents. They try and enter every tournament so they can hit once deep run and tell everyone how great they are. The problem for these guys is that there are now more talented players under 25 than there were talented players period 3 years ago. Then they could beat up on the fish from Moneymaker, but now they're the fish, I don't care how big the name is.

The top 10 consistent tourney performers notwithstanding - Ivey, Hellmuth, et al.

[felicialee1.livejournal.com]

The reason I say brighter days are ahead is because these are players who succeed at cash games, for the most part.

Van Alstyne was grinding 80/160 HE the very day after his choke at the WPT final table at Bellagio. Took his lumps, got over it, back to grinding the next day.

Derei was sitting at 20/40 Stud 8 during the Commerce festival. 50/100 Stud Tuesday at Rio after busting the 5k NLHE, grinding up a 3k win to stay afloat.

I could go on and on. Yeah, the poker bubble is gonna burst, but these are scrappers, survivors, not duds who got one big hit and suddenly thought they were poker gods.

I, myself, am often accused of being very negative and a pessimist. Perhaps that is why I tend to get along better with Brits than Americans. I am more understood by them, in any case.

But the reason I assured them that things will work out, is because THEY make their own luck. They have resources to fall back on, unlike the 22 year old kid in 2004 who entered a tournament for the first time, won a bracelet, has never played a cash game in his life, doesn't even know there is a game called Razz, has played nothing but NLHE and decides that he can be taught nothing, can learn nothing more, and is the best player in the world. After all, he won, didn't he? He must be the best. He must be the greatest.

A few months later he is basically on the bread line. He has nothing to fall back on.