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On November 12 2014 11:32 ggplz wrote: I think there are a lot of reasons. Some people just change nickname or move sites. Others can't keep up with the evolution of the game and go bust or get tired/burned out. Some finish University and go into real work. Also, i think generally people think of poker in a temporary and short term way so it's often dropped when other things in life demand more of them. I think there's also a sort of pre/midlife crisis people have between like 24-30 where they feel the game has or is meant to have ran it's course for them and they see something else they want to or feel obligated to do. Just a few things about PS: PS games are just bad to play due to the rake, seat scripting, multi tablers everywhere and the fish to reg ratio. PS don't care about the quality of the games and no advertising budget in the world will draw enough players to feed 90+% regs 12+ tabling the site. I feel AMAYA care even less than PS previously did but with their massive debt they are so limited in what they can actually do as well. The thing is that the AMAYA deal kinda sealed their fate and not because AMAYA are bad but because what currently sustains PS i.e. the mass volume fish chasing nit culture will slowly die off but until it does they won't change. Sorry but the advertisement budget or whatever else people say justifies their rake paid is just plain wrong. When I play there I have to open 40+tables per session and start another 8-10 per session to find decent fish at low stakes. That's at low stakes, I mean, come the fuck on! Any reg with a brain will seek fish the same way b/c the rake will eat you up playing vs regs. That's NOT fun for players or the fish but that's how the rake structure makes people play. The structure of the cash games forces you to play non-competitively and that's just wrong. What PS need to do to improve the games and make it better for players is to lower the rake at low/mid stakes to allow players to actually climb up stakes and allow weaker players to do slightly better. This will result in better midstakes games and more shot taking. You know, allow players to actually have a shot at becoming poker "stars"? They also need to cap the number of tables people can play to 4-6 and revamp their VIP system to be easier to climb (due to reduced volume) and to actually feel rewarding. That means the 10(?) fish 1 tabling your limit will be easier to play with too. The reason 12+ tabling became so popular was because there were enough fish on each table to justify it but now it's kind of evolved where the regs that couldn't multitable have mostly quit leaving mostly multi tabling regs. Since everyone is multi tabling, the fish are incredibly hard to find and play against and seat scripting grows in popularity every day, making it even harder. That means 1 person (not seat scripting) can search/compete on 12+ tables to find 1 fish whereas in days gone by it may have been only 5-15% of players were 12+tabling and the rest 1-6 with fish mostly 1-2 tabling in amazement. PS'll never make these kinds of changes in the near future though so your option is either crush HSNL or midstakes+ PLO, high stakes tourneys, go play eurosites or quit / do stuff IRL.

im quoting this post because it's the last one I saw, but it seems to be a common line of thinking. everyone who makes the argument "lower rake -> healthier games" totally ignores the fact many people who quit previously will re-enter because it becomes worth their time playing again, and many new regs will be attracted and successful in entering. sure you'll get a short term boost in your profitability and "health of the games" or whatever, but in the long run poker will converge to an equilibrium where only the best and hungriest players will be making any reasonable kind of money (it'll be mainly people who are too scared to leave their house or people in poor countries with internet access and at least some education but few other prospects, e.g. eastern europe, since these types have the fewest alternative viable options).

a situation where a mediocre person can make a decent living at poker is inherently unsustainable because the world is full of mediocre people who want to make easy money and poker has zero barriers to entry. in the long run it doesn't matter what you do to rake. lowering rake just attracts more new young regs prepared to throw their lives into the game and dilute out the easy money. point the finger at amaya all you want, but the fact is gravy trains need barriers to entry to last and a poker grinder doesn't have them.

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This is the kind of thing I figure many of you smart people here get a kick out of. It's an inductive reasoning test, where you have to figure out the "rules" governing a sequence or collection of abstract images based on the evidence, then use your induced rules to predict what the next one in the sequence / right one fitting in the indicated position should be.

I'm hopeless at it and would love for you guys to try it out and explain how you arrive at your answers. You can try a full test at http://www.shldirect.com/en/practice-tests/ - but since you have to make an account and I know not everyone is going to bother with that, I'm attaching some of the tougher ones from the site here for you to have a crack at:











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(ignore the fact I've highlighted an ánswer in this picture, this was a random click and doesn't mean anything)





Cheers~

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Comments (21)

Following from discussion here:

http://www.liquidpoker.net/blog/viewblog.php?id=1108751

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For fun I put in the payout structure from 2011 wsop into excel so I could see how ROI works out with different probabilities of finishing in spots.

- A perfectly average player returns (-6%) roi with an itm of 10%

- A player who gets itm 18% (like in Daut's sample) but has an even probability distribution of finishing in any itm spot returns 68% roi

- A player who gets itm 18% and is three times as likely to reach any final table spot as the person in point above who got 18% itm (with the extra probability of final table being taken out of the probability of mincash - a simplifying assumption), returns 214% roi

Now here's the problem, roi is ridiculously sensitive to minute differences in probability of finishing in the top spots. When we talk about a 5.3x increase in probability of final tabling between a theoretically perfectly average player (as in point 1) and a player with 18% itm who returns 214% roi (as in point 3), we're talking about an increase from 0.13% to 0.70% probability. In absolute terms it's a tiny difference yet leads to a huge change in roi.

Quick example, for Daut's sample size of 955 WSOPMEs played by a basket of good players, total buyins are $9.55mm. with 196% roi, total returns are $28.268mm. If we just remove one tournament result from this sample - Ben Lamb's final table finish for $4m, this reduces sample roi to 154%. The number of FT finishes in Daut's sample of 955 MEs is going to be in the low single figures. You can see where I'm going with this - this sample doesn't give us close to a clear idea of realistic ME rois. If we tried to get a 95% confidence interval around that 196% point estimate, it would be very wide indeed (an exercise i'll leave to those of you who are so motivated)

Payout data from 2011 wsop ME (i think it was 2011 but not sure
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This is intended to kick off discussion of the difficulty of ROI estimation in tournaments like the ME where we need a much bigger sample than we actually have before we can get narrow confidence intervals - and the implications for backing and staking "fair" markup. Can there even be such a thing as a normative idea of "fair"? Or is fair just what the market decides and what people are willing to pay / sell for?

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