For example, in the simplest sense I’d bet a lot that average VPIP is a downward trend over the past decade.
But there is no objective data set in even my ~5 million hand sample of online play that could show that kind of thing. If people are betting the river at a 5% higher frequency today on x boards, does that mean anything? Hard to say. There’s no meaningful stat here. The closest is probably something like x amount of people that I have tens of thousands or more hands on that are like, within 1 bb of b/e play.
Fwiw on most sites I would actually bet the average VPIP of non zoom tables has gone up in the last 5 years and would be very confident of such.
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Surely if we looked at all 50NL hands played over time and saw these trends it would be conclusive evidence play is better
-downward trending VPIP
-upward trending three bet frequency
-upward trending blind steal
-upward trending blind defence
-upward trending bet fold frequency on the river
-downward trending short stack play
Ect.
Those trends in isolation aren’t always indicators of better play.
Man I wish we could bet on the vpip question even though you play a ton more than me this seems just wrong. I’m probably a fish in the bet but would bet the trend over ten years is lower vpip.
Most of these stats peaked around ~2012 and so, so many people went broke emulating Dwan and other similar pros at the time.
The reason you’re wrong here is that in the last ~5 years most sites have introduced a table cap limit, and pushed players to zoom.
zoom/fast/whatever plays tighter. not all fish like the structure of it though.
Thus, the fish who won’t play zoom (bc they lose money quicker) play normal tables, where VPIP are much higher than they used to be. Before, pros could 20+ table normal tables. Now, Stars caps you at 4. Other sites are similar. So, with multi tabling players capped at 4 tables, they don’t bring down the averages like they used to.
Agree but it’s still a moving trend in one direction.
Also, it’s not really fair to exclude zoom and rush. I assume the bulk of all online hands at 50NL today are played as zoom/rush right?
lol me arguing with someone who has WAY more experience than I do but your claim that fish don’t play zoom also seems suspect to me.
I’m a fish now and can’t stand online except rush. Fish want action, not waiting. Lol sample of one but I’d probably bet a bit that the majority of losing players play more rush than standard NL.
yeah, bulk stats are meaningless. The best way to figure out if the games are “tougher” is to see players with large samples and see the amount that have moved from being small winners to small losers, basically. I don’t expect these numbers to be that different post BF tbh.
Not claiming fish don’t play zoom/rush. The player pools are too large a percentage of each stake to even say something that silly. But if you go to the casino next time, I’d give it a 50% chance the fish in your game won’t like it. It’s more dominated by eastern euros who are just passively bad.
If you were betting on a player over 10k hands and your choices are randomly drawn player from the NL50 pool today or ten years ago which do you choose?
At that level I think it would have literally no difference.
I genuinely think with ~10 hours of coaching I could have you beating that stake online, and probably ~5% of the pool are winning players.
Stars nl50z will have between 65 ppl at the valley and 300+ in their pool at peak. You probably have something like 5/15 long term winners over 3bb/100 at these times.
I think it’s fair to say on average everyone is better, your usual reg is slightly better than 2010, your average pro is better than 2010 and your average nosebleed player is easily better than 2010 players overall.
Once you take in all the variables @Aofrantic is probably correct in that everyone has improved and once you realise that the fish don’t really improve to a standard that they suddenly become winners and are Infact making even more mistakes with playing ranges etc then in will average out making a pros winning % pretty much the same.
Zoom 2/5 is where you test yourself against some of the better online players and its a very tough game, probably one of the hardest to beat.
“online poker isn’t harder you just have to expend exponentially more effort in game selection” like bruh, uh, maybe think about that some more
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No way. I was playing pro in the beginning of that time and games got so much harder then. Unless you’re saying games have gotten much easier in the latter half of that time period it’s not true.
The recreational player seems to have more or less quit online poker. I haven’t played in a decade and have no interest in doing so.
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No not really… There are loads of streamers who play poker on the reg, especially the Sunday events + the live regs mostly went online when the pandemic happened and some more regs signed up making for some nice pools in Euro land.
Games play much smaller now with 2.5bb opens and 1/3 pot C-bets, when I play 1/2 online on the apps it’s very rare to see a stack over $1000. Back in the day that was not the case at all. Less money being thrown around, more halfway decent regs, hardly any total droolers. I mean it’s not hard to be a winning player, but you just don’t see those crushing win rates like before. I don’t see how you can say online isn’t harder now…
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Shit I had to look it up but I transitioned to live poker in that time the games sucked so bad online.
Online was really good for a few months when the pandemic hit, lots of recs, but that of course was an exceptional circumstance. Now it’s mostly back to EV grinding. I can’t play more than an hour or two w/o getting bored out of my mind
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