"The Pen:" Live NLHE Chat Thread

I've always by-passed the "gofundme" and given directly to the person involved. If they are legit, they don't have gofundme skimming off the money they need. If not, then I avoid giving to scammers.

Paddy? Venice?

When I was at the Kings house a few weeks ago he told be about an alien thread in politics forum. I couldn’t find it, so instead I came here to beg for money.

Scam alert. Proceed with caution.

It's worse than you may think. It's all about bat twirls and mullets.

Never been away.

If I was giving to the doctor, sure. But that money is going to blood sucking corporate medical group that will apply it to the full retail cost, instead of the actual negotiated price.

We know a thing or two about mullets.

hey Rick Roll - Based on trewpers bet size and the games he plays; I know there is a fcukton of pie in the sky variables going on at once is it possible to range an hourly ev generated? standard dev? It just seems this is a rerun of his other ventures where is is vastly overestimating both his skillz and ev.

people may notice i always spell names rong. this is so randos cant get involved via searching

Oh, like how you're avoiding Beetlejuicing a certain citrus-based self searcher into the thread?

Sqwid F@c3

You are one of my all time favorite posters.

A legend among legends.

Thank you for all your contributions!

Lemon? Or was it Orange?

really hard to evaluate him because he drops one 20 minute video a week and acts like it’s all secret sauce. it’s not. it’s the most publicly known stuff. which makes me wonder if he’s selectively showing the bad sessions to protect actual info. this is the same guy who tweets a crockpot to troll vegans, so i wouldn’t rule out 4d chess

the biggest thing supporting the “elaborate troll job” theory is simple: if he’s actually making those plays day in and day out, i don’t see how he’s not busto. he’s playing ultra volatile games with basically no base payback and a shot at a big bonus. he’s hit two five figure jackpots in a few months. i know plenty of people who’ve never hit one. without those, i doubt he’s profitable

my baseline guess is he’s something like -50 an hour before variance, maybe worse if he played more high denom. sd probably 500 to 2k depending on the game. most of what’s out there is low denom anyway because that’s what the masses play

what i see over and over is him taking marginal or outright -ev spots and smashing a top 5 percent outcome. that happens short term. i’ve done it. you find a new game, run absurdly hot early, think 22 is the number. later the market matures and consensus is 37 and you realize you were way off. i think he’s in that phase, except he’s doing it on machines where consensus numbers are already easily googleable and way higher than what he’s playing

and the part that used to kill me was his walking to the machine parts of the videos. he’d stroll past a slam dunk play, completely unaware, sit down next to it at a different game, fire into something marginally -ev, then leave - but again that would be excellent troll work where his girl is sitting on the other play and he'll circle back to that once the camera is off

if it’s not a troll, it’s pure variance carrying him

following ap guidelines is easy, just requires dedication, originating, finding numbers that differ from consensus take a level of intelligence and self doubt that he doesn't have - he claims to be well connected though and he does sell some plays he found so there's some tiny evidence that he is in good with an AP group - just whether he's their shoe shine boy who finds plays sometimes or he's in on the secret sauce is up to debate

Hey RR -thanks for the thoughtful response, much appreciated

Yep

when i did it - i did it poorly - i was more interested in experimenting and learning and very willing to grind out the things i should have skipped (stuff where you spend 5 minutes checking the machine for a 10% chance at finding something that will likely earn you $5

i think i was making $12 an hour - but the comps probably brought it up to $30ish - playing slots for me was very much the rakeback grinder style - was stuff i did while killing 20 min waiting for 2h lines to open

did get some free cruises, thousands in hotel stays and gifts, free cruises for 2 3x (bad timing wasn't worth flying to redeem 2x so only cashed in one - going to do an alaskan one)

there's another simpsons focused poster in that thread who i'm actively in touch with who does slots professionally - idk about his bottom line but every time i discuss it with him it's incredibly obvious that i only scratched the surface - for reference - outside of a troll job, trooper probably knows <5% what i know

tr.oop.er knows <1% of what I know, but that's because I'm a self-proclaimed genius, much like Rad Thibodeux.

