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The Vale of Money
May. 6th, 2007 09:54 amSo, there's a post on 2+2 in the Internet Gambling thread. "Is Party Full Ring Now Tighter Than Stars?".
Obviously this now refers to NL, since limit is clearly going the way of 7-card stud.
This generates a few of the usual egg responses such as "Play 6-max, lol", but a couple of others observed that the $200 buy-in games on Party now had about 9 regulars at every table, with most people multi-tabling and a whole raft of short-stack Germans. (I wonder if the discussion had the same tone on the German language part of 2+2? I suspect not.)
Anyhoo, Stigmata ends the thread with "you can just run over these nits by playing a gear faster than they are".
Well, darn it, the man has blown my secret. The way to beat the nit-fests on a wet afternoon was, for years, just to play a gear faster than them. This meant that you won a lot of small uncontested pots while they waited to win one big one. The downside to this was that it was as boring as hell.
And therein lies the problem. I hate to throw national characteristics around, but it seems to me when I have played these young mainland Europeans that they do not get bored sitting with a short stack, for hours, waiting for the right situation. (One reason that I don't want to throw national characteristics around is that I can think of two other players - Felicia and David Spanier - who played similarly.)
Most of these posters, however, DO get bored. Although they say to themselves that they are playing poker to win lots of money, the element of "job satisfaction" has to remain. And most poker players, even the 2+2ers, like to win big pots and lots of money in loose-action games. They don't want to "run over" multi-tabling rocks for small sums of money, frequently. Even if this method of winning actually has a lower volatility and a fairly similar win rate.
Why is this? After all, the lower your volatility, the better. I suspect that it's partly self-deception. If you are running at $12 an hour, with a variance of only a few bucks up or down, then it's hard to deny that your rate is in the region of $12 an hour.
However, if you are running at $12 an hour, but this ranges from wins of $500 an hour to losses of $450 an hour, you can 'fool' yourself that your "real" rate is in the region of more than $100 an hour, but you have just been unlucky. In other words, a loose-action game helps the small-time winners, as well as the small-time losers, fool themselves.
It's interesting to see how the (non-US) 2+2ers react to this trend on Party. Margaret Thatcher, who was a better chemist and politician than she was an economist, took a "classical economics" line in her early days. She saw the state as if it were a household, and assumed that if the state acted prudently in hard times (as a household does), then things would be fine.
Now, it doesn't take much of a brain to see the flaw in the argument here. There are millions of households in the UK, but only one state. What's right for one household amongst millions is not right for one state among, er, one.
But, I digress. The classical view is that, as poker becomes less attractive, people will "voluntarily withdraw from the market", thus restoring some kind of stasis. Unfortunately, what happens in real life is the same as what happens in poker. Some people go elsewhere for their money, while others react by working for longer hours in an attempt to generate the same amount of cash.
Part of this is, once again, the job satisfaction aspect. How much do you dislike your job? I don't know anyone who does a job that they literally can't bear the thought of doing. Everyone, in other words, gets some kind of job satisfaction. For those for whom poker is less of a chore, the more they are willing to work for lower wages. For those who are unemployable elsewhere (they don't enjoy poker so much, but they would enjoy anything else even less) there is greater grumbling, but the principle remains.
Others, meanwhile, leave, back to world of advertising, or whatever. They act in the mould of true classical economics.
++++++++
I've been dabbling in the $50NL games a bit since I got back, mainly because limit games are getting harder to find. Even at this low level (and it is definitely lower than $2-$4 limit) there are tables of serious tightness abounding. And I love it. It's a bit like playing in a tight limit game, except that you have to raise to three times the BB rather than 2 times.
Often you take down the blinds. Sometimes there is a defence and you take it down on the flop. At limit, all of this had become a struggle, because people knew what was going on. You would get three-bet by players on the button with very thin values (say, a pair of fives). While big blinds would defend more often, leading out on flops such as Jxx, check-raising rag flops, or just calling you down to the end with any pair.
At $50 NL, the players just don't know about this kind of stuff (and they don't know to take each bet as it comes. They just look at how big a stack you have sitting behind the first bet). Now, the rakeback by comparison is dreadful, and the bonus dollars on UB are now a lost cause, but if I am just focusing on an hourly rate at the table, rather than bonus-whoring, certain sites are offering some very attractive $50NL tables and could, I suspect, be offering attractive $100NL tables. I would think that $200NL would be about the equivalent of the average $2-$4 limit skill level at the moment.
I'll try to get in a few thousand hands at the lower levels first, just to get an estimate of the volatility, and to get the hang of the game.
