ClubWPTGold - RNG discussion

whats your theory here? cheating? colluding? the rng is rigged for this guy specifically?

My experience was the runouts. It seemed like weak players were over-realizing equity in every spot. Obviously, sample size matters etc etc but it felt bizarre

I think the site is creating new accounts and they are over realizing their equities. If anyone questions the sample sizes, there are some examples in previous pages. A guy playing 89/44 won 1/3 the hands in a 9 hour continuous session. I'm sorry, but as someone playing for profit for 10+ years I've never seen a rec not take a break in 9 hours. And he snap makes every decision. So, I think it's a combination of RNG faults and superusing.

Most of these issues would not be issues if the player pool was just better. The amount of people who put too much money with weak holdings into multi-way pots and/or bet way too big in them is why you are seeing such massive variance.

These aren’t signs of bad RNG, it’s actually signs of a great game.

The only thing you should be saying after some 90/10 idiot wins a 600bb 3b pot with J963 suited to the 6 is……..what a fucken great game I’m in and reload instantly.

Everything this thread is complaining about are actually signs of great games being constantly available. This is a gold mine.

Love it. Thread full of fish, best site in the world by far. Pokerboom 2.0

I cant play there because im not from america but its must be one of hell of a soft site
Everyone is getting screwed over but still are beating the game hard
Than you know you have a fishy game :p

Yeah I disagree with this. The worse the competition is the lower the variance should be for winning players. I am not sure how so many people think the opposite is true. Sure you will see more dramatic individual hands where some crazy bad beat occurs. But you should have far more overall variance playing against solid players who are actually trying to find plus ev spots and get their money in good then you should against people who play reckless and don't care.

on a huge downswing covering the last 5 sessions, about 25 hours of play, 4 tabling. literally losing every spot; missing every flop when calling w/ playable hands in position, and getting 0 action when flopping the nuts, players with 22/10 stats 3betting KJo OOP and just smashing gutshots to stack flopped top 2. all the usual stuff!

at the end of my session last night, im down a ton overall, but have 350 bbs at one table. there are 2 other players there with about the same stacks. one aggro but decent, one aggro spazbot. and we already know a clash is going to happen.

EP shortstack opens min to 8 UTG, +1 is the decent player larger stack and 3bets to 34. i call with deuces on the CO, short stack opener calls. POT 116
FLOP 10 6 2 with two hearts
action checks to me, i bet 34. short stack folds, +1... chk raises to 98. now we are pretty deep, but, obviously a call. POT 312
TURN J of hearts
+1 checks. i check it back,
RIVER is another 10
he thinks for a bit, and bets $300.
i debate on just a call, but with a boat in position here, possibly up against AA/KK/QQ or something like AT/KT, i ultimately decide to (stupidly?) go for value. i jam it in for 1100 total effective.
he thinks for a long while, uses some time banks, im like, NICE..... then he calls. i thought he might have JJ, or AT, but could also possibly have the big pairs that wouldn't have an easy decision.
but he show downs 66, a hand i wouldn't have expected.

but after seeing it, and closing up the tables for the night, i thought to myself, that's just par for the course. i don't even get mad about the legit coolers because this was just a fun hand, for the other guy. i could have just called. it was my 3rd time being set over set in the session for stacks, so going for some win back at the end was more important than being conservative, the stuff compounds when you both get outdrawn and miss flops an incredible percent of time over the course of 10k hands.

robot gpt helped me out here statistically with this stretch:
- 2.6 standard deviations below expectation
- roughly 0.4% chance of happening
- happens about 1 in 250 stretches

so yeah it can happen, reasonably about once a year at this rate. if it happens every other month, then yes it's a bit suspect, and yes we deserve to have hand histories and some better stats to prove that the games are legit as promoted.

Myself and others who are destroying the site are still wary about its legitimacy and security. If you’re not concerned at all, then good for you. The people who don’t keep their head on a swivel don’t tend to last long in poker so good luck.

i doubt 99% of the recs are in here. i wouldnt say i crush personally, but i do make an annual poker profit that is a tad bit more than many oeople's salary, so it's a good side gig,

it's just super sketch. we need hand histories. where are you codedoug??

Poker as a side gig is great. I doubt hand histories or anything that makes the site better for regs will be coming. Someone asked Doug if there were any plans to implement in game notes and he said absolutely not.

Did you ever just stop to think

“Maybe I shouldn’t be cold calling EP opens and MP 3bets to those opens”

This is what I’m talking about. When you play vs people who aren’t sound, variance goes way up.

