Bankroll

You’re right. My bad. I didn’t realize you were replying to teeber51. He ruffled my feathers.

I believe gamergirl posted a screenshot with her Replay Poker ‘First Purchase Special’ offer still not used. She had about 1 billion at the time so I doubt if she needed to buy any since then.
Edit…
image
She had over 8 billion at the time.

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Oh please! “That much better” with winning hands.
Give me the best hand and you can have all the talent you want. I have flopped a royal flush, four of a kind, and a little wheel. Guess what? They’re winners. I don’t think the board is fair.

I’d note too that as long as your edge over your opponents remains constant (which it won’t, as players do get better as you play at higher stakes tables), bank roll growth is exponential. So through about the first billion or so, I saw a fairly constant doubling rate (it actually declined slightly, but the effect was subtle enough to be hard to notice).

I’d double my chips, and then play on tables with double the stakes. I’d double my chips again, and then play on tables for twice the stakes.

Note also that bankroll management matters a lot here, otherwise normal volatility can wipe out your investment capital.

Agreed that there is no skill in flopping a monster. The skill is in how you play the 99% of the time when you don’t.

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There’s another thread titled, “How to recognize a strong player”. If I were to instead create another thread, “How to recognize a weak player”, I think comments like

I don’t think the board is fair

would deserve a place as one of many reasonably reliable indicators.

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On the topic of fairness, I have been tracking my hole cards over the past 45,000 hands. The odds of being dealt pocket aces are 1-in-221 or about 0.452% of the time. Across 45,000 hands, I have been dealt AA about 0.486% of time. So it seems like the shuffling algorithm is fair to me, and I have no reason to believe that the board is unfair either, since those aces rarely got cracked. Of the times I was dealt AA, I won 90% of the time, which is above expectations.

On the topic of how to recognize a strong player, a reliable indicator is that they take control of the action. If you watch the top bankrolled players face off, you will notice the almost complete absence of limping in, which is the opposite of how most people on this site play.

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When you do have aces, most people tend to take post flop lines that are fairly aggressive, since they are starting with a pretty good holding (and perhaps even tend to get a little overly excited). That results in applying a fair amount of pressure, which generates folds on the flop and turn, denying opponents their equity share. That then in turn results in aces outperforming their pure equity share, although the flip side of that is that when they do lose, they do a wonderful job of losing impressively large pots.

Agreed that there is no skill in flopping a monster. The skill is in how you play the 99% of the time when you don’t.

I think we’re probably in agreement here, but I don’t think it is quite fair to say that there is no skill involved when you flop a monster.

I think people still make mistakes here, usually by not giving themselves a chance to win a big pot. How you’ve played the other 99% of your hands of course makes a difference in how easily you can extract value in these spots, but even in isolation, I think players that come closer to properly understanding the shape of their opponents range, and what hands they can hope to derive value from within that range, and thus optimize bet sizes… well, I feel doing that well is really quite difficult, even when you have the absolute nuts.

Like most people, I do take an aggressive line with my strong holdings. There is no need to be subtle around here. Roughly, about 50% of the time that my AA got cracked was at showdown, usually to a preflop all-in or a river suck out, which are hard losses to avoid. In the other times, I managed to fold (I am very good at that) and avoided those impressive losses. But the point of the OP was to provide “proof” that the game is not unfair or rigged. I admit that the stats I provided are crude, but these are at least better evidence that has been provided to prove the contrary.

Yeah… I was mostly just trying to understand why you had such a high win rate with AA. That’s quite cool that you have been so diligent in tracking your results here. I used to do that (and then later had tools that did it for me), but have never done a good job of tracking my results since I started playing here.

Let me add my congratulations and appreciation for a job well done in actually collecting data. This is something that I have kept encouraging those “RP is rigged” players to do and the sound of silence was starting to affect my hearing :slight_smile:

Thanks very much @AKFolds

Regards,
TA

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Screen Shot 2021-04-06 at 8.04.47 AM Remember this is online poker. This is not cash in high stakes games. You pick out the people right away who have, A something, and first bet means a very high bet or even all in. In the real world of money poker, these people immediately get marked as “fish”. Online you don’t get to see their face and body language. Since most people muck their cards, it’s hard to figure out who they are unless you’ve been playing for years. The ball is in your court as to what kind of a poker player you want to be. Do you want billions of chips, or do you want to be a player who follows the methodology that you have set out for yourself.

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No skill needed to flop the best hand. Agreed that you need skill after that to make sure you get paid off.

When one player gets a full house, and then an ace high flush and shortly after another full house, and wins 80% of the hands at a 6 or 8 player table, why don’t you explain the fairness of the board.
There are 200,000 players. I’m in the sixth percentile.
If you think the sixth percentile is weak, you have no concept off statistics or performance. That’s about where I finished in my PR marathon at age 38.

I’m imagining that wasn’t supposed to be funny?

Yes, bankroll management … thank you. I have made the mistake of moving up through the stakes too fast. I tried playing at stake levels where I only had 10 buy-ins. The variance of the game was destroying my bankroll. I think the recommendation of having 20 to 30 buy-ins for the game one is playing is solid advice.
I enjoy the challenge of building a bankroll here. Real money or not, it’s no walk in the park to build a big bankroll here on Replay.

Yes, thank you for getting us back on topic. I think this is really a giant part of poker that doesn’t usually get the attention it deserves. There are so many that play quite well at the highest stakes that might have what it takes to stay there, except that they move up fast enough that the volatility, almost inevitably, knocks them back in huge increments.

I’m unusually conservative about bank roll management, and have been happy with how that has worked for me. I’ve seen players like CKEnvoy and El-Jog move up extremely rapidly, playing much closer to the ragged edge. If you really enjoy the roller coaster of the game, and yet have the discipline to consistently move down as soon as you have hit predetermined thresholds, then it is probably possible to play at stakes where the maximum buy-in is pretty large relative to your bank roll.

But if you ever intend to play for real money, I think the habits you build are important, and you can start here by carefully managing stakes the that you play at so that the normal ebb and flow of the game does not sink you when high tide comes.

I think there are probably more than 200,000 players. Before they did the cleanup, it was getting close to 2,000,000. So you might be a bit higher percentile wise than you are suggesting.

I’m not making any real judgments about your game. Just that I do associate whining about the game not being fair with weaker players. And mind you, I’m not suggesting that all whiners are weak; just that as you move up to higher and higher stakes, you start seeing less and less of that. You could be anywhere in that bell curve of those players who lose only because the game is rigged against them.

Oh, and you could probably also count Phil Helmuth as good company.