What online stakes is easiest to crush?

I don't think you're crazy bc of that, we already know some % of online sites cheat in either small or large ways thru the main operator themselves or players using bots.

That said you were provided a long list of reasons why online games are generally tougher than live games which you seem to have completely overlooked and keep claiming you can't think of any reasons why they could be significantly tougher which means you're actively seeking to remain delusional to other possibilities than your own

Yes my experience is none of those things are true. The only thing that I see is if you play the same stakes online or live the pots will be bigger live. I don't believe the players or any better I don't believe the games are any tougher. I play approximately 12 to 15,000 hands of pot limit Omaha every month, which I understand is not a ton but I'm telling you I see the same guys doing the same thing playing the same bad hands year after year online and never getting any better I can't see a difference between that and playing live poker where they do exactly the same thing. I am playing poker right now with one of the dumbest people I've ever met in my life. And he's basically on par with all the other idiots at the table. So I don't see where the game is tougher

Are you a winning player online? I'm genuinely curious if someone with your mental profile can be a profitable player.

I had mentioned earlier that I've been playing online for 20 years and I've never had a losing year. I'm not saying I won millions of dollars I'm saying I pretty much play online 360 days a year and I've never had a losing year

Can you post any graph you have?

Of course they can, the same way scientists can believe in god and trump voters can give to charity. The validity of their argument is only weakly correlated with their winrate. Don't be an a$$. You don't win anything when you prove someone to be an idiot or losing player. It is way out of line for you to suggest this person needs to see a psychiatrist. That's a pretty nasty ad hominem. Take your words back and apologise.

That's kind of a strange comment. Why couldn't Trump supporters give to charity? I'm sure plenty of trump supporters give to charity.

that's my damn point

My problem with him isn't that his argument is invalid. It's a perfectly reasonable hypothesis that online poker sites might rig their algorithm.

My problem stems from all the bs that had occurred afterwards. You ask jungmit to steelman his own argument and he just steemrolls ahead and says he's convinced he is right.

His writing style is extremely rambling, he lacks cogency.

My first comment to him was "wouldn't it be an insane conspiracy for dozens of poker sites to independently manipulate their algorithms in a complex fashion over a period of multiple decades without a single inside leak?"

But he ignores my question and continues to embrace the conspiracy and paranoia.

I don't think poker is a game that requires high level critical thinking, or open-mindedness, like science does. So, it is reasonable to believe someone like him could succeed in poker, it just feels counterintuitive to me.

But if you look back on the internet there has been insiders that have come forward. They then get debunked by everybody and say it's not true. I used to prop games for ultimate bet. I was a prop player for that site. So what you had to do was you had to have like an instant messenger open so you would talk to the people at the site and they would tell you what tables to go to. The idea was to start new tables so they would get more games going. And in my conversation with one of those guys he worked for ultimate bet he said after I've seen what I've seen here he goes I would never play online poker. Which kind of shocked me because I'm like he works for a poker site. Now I'm saying if he came out and said something about a site not being random people would just write it off as well he was probably a disgruntled employee. Nobody wants to believe that it's a possibility. It's just what it is people that play just don't want to believe that it's a possibility that a site could be doing something to get more money for itself. I mean if you go online and see this guy Mickey Maze he is convinced that casinos cheat using their random shuffles they have in the casinos. I mean he has won millions of dollars supposedly at casinos and he's 100% convinced that the casino's cheat.

We found Mikki Mase's target demo.

All these traits you've listed are standard human traits that do not indicate neurodivergence or lower than average intelligence. He is almost certainly at least in the top 50% of poker players and I would deem him of higher than average intelligence on the basis of this discussion.

Your problem with him should be that is argument is invalid, not that he's stupid. Much smarter people than you or I have believed some ridiculously stupid things. For example, Bobby Fischer, arguably the greatest chess player ever to have lived (at least outside the era of modern chess engines), believed some crazy things. He was highly likely neurodivergent AF, but the discoverer of DNA believed in race science, and Heidegger, a well-respected philosopher, was a Nazi, and you could probably find a wealth of biologists who believe in god.

Attack the argument. Not the person. What you're doing is ad hominems. If his idea is garbage, you don't need to attack the person. So by attacking the person instead of the argument, you lend weight to his hypothesis.

