Week in Review #18 July 20th-26th
I weigh in on the WSOP POY Race (Photo: PokerGo)
A belief I hold about the poker world that I’ve written about here is that “Poker is both a competition and a customer service business." Similarly, the poker media, of which I am a part of, should recognize this, to know which people should be treated as competitors and which should be treated as customers. It’s a tough needle to thread. I believe if poker wants to grow their audience, players need to accept that media members will criticize their play. One reason professional sports are popular is because, from the comfort of my home, I can yell that LeBron James should have passed out of that double team or that Aaron Judge should have hit that 95 MPH fastball over the heart of the plate. I would never want to take that experience away from poker spectators, and if the media wants to accommodate those spectators, go for it. However, it’s also important to recognize that, collectively, VIPs help fund the poker ecosystem; you don’t want the media tapping on the glass and scaring them all away, and sometimes the line between “top pro” and VIP can be hard to detect for a non-expert player.
The difference between high stakes poker and pro sports is that when I get bluffed by Melika Razavi, I am not getting paid $40M a year; in fact, I am paying hundreds of thousands of dollars a year for the privilege of playing these tournaments where I can get bluffed in front of the whole world. The line of who isn't above public flogging for poor play is up for debate, but there are many other ways that poker media can treat poker more like a sport and give it that sports-media shine. Nick Wright was a polarizing presence on the WSOP Main Event broadcast: I found his analysis lacking, but the energy and broadcasting chops he brought to the broadcast were nice. He knows how to sell an event and, to quote his employer’s old catchphrase, embrace debate.
As a lifetime listener (and two-time guest) of sports talk radio, two recent evergreen sports-talk debates have entered the poker sphere. Who should make the Hall of Fame? What does the word “valuable” in most valuable player mean? However, since there is no MVP in poker it has morphed from “What does valuable really mean?” to “Who really is the Player of the Year?”
Phil Hellmuth sparked the debate with a tweet riddled with factual inaccuracies. Shaun Deeb is not embarrassed that he won POY, 90% of players would not have given Michael Mizrachi POY over Shaun, and Shaun did not influence the POY format. Phil later apologized for one of the things he got wrong. He did not apologize for the hypocrisy of him of all people, the guy who gets the clock paused for thousands of players so he can enter the WSOP Main Event, complaining that someone else might have gotten favourable treatment at the WSOP.
He also suggested that a panel of five people, of which he’d surely be a part of, can overrule who wins POY, a policy that could lead to all sorts of potential cronyism. Hellmuth’s argument is self-serving: The guy with the most bracelets thinks POY should value people winning bracelets. The POY points system might not be perfect, but it is objective. Complaining about who wins after the fact reminds me of people who suggest they re-award regular season MVP awards after the playoffs. It is a regular season award and that’s fine. The POY (like all player of series awards) rewards high-volume players who put up a lot of results (and pay a lot of rake) and that’s okay. Mizrachi had a historic year that will live on regardless of whether he wins POY; there is no wrong that needs to be righted, but top players putting their thumbs on the scale to get a desired outcome that feels right would be wrong.
Hellmuth’s argument is bad, and the way he presented it even worse; however, if you, the reader, want to argue that the POY formula should be changed, go for it. If you think winning a big field tournament is more “valuable” than winning a high roller, or that winning mixed-game tournaments should count more, or that min-cashes should not count, that’s your right as a poker fan, and it can be a fun debate to have. If you want to come up with different designations-- Shaun should be the POY, but Benny is the “winningest player,” and The Grinder won more money than anyone and his WSOP was “better” than Shaun’s-- go for it. You’re allowed to believe all that; you’re allowed to believe that I’m a terrible poker player, that Michael Mizrachi is a better NLHE player than Linus Loeliger, and that you’d hit a 95 MPH fastball out of the park. You may or may not be right, but it is your right as a fan.
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Additional Sims For Premium Subscribers
Premium subscribers get the raw files of sims I used to write my POTDs, sims that are more accurate and appropriate than equivalent sims in the big public libraries, videos of me walking through the sims, and a text summary of how I ran the sims. This week I uploaded:
A PIO ICM sim of my three bet pot vs Manig in POTD #86
A 3W Rocket Solver Sim of my hand vs Vito and Henrick for POTD #87
A PIO sim using the correct UTG9 vs BU ranges for POTD #88
A PIO sim locking my turn size to the incorrect size I used for POTD #89
A PIO ICM sim looking at my final table bluff vs Seth Davies for POTD #90
Additional Analysis for Premium Subscribers
Everyday Premium Subscribers get an extra bit of analysis not included on Substack. Today I’ll share #onemorething I posted about POTD #89. I wrote about betting 1bb.
A fun development in high stakes poker recently has been people pushing the extremes of bet sizing. Most people who study learn simple rules “if you raise ATo UTG you fold to a three bet”, okay what if you raise to 2bbs and your opponent three bets to 4bbs? You need to call and if your opponents followed a size-insensitive heuristic like “always fold ATo to a three bet” Making it 4bbs would make a ton of money for the three bettor.
If you’re playing in games where people are unfamiliar with a one bb river bet, they might not know that IP needs to call the river with as weak as queen high. So even if your one bb bet loses EV vs the solver it might make money in practice. One thing about plays like betting one bb is they can never be too costly, the most you can lose is one bb. In today’s hand it loses 1/12th of a BB, but betting quarter pot loses 0.5bbs and more than a full bb if you have 7d6d. Cheating to these smaller sizes vs players who have never seen it before and don’t know the appropriate range response can be very profitable, even with the wrong hand.
Media
No media appearances for me this week, but I did manage to sneak out to the theatre and see Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning, my opinion lines up with the consensus, the movie doesn’t have enough action and is slow, I don’t care about the canon of the MI movies, but some of the retconning of previous MI was so dumb that it insulted my intelligence, but the final setpiece is some of the best action movie making you will see and totally redeems the rest of the movie.
It would also be negligent of me to not recommend an album titled DON’T TAP THE GLASS, given this is a poker newsletter.
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