Something like that. Maybe Limeade?

RR / Dan GK / etc., I have zero interest in actually pursuing AP slots, but I find the whole thing sketchy AF. Course as a skeptic of everything I find everything sketchy AF, but I'll also admit I'm *100%* ignorant on it. But thought I'd ask some lol noobish questions anyway.

- where is the information gotten?

- how can you ascertain the information is remotely correct?

- wouldn't the only ones who know whether the information is correct be the internal designers of the machine, so, what, it's getting disseminated by disgruntled ex-employees (but for what gain?) or something?

- I have a tough time believing you could get any reasonable information whatsoever from sitting in front of a machine at various levels and recording results; wouldn't you need 1000s++ of hours (sitting at various levels at that) before coming to any remotely valid conclusions?

GcluelessmagicbeansnoobG

Haven't swung a club since November but getting out golfing today on what looks like a beauty day (although I'm sure the course will be very wet).

Post-injury ~recovery / onset case of the olds I'm trying very hard to just enjoy the sporting moments for what they are, a good time out with buds, although ask me again when I shoot that inevitable 9 on hole #9 and just barely (or not) break 100.

Gi'mhavingfuni'mhavingfuni'mhavingfuniamhavingagoodtimeG

gg - my gateway drug was wizardofodds, which i feel comfortable talking about publicly because it's well known and i won't be burning anyone - i basically read every single angle published on that site from cover to cover and while learning about counting for a 0.5% ev of hitting a double secret probation dragon in baccarat, kept coming across a handful of slots guides which gave out numbers

they have very little there

i then started doing comprehensive googling, searching for lists of all machine and the play states in which they are +EV and compiling a notepad

there's a paid forum but i never joined - i considered joining for a month, scraping entire site, then quitting, but never did that

this was probably helpful for my general understanding and helped me originate on some stuff when it came out fresh - but alas 90% of the machines i studied up on this way are no longer in rotation - ie one of the gold standards for ap slots was the madonna one and i've never seen that in all my casinos and all my systematic walks through the casino

some casinos have slot concierges which list everything they have and where they are located on the floor, this is helpful but not always as it's usually not up to date

most of actually helpful work was finding something that looked like it had progressive states - finding nothing at first run, but then diving deep and finding obscure forum discussion of it - and then taking their suggestions and exploring that thesis at lower denoms - sometimes they were worng, but usually they were right

there's also a lot of networking, i tried really hard to befriend other slot aps and exchange info but most won't even acknowledge what they are doing and when they do talk to you, you're not quite sure if they are giving you an ultra conservative number so you don't take their plays before they do or an ultra lax number so you go busto and stop competing

there are 2 guys i absolutely trust and they've helped me so much that i just automatically text and feed them any info i come across - sometimes i found something new that they haven't even seen yet and i'm super happy that i finally helped balance the scales but usually it's "oh no we studied that one 3 years ago - the number is x"

it's funny because the well known stuff is easy to do but hard to find, the unknown stuff is easy to find but you honestly don't know if you're making an ev play or not

the math behind the machines is hidden, so you can only use observational accounts - where you theorize "this resets at 70 and must hit at 150 (but could trigger early) so I think it's a play at 145 and make money about 80% of the time for a decent overall profit so i think that's a good number"

and a lot of it is simply just looking at outliers - with frank most banks reset to 0 or 2x so when those first came out i was very happily playing 8x because there were very few of them and it was paying well - as that game matured a bit - i discovered market consensus was much higher, acknowledged i clearly ran well in a high variance game and adjust my number to reflect the better understanding - our footsoldier still plays 6s and 8s which is truly bizarre to do now given we're post consensus

But who created these lists? How trustworthy are they?

But wouldn't this take 1000s+ of hours worth of samples to actually confirm?

