jonna102

Thank you P, and thank you also to David C, limpinski and Tom Chambers, for being civil and sharing a tempered and unbiased view. Especially also reStacks, who may have had less reason to speak up than the others. While I regrettably can't go back and change the past, I do appreciate the post.

These are the only posters who have had any contact with me in relation to the PLO Fundamentals courses.

These are my latest 500 or so stack-off situations. I had one slight slip-up, and you guys fall all over yourselves to snap post it in your desperate search for something to hate on.

I know players who rage tilt when they lose 10 stack-offs in a row. This graph shows my performance after being 80 BI behind EV over two weeks. Under those circumstances I can forgive myself if I make less than one mistake per 100 stack-offs.

I can go back several years and show a similar graph. There is just no foundation at all for the mindless hate that you guys are spreading. There is a word for posters who behave like that. It's really embarrassing to see so many of you have such disregard for source control.

Now let's see if you guys are prepared to back up your words with your own stack-off graphs that so obviously humble my results.

I don't handle the reviews myself personally, but as far as I'm aware every review that was entered in the shop has been posted. They are posted exactly as given by students, and all students have been offered the opportunity to give a review. No reviewer ever received discounts in exchange for the review, and nobody ever will.

This has gone way too far already. I am deeply opposed to this blind use of results as a metric of someone's skill in a game of chance. I am deeply opposed to the stake envy that is displayed in this thread. A good poker player knows immediately from talking to another whether they know what they're talking about or not. No results required. By continuously insisting on results graphs, all you do is prove that you don't belong in that category of players yourself. And yet, against better judgement I have still provided more than plenty of results graphs to disprove the accusations in the original post.

This will be the final results graph I post in this thread.

Before we further question my integrity, maybe we should also have a look at yours?

• You have posted a hate thread in my honor where you pretend to have information about my ability as a coach. But you actually have no experience with my coaching programs, do you? We actually have had no contact at all, have we, until you anonymously started spamming my inbox with "Why are you playing xx" messages?

• You claim to have evidence of me moving down in stakes, but you conveniently left out the times when I moved up in stakes. And you didn't consider that I've been jumping up and down, left and right between stakes and sites constantly all the time since I started playing PLO 5 years ago.

• You claim that I am an extremely mediocre player, pretending to have evidence of this, when in fact you have none at all.

• You accuse me of scamming new/beginner players, when in fact you have no evidence or even indication of this. You also claim to know what my students believe about me, and in fact you have no idea what they believe, do you?

• You present text fragments that you attribute to me, but you fail to mention that they have actually been altered and edited by yourself. They are not my quotes.

• You appeal to the public that my coaching programs should be discontinued because of the fake evidence that you have presented. If you indeed had a valid case against my business, would you not actually have taken some more appropriate action?

So in summary, you have posted a public hate thread with my name on it, falsely impersonating someone who actually has meaningful information, with the clearly stated intent to severely damage my business, when in fact you have no case against it at all, and the evidence you refer to is completely made up.

In this light, I believe I have been about as forthcoming as I can be expected to be. If you want to demand anything else from me, maybe you should clean up your own act first?

I think a tribbles vs trilobites gif thread should receive higher priority.

That's exactly it, as explained above. It was also around the time when we started another iteration of courses with twice as many groups as before.

I skipped the EV line in the other graphs because it didn't add any useful information and cluttered up the graph. (I consider EV adjusted winnings to be a close to useless metric anyway.) It mostly followed the green line, and ended at around 6 bb/100 as well. During the 250k hand sample, there were swings from being 46 BI behind to being 12 BI ahead, and back, but that's just business as usual with PLO.

The 20 BI difference for 500z is also completely normal, and not something I'm particularly concerned about. It just happened to be at the wrong time.

Let me also state clearly, for the record, that these products are entirely separate from Run It Once. This is also why I've kept a low profile about these products in the forums. They have been mentioned occasionally, but not much. And I cleared this with the site beforehand.

My role as a moderator for the PLO forums is really nothing much other than being a normal member keeping an eye on the forums. I get no compensation from RIO for it (other than access to the site) and my skills as a poker player have not been reviewed for this role.

With the graphs out of the way... mediocre micros player? Anyone can have a crazy run over a small hand sample, but for it to happen consistently over 250k hands that is fairly unlikely. I think I deserve credit for being a good player. It should give anyone the confidence that I'm not going to give advice that is entirely wrong. But ultimately I'm much more a poker theorist than player. I'm ok as a player, but my real skill set is in poker math and computation. But I've also never claimed anything else.