Here's a couple of hands where I didn't really know what I was doing.
( hand histories )
Obviously this now refers to NL, since limit is clearly going the way of 7-card stud.
This generates a few of the usual egg responses such as "Play 6-max, lol", but a couple of others observed that the $200 buy-in games on Party now had about 9 regulars at every table, with most people multi-tabling and a whole raft of short-stack Germans. (I wonder if the discussion had the same tone on the German language part of 2+2? I suspect not.)
Anyhoo, Stigmata ends the thread with "you can just run over these nits by playing a gear faster than they are".
Well, darn it, the man has blown my secret. The way to beat the nit-fests on a wet afternoon was, for years, just to play a gear faster than them. This meant that you won a lot of small uncontested pots while they waited to win one big one. The downside to this was that it was as boring as hell.
And therein lies the problem. I hate to throw national characteristics around, but it seems to me when I have played these young mainland Europeans that they do not get bored sitting with a short stack, for hours, waiting for the right situation. (One reason that I don't want to throw national characteristics around is that I can think of two other players - Felicia and David Spanier - who played similarly.)
Most of these posters, however, DO get bored. Although they say to themselves that they are playing poker to win lots of money, the element of "job satisfaction" has to remain. And most poker players, even the 2+2ers, like to win big pots and lots of money in loose-action games. They don't want to "run over" multi-tabling rocks for small sums of money, frequently. Even if this method of winning actually has a lower volatility and a fairly similar win rate.
Why is this? After all, the lower your volatility, the better. I suspect that it's partly self-deception. If you are running at $12 an hour, with a variance of only a few bucks up or down, then it's hard to deny that your rate is in the region of $12 an hour.
However, if you are running at $12 an hour, but this ranges from wins of $500 an hour to losses of $450 an hour, you can 'fool' yourself that your "real" rate is in the region of more than $100 an hour, but you have just been unlucky. In other words, a loose-action game helps the small-time winners, as well as the small-time losers, fool themselves.
It's interesting to see how the (non-US) 2+2ers react to this trend on Party. Margaret Thatcher, who was a better chemist and politician than she was an economist, took a "classical economics" line in her early days. She saw the state as if it were a household, and assumed that if the state acted prudently in hard times (as a household does), then things would be fine.
Now, it doesn't take much of a brain to see the flaw in the argument here. There are millions of households in the UK, but only one state. What's right for one household amongst millions is not right for one state among, er, one.
But, I digress. The classical view is that, as poker becomes less attractive, people will "voluntarily withdraw from the market", thus restoring some kind of stasis. Unfortunately, what happens in real life is the same as what happens in poker. Some people go elsewhere for their money, while others react by working for longer hours in an attempt to generate the same amount of cash.
Part of this is, once again, the job satisfaction aspect. How much do you dislike your job? I don't know anyone who does a job that they literally can't bear the thought of doing. Everyone, in other words, gets some kind of job satisfaction. For those for whom poker is less of a chore, the more they are willing to work for lower wages. For those who are unemployable elsewhere (they don't enjoy poker so much, but they would enjoy anything else even less) there is greater grumbling, but the principle remains.
Others, meanwhile, leave, back to world of advertising, or whatever. They act in the mould of true classical economics.
++++++++
I've been dabbling in the $50NL games a bit since I got back, mainly because limit games are getting harder to find. Even at this low level (and it is definitely lower than $2-$4 limit) there are tables of serious tightness abounding. And I love it. It's a bit like playing in a tight limit game, except that you have to raise to three times the BB rather than 2 times.
Often you take down the blinds. Sometimes there is a defence and you take it down on the flop. At limit, all of this had become a struggle, because people knew what was going on. You would get three-bet by players on the button with very thin values (say, a pair of fives). While big blinds would defend more often, leading out on flops such as Jxx, check-raising rag flops, or just calling you down to the end with any pair.
At $50 NL, the players just don't know about this kind of stuff (and they don't know to take each bet as it comes. They just look at how big a stack you have sitting behind the first bet). Now, the rakeback by comparison is dreadful, and the bonus dollars on UB are now a lost cause, but if I am just focusing on an hourly rate at the table, rather than bonus-whoring, certain sites are offering some very attractive $50NL tables and could, I suspect, be offering attractive $100NL tables. I would think that $200NL would be about the equivalent of the average $2-$4 limit skill level at the moment.
I'll try to get in a few thousand hands at the lower levels first, just to get an estimate of the volatility, and to get the hang of the game.
Here's a couple of hands where I didn't really know what I was doing.
( hand histories )
