You could log in and collect the bonus for a year and have over 900K chips without playing a single hand. Would this put you near the top 1% in terms of skill?
I spent $20 and got like 650k chips early on, but it had nothing to do with inflating my ranking. I wanted to comfortably play the 10K and 15k tournies, and didn’t want to have to grind through the lowest level madness to do it.
I’ve done OK in the medium level MTTs, but if I take those same strategies to the highest level games, I would be crushed, chewed up and spit out. By the same token, strategies that work well in the lowest buyin tournies might not do so well in the higher level ones.
Many, many players have discovered this the hard way. I would suggest that grinding up from the very bottom might be counter-productive. Bad habits learned there are hard to unlearn.
None of the top ranked players bought that rank. Call it top 50, top 100, top 200, or whatever, those players know the game. Ranking is virtually meaningless except at the very top of the food chain.
I see enough random types of players, and random mix of players at the lower level tournies, which opens it up for new players to do some trial & error. They’re not getting killed on every bad move.
I agree with SunPower on the strategy differences, and I sure don’t know them. But here’s the deal: I’ve played 15 & 20k tournies, and play is usually similar to say, 2k ones. But I found myself at a couple 20k tourny tables that I was way out of my league. It reminded me of learning to play chess - it seemed every time I made a move it was the wrong one. But again, good learning experience for me, and humbling.
I see the issue SunPower brings up. I have developed bad habits that I get away with, probably because of the inexperience of the other players. My bad moves would doom me at high stakes games. So, I guess if you want to play at that level (and you’re smart), you should get ready to take your lumps…pay and learn, lol!
This is ridiculous. Of course some tournaments should be limited to the level of players in them - low, medium, high. Every major sport/event is stratified to ensure amateurs don’t have to compete with pros or more experienced competitors. As was mentioned earlier the American Contract Bridge League does this very well. Do you really think a player with 20 master points should be competing with a platinum life master with over 10,000? The argument being that for the same entry fee the beginner gets to get creamed by the professional, lose confidence, have no fun and leave dejected? And this is supposed to somehow teach him/her to play better bridge? All it will do is drive the new player away from the game and discourage further learning. This is why there are stratifications - to make sure players at all levels have a chance to succeed and improve. It would be simple to do and only fair. (How many other sports and activities should we list that require stratified play based on experience and ranking??? C’mon people.)
Anyone with 10K can walk up, plunk it down, and play for the WSOP Main Event World Championship bracelet. You can’t do that in any other game that I know of.
Are the top ranked players here really playing 2k tournies enough that it’s a problem? Is someone with 200 mill really playing so they can win maybe 15K by beating up on less experienced players? I don’t think so, but I have been wrong before.
It seems to me the best way to learn is to play play play. You can read all you want, but in the end it’ll be about how much you play. And come on folks, Replay gives players MUCHO chips to play with. Sun did the math and said you could collect 900k in 1 year by just showing up every day. Also, there are plenty of “play computer players” hold em games out there to get a feel for it before you go into real competition.
I started here with a very basic knowledge of the game. Yes, I lost all my chips a few times before I started holding my own, but I did, and do, continue to get better. I think the important part that new players might miss is to pay attention to what other players are doing. Once you fold, don’t turn your attention back to the Law & Order rerun!
Having play stratified strictly by skill, would probably result in lowering the learning curve. I keep learning BECAUSE I know there are players in the game that will gut me. I’ve been playing here for a year, and there are still times when I know I’m a “fish on the hook”, but knowing that is important. If I was playing at my level all the time, that wouldn’t happen too often and I might think I’m good. That is the perfect setup for a skilled player to clean me out.
Ahh, yes! Limping with AA makes me smile! Almost as good as limping after the flop turns your ‘pair in the hole’ into trips - now that’s entertainment, lol!
I hate to point out the obvious but this is a play-chip poker site, not one for cash. No one here is competing with professionals, world-class or not. How much farther should we stratify the game? Maybe we can make enough levels so that every single player is the only one in their bracket? That way every player will win his particular category and get lots and lots of meaningless accolades and trophies?
Poker is not a nice or kind activity. It is not meant to make people feel good about themselves. Almost every single person who plays the game with any regularity loses money at it. The people who are making money intentionally seek out the weakest competition they can find at stakes that are still meaningful to them. If you don’t like the brutality of this game, instead of trying to change it, maybe find a hobby that suits your tastes better?
Take a peek at this 39 million chip multi-car pileup from limping AA behind in the SB: https://www.replaypoker.com/hand/replay/391238179
This is honestly so awful on every level that it should be in a training video to show how not to play poker. And this is “elite stakes”. SMH
WOW! Holy frijole! If AA limped at the turn on purpose, I mean maybe it was a mistake, but at these stakes I assume it wasn’t…and then the raise? …uh…I…hmmm…okay, I will not say the word comes to mind, but I do think that playing like that would be dangerous in real life, lol!
You cannot escape the weird - someone please tell me how 22 gets to this river? Shouldn’t get to the turn. I’m only a 9:1 favorite on the flop and a 6:1 on the turn https://www.replaypoker.com/hand/replay/480218068
Many of the tournaments here are about making a hand, no matter how improbable. The 9-seat games are especially awful, with the entire table playing defense, trying to out-trap or outdraw each other.
I have same problem with players that dominate every hand with big bets,an it is usually the same players every game.I would love to have some games that there was no preflop bids. After all no one has bigger then a pr of A’s which have cost me many games.But why should it be ok to bully players it’s just a game.I love the game an most players I’m starting to avoid games that they are in because it ruins the game.When you feel like throwing your laptop lol it’s time to rethink who is in the games you are joining
Hi, I’m new here. Just one month old. I started out with few thousand free chips and my rank is above one million. I haven’t purchased any chips yet. After playing some tournament, I loose some but I also win some and few days ago to my surprise, I won my first MTT. Now my rank improve to 30,000 and stakes reached medium level, 150k. Maybe got some beginners luck or learn some strategies from watching you tube live poker lol. Not to boost how good I am as I still make blunders here and there. I believe system here is fair for every level of players.
Don’t be in too big a hurry to move up though. You will probably lose a few until you can make the adjustments, and your bank isn’t deep enough to sustain many loses.
I will tend to pick low entry fee tournaments to play in when I don’t really know how much time I have available to play, or need to go to bed early, or something like that. I actually get BETTER results in the higher entry fee tournaments, because I don’t enter them unless I am pretty sure that I can play to the end without distractions or pressure to do other things.
In 7 months on the site I have gone from 1000 chips to over 6 million chips mainly on the strength of winning or placing in higher entry fee tournaments with entries from 50K to 1 million, and practicing in the tournaments that have an entry fee of =< 25K chips.
I suspect there must be more players than one would suspect who buy chips, because I regularly encounter players in tournaments who are much higher ranked than me who play very poorly. I only have one “friend” on the site whom I befriended because he had a vast number of chips and was ranked near the top on the site and I thought perhaps I could learn something by looking up his hands. I was amazed when I looked at my “friends” page yesterday and saw that he now had only a few thousand chips and was not in the top 100, 000 players on the site.