Concerning the pricing of the courses:

The Basic course is priced at €800. It includes a total of 24 coaching sessions, 12 theory and 12 practical sessions. I frequently bring high stakes players as guests to the practical sessions at no extra cost for the students. There is also fairly extensive homework every week, plus a chat room where students can discuss hands among each other, and I'm also available in the chat to answer questions. I also have optional live play videos available to students who want them. If you just count the cost per sessions it's around €33, which is really as low as you could possibly expect for the kind of attention that you get as a student in this course.

The Advanced course is priced at €2400. The theory and practical session setup is the same, as is the homework (though it is more sophisticated). For this course I haven't been providing live play videos, but I'm looking into doing that for the next iteration that starts early September. This course covers PLO range construction, plus some related thing like review of range interaction on every flop texture, and some minor game theory content, and includes material that is not fully available anywhere else to my knowledge. The price ends up being higher, but we're also talking about theory content that is much more exclusive. And still, if you split it into session costs, it's still only €100 per session, and the sessions frequently last 90 minutes or more.

The Elite course is of course the flagship product, and is listed at €9600. It's an applied game theory course for PLO. It targets at a very small group of high stakes players (essentially 25/50+), but aims to lift the level of game theory sophistication for PLO to similar levels to what we see in NLHE. There are some challenges with software availability for PLO, but I've had my own software running for weeks and weeks to calculate the results we present. I believe I personally solved around 1500 games for the first two weeks alone! Every session represents many weeks worth of offline work, and that's how it ends up with the price it has. And still, this kind of knowledge has value to some, and I wanted to make it available since I have the skills. The theory and practical session setup is the same as for the other courses, except each session is around two hours and have two coaches. This course extends and modernizes some of the material in Advanced PLO Theory. Tom Chambers is my co-instructor for this course, and has created half the content. I've seen another thread on Tom, and I can't comment too much, but I'll say that Tom is possibly the brightest mind that I've ever come across in poker, and he puts an incredible amount of solid work into everything he does. I'm honored that he's decided to work together with me on creating and delivering the Elite course, and I couldn't possibly have done it without him.

Many players appreciate the scientific and systematic approach we take in these courses. It won't be for everyone, but there's no need to be. Feedback has been overwhelmingly positive for the most part. Some criticism has also been received, and we're updating the courses for every iteration to improve them based on student feedback. We also offer students their money back if they take a week or two and are unsatisfied with the value. Nobody has yet decided to take that option.

As far as is at all possible, I base the material at least partially on published material. The board texture categories are exactly as in Advanced PLO Theory for example. I do this so students can get an extra level of confidence in the material, and a source to go to if they want deeper knowledge. Just like in any university course. For Advanced and Elite it's somewhat hard to find published resources. Elite is a bit easier, because I can point to raw math or science papers (just on the off chance that anybody would be interested). With range construction it's harder because there isn't much available, but I do link to videos here on Run It Once, that at least partially provide such coverage.

So let's keep this discussion in perspective, please. There are solid products that are valuable to some, for the price offered. That's fair business. 1000+ hours have been put into producing this content to make it valuable for students. If people have comments on any of the content, then I'm happy to discuss, but I've seen no such comments in this thread. If there are other products in the market that other people prefer, that's also fair business.

This is from 500Z at the beginning of the year. Small hand sample, only 14k hands so nothing much can be read out from it, but it's what I have. It does show though, that I was 20 BI behind EV at the end, or around $10k off my true winnings.

This is the same hand sample but in BB/100. It shows the consistent results a bit more clearly. Both of these are unfiltered hand samples from around mid Aug 2016 to mid Feb 2017, and represent ~6 BB/100 over ~250k hands. Not at all destroying the games, but winning quite consistently. The first part of the sample is swinging that $50 back and forth a bit. It's the insane variance that you get when you're winning 20 bb/100 but rake takes 18 bb/100.

The simplest thing to do would be to post the graph of your $50->$20k and then the runbad in 500z.

Really, not much else you need to do to earn that credibility. Post a
full graph, not 10k samples of where you won here and there. You just
gave the backstory (above), so just provide the evidence and all
should be good.

If that's really all that it takes...

I feel incredibly silly doing this because I have no desire to brag. I don't think this is anything to brag about. I'm sure any good player could repeat this and more. But if it really helps anyone believe that it's legit, then here goes.

This is $50 => $20k. It doesn't quite go all the way up to 20k -- this was back in the day when there was still rakeback on stars, and I fed that back into my account to land at at bit over $20k.

It turns out that it was actually more like $22k:

Would it be at all fair that those who ask for scrutiny would perform even a minimum of fact checking? Or at least stating what it is in the products that is in question? That would give us something tangible to discuss, create feedback that would be meaningful for me, and give me the opportunity to correct whatever you find questionable with the products.

As it is, this thread only serves the purpose of publicly discrediting an individual, without any substantial reason presented at all. As such it is nothing but slander.

