sabiam3

I really love the comments on in-game mindset coming from someone playing the highest stakes. Having transitioned from cash games to tournaments primarily in the last few years, I do think that avoiding the kind of thinking that results in needing to know the answers now is something that you can hone a bit from playing cash games - you sit out on your BB, go to the bathroom, and come back to play. Time spent playing is for playing; time spent studying when you can truly dedicate your mind to study is for studying.

I agree with this wholeheartedly. I loved seeing the realistic approach of someone preparing to play (and actually playing) the highest stakes. There is a lot of poker mindset advice out there that is basically "grindset" content that doesn't deal well with the fact that we're all human beings who don't have infinite attention spans.

congrats on the score in the 100k! I'm using my one time to make a content request for you to review that ft...

Hand at 24:03 with 8c8h, facing this flop cbet size obv our range for continuing narrows quite a bit. I assume our only worse hands by river besides 88 here are some AQ/AJ with a club/dd and 7c7x? Not sure if you peel 22-55. I also imagine the way that solid regs would structure some bigger bets here otf would be to have a Q in hand pretty often. So when river completes flush do you think 8c8h should mostly be bluffed? His timing and lack of turn bet kinda feels a lot like Qx too as you mentioned. I guess some really creative players can check jam some Qx otr but feels like most just end up folding. You said you thought you were allowed to mix bluffs on that runout but didn't want to and I guess I'm looking for more of your thoughts on why.

Would also be cool if you had part of a video going over these big sizes that aren't used super often by the population on similar textures and whether you and PIO think they're good.

So for the 764 4b pot I copied the parameters of Ben's sim with a simplified version of some preflop solves for this spot that I have, and like Ben I couldn't find a leading frequency here almost at all. However, changing the effective stacks to that of 100bb to start the hand produced a ~10% leading frequency for oop. JTcc basically never used the lead, but the EV of 20% lead and the EV of check were close.

I was surprised by the IP response. Pretty passive, only ~10% raise, mixing between the small size and a shove and mostly just raising with QQ/JJ.

I think it's pretty easy to imagine BBB having studied this spot for 100bb and found the lead, and then not appropriately adjusting for the extra stack depth in this particular hand. I guess it's also possible he thought he might be able to get Ben to go over the recommended 5% fold frequency as well.

No problem. And I'd add that running your own sims will probably help you get more out of watching videos on here where coaches are going over their own sim outputs.

Are you talking about live 10/20 and 25/50 or online? Because I'd have a hard time believing you're even beating 5/10 online without any Pio work at all.

That said, in terms of breaking into Pio I don't think it's as difficult as you are making it sound. There is definitely a learning curve: in order to run your own sims, you'll need to understand how to interpret the data and conclusions from the sims as well as understand the ways in which the constraints you place on your sims can affect the conclusions. But I also think that at this point, the vast majority of NL training videos are incorporating and discussing strategies or lines that are already based on conclusions from Pio sims. So in a way, I would say that you have been indirectly indoctrinated into Pio just by trying to get better at NL in this day and age. In other words, you may have already absorbed some value from Pio just by watching videos on this website, even if the coaches aren't showing you the sims to back up their strategy choices. I don't think that this should discourage you from running your own sims (there's definitely value in learning from them especially if you are in fact playing mid to high stakes live poker with deep stacks, a topic not often covered explicitly by training videos), but I also don't think that you're late to the party the way that you might think you are. You may already know more than you think you do.

Perhaps this is because I also have a background in academic science, but I just wanted to say that your thought process about playing poker for a living, the challenges that come with it, and the reasons why doing it may well be an unhealthy endeavor are spot on, imo.

I just wanted to build on one idea from the above post. Generally speaking, all of the concerns about sample size and the distribution of variance in poker are amplified by an ungodly amount when thinking about live poker in particular. The overall skill level required to play high stakes live poker is many orders of magnitude lower (even the recreational players that play high stakes live are likely much worse than recreationals playing high stakes online). Meanwhile, variance is quite high even though the game conditions allow for exceptionally high winrates for the best players in the game. This set of conditions encourages the "pretty good" pro who is not necessarily one of the best players in the game to take more shots than maybe they otherwise should because they believe that they can also earn a high winrate in the game. This kind of behavior can lead to an insane imbalance in the way one's earnings over the course of a year are distributed. If you run bad in the largest pots you play over the tiny sample of hands you play in a game that is 3-5x larger than your regular stake, you are going to end up losing over that time frame, and a "tiny sample" of hands can be multiple years' worth in live poker if you aren't playing under certain game conditions regularly. The same thing can be true in live tournaments as well. As mentioned above, that is a kind of work pressure that is really faced by basically no one else and that the human brain is absolutely not prepared to deal with, not to mention that the variance distribution is already incredibly difficult to process for human minds. Most of the poker I play is live poker, and most of the pro poker players I know and associate with play live poker almost exclusively (although some have income supplementing things going on on the side). I almost cannot fathom how they function in daily life, especially those of them that are supporting families with poker, knowing that they are playing a long, long, LONG game when the short term is so very important.

Another thing that might be important to point out is that when you merely walk into a poker room and especially when you look at higher stakes games, you are already surrounded by people who are either: 1) able to cover poker losses extremely comfortably or 2) running at or above expectation. You generally don't see the people who have truly hit the bottom end of variance, because those people aren't part of the game anymore. Even with this being true, pro poker and especially pro live poker is still a grueling profession, and how do you know you won't be next to find the truly bad run of variance?