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First 2008 post: BR management and game management revisited
by Adanthar on 01/02/08
I've noticed something about the scene. Since UIGEA, it's a lot easier to find a nosebleed game - every site out there now has at least 50/100 NL and most top out at 3/6 - but the games that used to be called high stakes, those bread and butter 5/10 and 10/20 games, run at the same rate they did two years ago and at 10x the difficulty rating. They're still very beatable, but you have to know what a TAGfish is to beat them, and have to know what a dolphin (the LAGfish eating the TAGfish) is to crush them. The same thing applies to tournaments; we don't notice it because the donks we play in the first two hours are almost as bad as ever, but, increasingly, a vast percentage of the people ITM in the bigger stakes events are at least TAGfish. The ROI of a tournament player, which is - invisibly to most people, because they don't get there that often unless they play 29802389489 tournaments - determined largely by final tables and the ability to win them, is affected by these guys even more than in cash, because while they might be fish postflop, they do know how to pushbot.Okay, so, your ROI's dropped because people suck in different ways now. What does that mean?
Most of the people I know came up in poker through the SNG/MTT scene; comparatively few started out playing cash and almost none started at 6 max (nobody starts there; it's an online midstakes thing you kinda have to graduate through.) The first of us started in '03-'04, many more in '05, and a bunch in '06, but due to UIGEA and the fact that only fourteen months have gone by, comparatively few people that are good, well rolled HS players today started playing after last October. The upshot is that those of us who are already here only have the BR management that was required of us *last year*.
What did I know about BR management and moving up? Not a damn thing. As recently as '05, I was told to play a whopping 10K hands in fixed limit (which took me a month or so two tabling it) to know when to move up. Over in SNG land, most people used to think 30 buyins was enough, and some of us made do with 20-25 in a pinch. We'd basically just kinda rush up the ladder (which maxed out at 200NL and 15/30 limit at Party anyway...very very few people even wanted to play Spirit Rock at 10/25 on UB and no other games even really existed), eventually stick when we didn't thoroughly suck, and beat the games in spite of ourselves because they were full of complete idiots. Nobody I know has a BR management background because we all had mid five figure or six figure rolls by the time anyone cared.
So now a bunch of people are sitting there with, say, 100K-200K and decide they're rolled for every game they want. This means playing the big 1K MTT's online (possibly/probably all three of them), another 2K in buyins worth of random tourneys a night, and/or, if they play cash instead, probably 8-12 tabling midstakes for another 10K on the table. Except, ROI's have gone down, aggression [meaning variance] has gone way up, and every 6 max table from .50/1 to 10/20 has 4 regulars, 3 of which have Cardrunners/stoxpoker subscriptions and 1-2 of which probably teach somewhere. Despite all this, the games are still beatable - but the days of 30 buyin rolls are so long gone, it's laughable, and just because you can beat 10/20 or even 25/50 does not mean you can beat the next level up (which, BTW, is a gigantic freaking jump, because for some reason we're all primatefish that love round numbers and don't stop to consider how much easier it would be on everyone involved if there were about 5 more widely played limits between 10/20 and 50/100.)
So, to sum it up...guys who have never lost in poker at any stakes, because they skyrocketed up and are used to considering themselves at the top of a ladder, keep climbing up, not thinking how far from them the next rung is, who currently occupies it and how much effort it's going to take to stick to it. Then they go on six figure 'downswings' which are really about half variance, half playing bad after losing the first 50K, drop down and rebuild, quite possibly playing worse due to lack of confidence. Repeat. Somewhere, Phil Ivey is laughing (and, by somewhere, I mean 300/600 on FTP. Seriously, he's probably there right now.)
Prediction: the good '07's that come up will be much more likely to stick at the top rung right away than any one of the people I'm taking about. They'll be used to playing in tougher games with 50-100 buyin rolls, taking variance as a sign of playing bad and immediately retreating, etc.
Further prediction: a lot of people will go busto (enough to be on near permastakes) in '08, and a lot more will get rich - at the cost of ever-increasing variance to them, as well - backing them. By the end of this year, well known, "good"* players like me, who might have live staking deals but retain their own action online, may be in the minority.
*(I maintain that I'm not good, I'm just better than them)