None of this -> the RNG in online poker creates systematically designably different results to shuffling a deck of cards. It certainly does -> 'cheating is rampant in online poker'.

I attacked the argument. However, once I realize the person I am talking to lacks the ability to even consider the opposing POV, then the debate becomes pointless.

I'll take your word that he is >50% in poker ability. I was being sincere when I pondered openly whether someone who lacks critical thinking abilities and open-mindedness can succeed in poker.

I think poker is like chess, it's about memory and pattern recognition. Not critical reasoning or open-mindedness.

I shifted the discussion to something else that I found interesting (what are your mental diagnoses) because your ongoing debate with him is clearly pointless.

The debate hasn't been pointless for me, though I'd hasten to call any of this a debate. The pointless bit comes when you focus on the person rather than the argument.

Success at poker and chess are both correlated with critical thinking and logical ability. But you can have those prerequisites and still be an awful poker player for life. That's why so many lawyers and doctors, who assume that their big brains automatically will make them good at poker, are fish.

I have over 3M hands of plo online and around 6000 hours live and I wanna chime in with a few points.

1. I strongly disagree with the assertion that online 1/2 players are just as terrible as live 1/2 players. Live fish are fundamentally much more lacking than online fish, in terms of even basic concepts like the valuation of non nut flushes/draws when facing aggression. These type of gaps alone will account for huge discrepancies in win rates. A lot of live poker is nut peddling and having a big whale pay you off in these spots. Yes you have terrible players both live and online, but there are different levels of this badness and its not correct to lump both live and online fish together in a generic statement.

2. Live pot calculation and inflation is larger than its online counterpart. Online 1/2 PLO you open true pot to $7. Most venues live (Vegas, Florida, Texas etc) the 1/2 is a $5 bring in and you can raise pot to $15. In parts of texas, their 1/3/6 game usually has a $15 straddle and your open raise is actually $75 for some reason. Due to the game size being inflated just from how different preflop pot calculations are, of course live win rates will also be noticeably inflated.

3. I've always suggested that your hourly ceiling in live is more correlated to the effective stack depths in play rather than the blind sizes. Online buy ins are typically capped to 100 BBs so when you get in a dream stack-off spot vs a whale, you're limited in how much you can win through that buy in cap. My highest win rate location live is the 2/2 PLO game at the Lodge. Most of it is attributed to a huge pot I won due to their match the stack buy in rules. An unbelievable whale ran his stack up to $6k and i simply topped off to $6k to match his stack. A few orbits later, we ended up playing a close to 13k pot where he got in bottom 3 pair drawing dead vs my top set. It didn't matter that the stakes were 2/2 PLO. We stuck $6k into the middle on the turn. It's incredibly improbably to ever really have a +$7k session at 1/2 online but live, this is not that rare of an occurrence due to effective stack depths being significantly deeper.

Good post. Just to add a couple of things:

1. The rate of hands we see online (and the fact you can play more tables) means that the refraction of the player pool happens faster, i.e. bad players lose their money faster. More of these go broke more quickly, leaving fewer fish in the pool. More hands (and more convenience) means good players working hard on their game get better more quickly too. This refraction effect is probably a very important factor here. Early online games were far, far easier than they are today - probably a lot easier than many live games today. When I started out, I met a grinder that was making $100k+ every year mass-multitabling low-stakes NL with a strategy that amounted to 'no set, no bet'.

2. One of the reasons casinos care so much about money laundering is that casinos have always been a place where criminals go to wash their money. Online deposits are strict and trackable (in fiat sites, anyway); casinos with overly strict AML laws can become less profitable (the Vic in London is a great example. not much action there these days, I hear). It's possibly a little difficult to tease out exactly why but it seems somewhat clear to me that a criminal looking to money launder at poker will be more likely to be a fish than a random.

3. Live tells can be very valuable.

4. In casinos you will very regularly get highly casual punters who have wondered in from blackjack and don't understand that poker is a skill game, or don't care. While you might get some online, I'd wager you'll get more casual punters in casinos.