As I'm partial, I'll ask the site staff to judge whether this is acceptable.

About a year ago now, I withdrew everything from my stars account save for $50 of fun money. I did this in order to focus full time on the PLO Fundamentals courses, as I wouldn't have time to play and review my own play anymore. I still played a bit, but just recreationally. By the end of the year, that $50 had grown to around $20k from only PLOZ.

Sadly, I ended up running really poorly at 500Z. 20 BI behind EV over a small hand sample, and since I was still doing this just half-recreationally, I decided to stop playing 500Z, withdrew most of my BR again, and played some lower games. I played some 200Z and 100Z, but continued with the sick variance. The kind where you get it in with top set on a dry board, and your opponent hits their only backdoor draw. And repeat 40 times per session.

I could obviously have continued playing higher if I wanted to, but it's not as important to me as it apparently is to some others. I love the game, but contrary to most players I'm not actually in poker for money. I'm in it for the love of the game, and because I enjoy the intellectual challenge.

In this light, I find this thread very odd, and I haven't really known if I should comment or not. As far as I'm aware, OP has never been in any of my coaching programs or have had any substantial contact with me at all. I think I should be legitimately allowed to make responsible choices with poker winnings, and make conscious decisions on what financial risks I take, and when. How that translates into a need to make groundless accusations against me, is beyond what I can comprehend. It's unfair and uncalled for. (Aside from also being against the rules of conduct of runitonce.com.)

I still don't really know how or if I'm supposed to respond to any of that, since it's so far removed from any substantial reality that I know of. All I can say is that I've never pretended to be anything I'm not, I'm just offering to teach the skills that I've picked up over my years as a PLO player and researcher. If people value those skills and what I do (and they do), then I think I have fair cause to continue.

It Really Was No Miracle

Totally. It's the only reasonable explanation, and I will stick to it facing rain, snow or overwhelming evidence. GT is a lady.

Welcome to Run It Once!

Hands that are typically doing poorly calling a 3-bet are disconnected pairs, weak A high hands and any rainbow hand.

There currently are none, you have to compose them yourself. A cold calling range on the button vs a CO open could look like: $FI30!$3B12I. This kinda works if you're looking for approximate results. But if you were to look deeper into the resulting calling range, it actually doesn't quite consist of the right hands for that situation. If you want better you can either make your own, or wait for a future version of PJ which will have explicit calling ranges.

I have none planned. The next step would be 100 PLO, but it's mostly the same experience as the 50 or 25 PLO games so it doesn't add anything new really. If I come up with any new interesting way to do it then maybe, but I haven't quite thought of anything yet.

I gave it a quick look with some generic ranges, but nothing super interesting came out of it. Personally, I can't see a compelling reason for the SB to have a leading range here. The 9h turn is one of the worse cards for the SB. It's maybe not quite as bad as people generally seem to think, but it's certainly not good.

BB has a pretty large equity advantage on average, and there's no place in the distribution where the SB really has an edge. So fundamentally, I can't see a reason for SB to lead. Exploitatively I can't really see it either, but maybe someone else can?

At the micros you just have to keep getting it in good, and eventually things should start happening in your favour. Hands like this should also inform some other parts of your strategy, like the futility of bluffing or getting it in light. Even semi-bluffing light is very questionable, you just want to make sure that you're putting chips in with stronger hands than your opponents all the time.

And I'm not 100% confident that I can beat PLO200 ^.^ ... haha maybe I should better play PLO100?

Heh. Well in that case I would recommend that you figure out what level you think you can beat, and then drop down one extra step from that. Otherwise you'll need those 200-300 BI and more :)

If you know that you're beating 200Z then that's what I'd recommend. Though do it carefully. 10k is slightly on the lower end for 200Z, unless you're good about dropping down quickly if you end up losing.

I tested the system recently, where I left $50 on my account and ran it up all the way to 500Z. All the same things apply from before. Players still really bad. Rake is still a killer. Variance will be high since nobody really ever folds. You'll need a bit of luck to run it up, but it's certainly possible same as before.

Experiment: Starting with $100
Experiment: Starting with $1000
Experiment: Starting with $2500

It's alternative GTO. Already explained.

No. GTO is just a certain strategy pair. Each part assumes that the other part plays GTO.

I was under the impression that...

GTO IS DEAD

Dead meaning it has passed on. GTO is no more. It has ceased to be. GTO has expired and gone to meet its maker. GTO is a stiff. Bereft of life, it rests in peace! If you hadn't kept bringing it up in conversation it'd be pushing up the daisies! Its metabolic processes are now history. It's off the twig. It's kicked the bucket, it's shuffled off its mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleeding choir invisible!! GTO IS AN EX-STRATEGY!!!

It's alternative GTO. Perfectly legit.