Keating is a legend and did the exact right thing. You buy in for 50k after 50k and gamble it up. He should be in the Poker Hall of Fame for that performance.
I know he normally VPIPs like 80, but I still feel like he was punting a little extra for the sake of the Content Creators. For example, the KT5 board where he bets 3k and gets check-raised small by Ninja’s AK. Keating calls with 65 and then jams on turn when another overcard hits and Ninja snaps. That play’s just monumentally dumb, but I have to think it’s just for the fun of the stream.
Nah, the pros should be limited to 50k buyins and then just gamble it up like Negreanu in a rebuy if they want a stack. Noone wants to see some dork GTO pro adding up to cover the biggest fish stack and then busting them while not saying a word and only trying to max every ounce of his EV.
Can you imagine how bad the stream would have looked if instead of Keating the 3rd regular was someone like Nick Petrangelo? The Content Creators would’ve gotten slaughtered, the atmosphere would’ve been way more boring, and poker would’ve just seemed like a game where you go to get systematically slaughtered by silent killers.
After seeing the reactions the next day, I’ll grant that Hellmuth was probably a good choice. It seems the new fans loved seeing him as the Boomer foil and he did create a couple viral moments. The photo of Ninja laughing in his face was excellent, and was the type of thing that will draw in new eyeballs. I can guarantee you that not a single person who didn’t know Dwan beforehand even remembered a thing about him (other than maybe “that quiet guy who was falling asleep”). Everyone was mentioning Keating or Hellmuth.
In 2017 I had to move down to 300 max 1/3 for a month, and part of my strategy was to push every 0EV or slightly -EV edge and seek out flips until I was 500 effective, then reverse course and avoid 0EV or sightly +EV spots until I was like 800 effective, then play totally +EV.
Someone playing perfectly GTO with no adjustments might have been -EV on that stream and would be quite unlikely to be a big winner. They’d be torching so much money preflop opening solver ranges that I’m not sure they’d be able to overcome it unless they were absurdly deep, and balancing every single range would just be torching EV with their bluffs.
GTO can be -EV preflop if other players deviate from GTO in mutually destructive ways, which was definitely the case.
The proper adjustment was to limp/RR huge with whatever range you seemed +EV, limp/call a profitable range, and bluff minimally post flop just enough to keep your image good enough to get paid.
In TMoP, Chen and Ankenman explicitly refuse to use the term “optimal” when talking about multi-player strategies. While there is a Nah equilibrium for multi-way poker, it is very easy to disturb and create situations of implicit collusion where it might not be able to be +EV against an implicit alliance even if you know your opponents’ exact strategies. One toy game from the book gives an example where it makes sense to bluff into a dry side pot.
I basically never raise preflop in wild games. I don’t have to because they’re going to build the pot for me. I don’t bluff to keep my image good enough to get paid; I establish an image where I don’t get paid as much then start picking bluff spots. It’s amazing how a nitty image causes some opponents to become scared of playing a big pot without nutted hands and turn their face up. Some players think they would just muscle people out of pots preflop or on the flop with my table image, but I find it much more profitable to find bluffs on turn and river scare cards.
Of course, that style won’t get me into private games and it certainly won’t get me invited to any online streams, so there’s’ a limit to how far I can go.
It was very bad for poker already. Just because a bunch of hard core poker fans like us are taking about him yet again doesn’t mean it was good.
This was one of the rare times totally new people were watching poker and what they saw was a boomer yelling at the only woman, being a jerk, and killing the fun. Nearly anyone would have been better. They same fun atmosphere would have been present 100% thanks to the streamers and not pros. You would just have one more person in on the fun and all the negative stuff would be gone.
In general, nits are always bad for poker. They are almost always the players with the most negative table presence and they don’t help feed the game at all. They should be shunned at every turn. Especially if they are pros.
I highly doubt Fossil used ‘GTO pro’ to mean someone who plays GTO in all situations! But let’s keep anything GTO related whatsoever out of this thread
I think some of you guys are right about Phil, people really do like watching him bitch and moan at every possible opportunity, even if he’s winning. Only Phil can get rewarded for always acting like a douche burger, sigh.
I’m not good at trying to be a gambly dude. It’s not natural for me and I come off as awkward. So, I play tight preflop and make my moves postflop. And I’m a social, talkative nit who typical loose passive players seem to like and don’t get mad about paying off. I do things like protect them from angle shooters and they respect that. I also entertain them sometimes but picking off bluffs with hands that can only hear a bluff. The players who hate me are the smart LAGs with a sense of entitlement who resent that I force them to be more cautious when I enter the pot so they can’t just run over the table or else I trap them if they remain reckless.
Even wild players usually notice what I’m doing if they don’t go broke first, so what eventually happens is they build up a pot on early streets which I occasionally find a way to take away.
But you’re not going to find me in with ace-rag offsuit in a three-bet pot in these games and probably not in most single-raised pots either. I don’t feel any need to spew with random garbage preflop for the good of the game.
I think they’re 3betting and 4betting with those hands. I don’t unless I’m shoving. I’m definitely not doing it in a wild game where I’m likely to get called by multiple players.
Do you think LAGs are over calling with weak offsuit aces against an early position opener?