5. A small point, but if you've driven an hour to a casino, with the plan to stay the evening, and you go on tilt and lose 80% of your buyins for the night, you've got some sunk cost fallacy (I think?) going on whereby you'll say 'I may as well punt the rest off'. When playing online, and you haven't had to do all that driving, you'll be more likely to say 'ah, no, have some self-control, no need to punt the rest off'.

Though I'd say the larger buyins and bringins are the most important factor here. I've seen a £24k pot @ £1/2; and a £970k pot @ £50/100 (I lost). Both were in uncapped buyin games.

It's also useful to note that we can find a trade-off. Live is higher profitability, but also higher variance, because of the slow rate of hands; online is less profitable but also lower variance per session i.e. in relative terms rather than absolute.

Wazz playing $1,000,000 pots on the reg? o_O

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As someone who had played 100 - 10K online within a 3 week window years ago, I would say that rake was and still is the main determining factor for how beatable each limit is, assuming that your game quality is approximately equal at ~4.8 reg:1.2 rec ratio at each limit. For online games which are 5% with a $3 cap (with no other goofy rake on the side bullshit like BBJ) I would say that 400, 500, and 600 are limitis that are/were significantly more easy to crush than 200 where the pool is generally much tighter and you get rake raped any time you enter a pot vs another reg. The difference between paying 3bb - 5bb/100 and 9 - 12bb/100 is ****ing massive, especially when you are only playing in "decent/good" games with at least one spot that is losing 30bb+/100 (pre rake.) 600 was a bit of a goofy stake and likely beatable at the highest rate between 400 -1K, it had the advantage over 1K in that many players that played 2K and higher generally wouldn't drop down below 1K so you payed slightly more rake than at 1K, but had a better player pool which ended up working in your favor and giving you a higher bb/100.

For current GG, there are too many factors that go into how beatable games at 200 - 2K are to give a straight answer like you could years ago on Stars and other public sites.

How beatable each limit is for live games is going to vary massively depending on your city/venue, much more so than on online between sites or "public" app rooms/unions.

Just once. Probably played ~10 pots in the 6 figures in my lifetime (in cash games). This was a crazy outlier at the end of a night with a very deepstacked very bad fish but even then I really should have cashed out earlier.

Having said that I'd likely have had to wait ~ a year to get paid had I won

I mean maybe I'm missing all of this and a lot of good points have been made. But the sites I play on I basically play against the same guys all the time. The same fish somehow make enough money on rake back or depositing more money, or whatever it is that it's mostly the same players all the time. So the player pool I'm at is terrible and it's basically the same guys all the time. So it's not a scenario where the fish are being run out of the game and they don't play anymore. Usually when I'm at a table with five other players I got four players labeled as a fish and one of them might be labeled as a decent player. If I look at a scenario of how often I get my money in as a 60% favorite or better I would say it's 90% of the time but I am not sure I'm winning anywhere near what I'm supposed to. Most all-ins where I'm unsure I will go to a calculator and run the odds and I go okay yep I was a 72% favorite etc. But this is what I'm saying the point is I just don't see it as there's a tough player pool that I'm in, and the fish on coming back. I have notes on 80% of all players that I play because it's always the same people. Yet somehow these guys are consistently shoving flush draws and destroying my sets or straights well over half the time. This is what I'm saying is I don't understand. But as I say overall I'm definitely up money for us them I just feel like I should be up way more money but maybe I'm out of line here I don't know. Because I play on sites where you can't use poker trackers then I have to just make assumptions but I have played on site where I have used poker trackers so I get a good feel for where I'm actually at as far as all in EV and things like that

Weren't you the person that played Phil gelfand online that time? I remember reading a post you made or I thought you said that 1-2 players online seem to have the biggest fish of any level. Maybe I'm wrong

yes lol.

I'm not sure I'd necessarily phrase it as biggest fish but I do still believe its the best stake to play for PLO (at least on nevada's WSOP.com).

To clarify, I think starting at 2/5+ The reg to fish ratio gets alot worse at 6 max, like 3-4 regs 2 fish, and at .25/.5 or .5/1, I just feel like the $/hr and the higher rake ratio makes it not as worth it. At 5/10+ it just becomes a pure bumhunt and games break as soon as the targetted fish dies so in terms of consistently putting in hours, I think 1/2 online is best.