And while this is my complete ignorance speaking, was there ever a concern that the same machines had interior settings that could make them payout different (or is that simply not a thing)?

Yeah, I could definitely see that being an issue. And I guess you just had to use your people skillz to know whether you were dealing with the real thing versus some delusional casino gambloorer (defaulting to the latter a good guess 99% of the time)?

Yeah, this is where sample size gets me. I just don't know how you get there without a hugenormous sample size worth of observation?

On the one hand, I think perhaps I'm being unfair in the amount of solid indisputable proven knowledge I would need to be less skeptical, especially when compared to something like how to win at poker (i.e. I don't know for sure if every author / poster / player I've discussed the game with knows exactly what they are talking about, my sample size is a lol ~7000 hours at 1/3 NL so lol at my observation "proof", I would probably be considered a heretic myself, etc.).

But having said that, I can only guess the +EV is so thin in AP slots, so if your knowledge turns out to not be exactly correct you're probably not too far off from your typical casino gambloorer (where most are losers although fate will decide a few lucky ones). Whereas in LLSNL the +EV margin is so large that any non-moronic system will win.

Anyhoo, I'm most definitely not going down the rabbit hole (I have zero desire to sit in front of a slot machine), but I do find it somewhat interesting as a complete outsider... though also something I remain completely skeptical about.

GcluelesswitchcraftnoobG

I will defer to rickroll on all matters advantage play, he knows a lot more than me and there is a lot of good info in his posts ITT. I am a casual in the AP slots world, it's just more of a fun thing to do when I am taking a break from playing poker. I've grinded slots for ~200 hours at this point and my hourly is roughly in line with what I make at $1/$2. I play low limit stuff exclusively though (bankroll management and whatnot) and I haven't had any really big hits yet. It has resulted in infinitely better comps from my local casino too, which is a nice bonus.

The real gateway to playing slots for me was through hustling bonuses on my local online casinos. I got into that, made several thousand dollars in ridiculously easy fashion, and then started trying to branch out into other forms of advantage gambling. Like RR, WizardOfOdds was a starting point for me with slots. My true introduction to the concept came from the advantage gambling podcast Risk of Ruin though, specifically an interview with a guy named Mickey Crimm who has been a slots pro for a long time. He is extremely forthcoming with his info (much of which comes from manually tracking thousands of spins) on several different gambling message boards as well.

At this point I have paid some small money for info behind a paywall. I am also networking with a local friend I made on 2p2 who is much sharper than I am. I treat any info that I get with healthy skepticism but the stuff that I've gotten from the paid site has been very helpful and there is great discussion happening on that site's message board.

The 2p2 friend I mentioned above put a lot of work into an online slot play that I was involved in recently. He had me help him to manually track the result of individual spins and then was analyzing the info using AI. I believe he ended up tracking over 20k spins. At that point, he had a confidence interval that was sufficient to show that the play was +EV. It would take a lot more spins to know the exact return percentage, but 20k spins was more than enough enough so that the AI could be certain that it was positive.

Imagine my surprise when I googled Bobby Shantz and discover that he's still alive at 100 years old. According to his wiki, "He is the last living Philadelphia Athletics player, the oldest living MLB MVP, and the last surviving MLB player who played in the 1940s."

Thanks for the info / stories RR and Dan.

Ha, I remember when I'd get the occasion $10 match play coupon every so often in the mail. I would sometimes take a break during pokering to play the match play, but the time to stand in line at the font desk, get the coupon validated, get into the roulette game, place the bet on red, wait for the payout, etc. would take at least a solid 10 minutes. I believe the match play was an EV of $3.89 or something like that, which is just slightly greater than my historical EV at 1/3 NL per 10 minutes. But then when I factored in the mental cost of perhaps missing a poker BBJ while I'm off making $3.89, I concluded it made zero sense to do so, lol, so those coupons have gone directly into the garbage ever since.

Gclueless+EVnoobG