No, do you remember where it is?
You can still do very well at decent stakes and everyone is still awful. But if you’re playing 10k+ buyins, I would game select hard at best.
Looks like it starts about 1:14:00. I listened to this in podcast form so the video is new to me.
Yeah not the type of interview where I would ever do that, and the one she decided to ask was pretty laughable IMO. I mean, it is what it is. He chose the most favorable spot he could to tell his side of the story and he chose well.
Just went down the poker podcast rabbit hole for a bit which led to a Cary Katz comment which led to me wondering how Cary Katz made his billions and… 
My current poker podcast lineup is:
DAT Poker
Thinking Poker
Free Crush Live Poker
Red Chip Poker
Tournament Poker Edge
PokerNews Podcast
Dream machines have been around since 2012.
Eastern Euros we’re using DLSR cameras for capture and second PCs to evade detection on Stars in Googlable .ru forums earlier than that.
Kind of amazing it took a decade for someone to squeal publicly on 10 year old info.
If you play online poker for significant stakes and you’re not cheating lol you. Poker is, top to bottom, entirely full of scumbags. No way there are going to be legit games for high stakes when it is so easy to cheat and the sites basically never punish anyone.
The vast majority of poker players are honest good people. Don’t lump the bad minority in as reflective of the whole community.
Sure but if you’re playing online poker at probably 1000NL or higher, maybe even 500NL, 70-90% of the players on each table are going to be pros and the likelihood that at least one pro at each table is using RTA is through the roof.
It’s becoming a steroids in baseball problem. The assholes cheating are closing off avenues to success for those of us not cheating. Like even at the live table, how am I supposed to go to the WSOP and have a fair fight against a guy like Ali, who’s allegedly using RTA for his millions of hands of online play? Or the same thing except instead of the WSOP it’s a big live cash game against a guy using RTA playing online all day 5 days a week then rolling over to the casino one day a week when the big NL games run.
Saying they can’t use RTA in the casino so it’s fair is like putting a Triple-A home run hitter who’s not on steroids in a home run derby against Mark McGwire in like 1999 and saying, “Hey it’s fair cause we’re testing and McGwire stopped juicing a couple weeks ago!”
Yeah, well, he still has all the muscle he cheated to put on!
Those of us doing it on the up and up have to make choices. Play or study? How many hours can I play in a day of online poker before my brain gets fried from decision-making? (For me it’s three hours at a time playing 500-600 hands an hour.)
A guy using RTA gets to study while playing and do so for more hours because his brain isn’t getting fried, he’s just looking at the solver and randomizing his action to match it. So he gets to play more, make more money, and study more and thus get better than someone doing it honestly.
It’s incredibly frustrating to me personally. I’m fairly confident I’ve been up against RTA online at 500NL before, and it’s basically keeping me from feeling safe playing that stake now. A guy went from playing pretty standard solid poker at a standard pace to taking a long time on every street and sizing his bets drastically different than he used to. The change was overnight, so it’s hard for me to buy, “Oh he just studied and got better.”
I also have a friend who mostly played 200NL to 500NL with a little 1000NL sprinkled in who was offered access to RTA for a cut of his profits, but he turned it down. So I know it’s out there.
Already great players using RTA is like Barry Bonds using steroids…and people still want to put Bonds in the HoF.
The vast majority of poker players are also losers.
Well, sure, but Ali came up online. Who knows how long he used RTA? He may be a great player now without it simply because he used it so much before.
Also I think if anything people underestimate the value of RTA in those high stakes games.
Imagine having a standard GTO strategy, but also other perfectly balanced strategies on sizings nobody has studied, and being able to flip a switch to a different one whenever you wanted. And online where people only have a few seconds to make decisions.
Does anybody on this forum play online for a living? Just @Fossilkid93 ? Have games gotten worse in the last year or so? Do you think people are using RTA at mid stakes? Whenever I go online the games are just so nitty and boring. Live poker people are just trying to give away money. I can’t believe the quality of play in Jacksonville lol.
Although I clearly agree that using an RTA during play is cheating, I don’t get the animosity about the knowledge advantage for the future one might gain from using an RTA/solver.
This sounds a lot like the older chess GMs who whine about the “kids and their computer databases,” even though the player still has to put in the work to review the computer lines and remember them. Likewise, I assume that anyone who can play GTO more accurately than I can has put in a lot more work than I’m willing to in order to get results.
I think the complaint is that normally a pro has to balance poker playing time vs studying time, so by cheating in real time you can do both at the same time
3 Likes
I don’t care if they use a solver to study. I do that. It’s clearly not cheating at all.
What I care about is that of my time available for poker, I have to mix it up between earning and studying. They don’t. By playing with RTA they’re doing both at once because seeing those solutions each hand is teaching them what a solver does in that spot.
So like if I spend 50 hours a week on poker and play 30 hours and study 20, but they play 50 hours with RTA, after a year I’ll have:
1,500 hours earning
1,000 hours studying
They’ll have
2,500 hours earning
2,500 hours studying
Now we both go to the WSOP. They have more bankroll to utilize and a 2.5 to 1 study advantage before we even account for the fact that their RTA usage is going to help them internalize the concepts way more than my solver work.
And the bankroll advantage will compound for them over time too, as they get a higher winrate by cheating, more hours by not having to study separately, and they get to rise up the stakes more quickly too and compound those advantages.
How am I supposed to compete with that?
I also recently had a conversation with someone who plays the high rollers who told me the RTA these guys have goes beyond solver outputs and into real time player specific exploits based on hand databases.
1 Like
This is why I like to manipulate the betting to create more multi-way pots and avoid getting it heads up, because I think the solver outputs haven’t been as developed for multi-way scenarios.
I’m also spending more time trying to learn mixed games because solvers aren’t as developed for those games.
If you’re playing any decent live games you know for damn sure that solvers are not on the radar whatsoever
1 Like
Once you get to 5/10 there are usually multiple players at the table who have spent significant time in solvers. At least in my region. T/20 it is probably half the table.
It starts going down somewhat at like 25/50 actually.