People think it’s the other way as evident by the other poster here who says you should get more variance playing regs who are trying (lol)

Couldn’t be further from the truth. Playing vs absolute spewtards your winrate will skyrocket but your standard deviation will increase massively.

PLO is already 150-200bb/100 STD, in these games with straddles and looser players it’s more like 400-600bb/100

Plug that into a variance calc over 1000 hands and show me what kind of variance you can expect in the short term

Softest side ever post Black Friday yet they mad to lose to a guy shoving with 20% equity. Like you can't have it both ways. Either fish have a chance or poker is chess and nobody has a pipe dream to win millions. Take the variance and print.

Can't we just be happy a USA facing site takes credit cards again

That's never enough for these people. They expect to do little to no genuine, consistent, hard work on their game and be handed millions just for sitting in a chair and knowing the rules. I took on a student that was brand new to the game at the start of 2025 (brand new to POKER, not just PLO) and he is now beating 1/2 online on here, global, ignition, and acr healthily. He actually studies near daily with me, shuts up, shows up, plays the best games available on any given day, and focuses.

Be fucking honest with yourselves. You are not putting in even close to a quarter of the effort you could and should be to earn the $ you think you're entitled to. No. Watching a JNandez "Play and Explain" in the background once a month is not studying.

PLO has been and is still insanely soft because of all these lazy, weak, pussy mental regs. You should be concerned that people will step up and actually do the basics consistently and run laps around you.

So you think if you are playing at a table with 7 Guy Lalibertes you would have more variance then playing at a table with 7 Phil Galfonds? That is interesting.

Run the math yourself.

6bb/100 winner vs regs with a standard 150bb/100 deviation

Vs

20bb/100 winner vs whales with a 600bb/100 deviation

Show me which graph is crazier for variance over 1000 hands

Why are we fixating on 1000 hand samples in the first place?

No one doubts "short term variance higher in crazy games"

You'd think people being around the game for this long would understand talking about 1000 hands is lol.

But those standard deviation numbers are just made up by you. If I were to plot a graph of an average 20bb/100 winner and compare it to that of an average 6bb/100 winner I will see far less variance in the graph of the 20bb/100 winner. Of course the graphs will look smoother for both the more hands that are calculated.

Still amazed how many people in poker dont know what variance is.

Variance in poker is the statistical difference between expected long-term results and actual results.

Versus huge fish the swings are crazier than versus great regulars.
Of course the expected profit is way higher versus the fish but thats not what variance entails. Variance is how much it differs from the expected profit, not if that profit is high, low or even negative.

Over, lets say 300k hands, the chance of running 20 buyins over/under expected profit is higher versus crazy fish than versus solid regs. Therefore variance against all fish is higher.

When a game gets more "volatile" variance increases. So when switching from NLHE to PLO, switching from full ring to 6max or from 6max to HU, playing 250bb deep instead of 100bb deep. All increase variance while they dont rely on winrate or the quality of the opponent.

Here in Austin the PLO games are 1/2 with a $5 bring-in, unlimited straddles from UTG to the Button (can get up to $320, I've seen it) and match the stack. As soon as people see a big pot brewing, they can't help themselves, they HAVE to get their stack in with any four napkins because they have FOMO.

Now you're in a 6-way all-in preflop and the variance is through the ***** ROOF!

Let me ask you this: Say I have two biased coins. One with a 65-35 edge and the other with a 55-45 edge. Lets say we flip each of these 300k times each. Which do you think will produce the higher variance? And would you say this scenario is different then playing in 2 different poker games, one where you get your money in on average as a 65-35 favorite vs one where you get your money in on average as a 55-45 favorite?

That’s expected value, not variance.

Variance is flipping the coin 10 times in a row and getting tails all 10 times

I think there are different ways to think about variance that can confuse these discussions. I understand that variance probably has a technical definition in terms of how likely you are to have swings that are standard deviations above or below your expected value. Which is what Slugant it getting at.

In the coin flip example I gave you rate to have far less 20 flip downswings ( or upswings) over the 300k sample with a 65-35 edge vs the 55-45 edge. I don't think either of you would argue with that. I think you can correlate that with poker buy-ins as well.

The main thing that is different about poker is the fluctuation in pot sizes. Against aggressive fish you are putting yourself more at risk of running bad in the bigger pots which will come up more frequently then if you are playing against a bunch of tight regs. So over smaller samples if your 65-35s lose (or win) more then they should in the 200bb+ pots that will greatly deviate your actual results from your EV. For example over the course of 1000 hands you might play 60 big pots against the fish where as you would only play 20 big pots against solid regulars. So I acknowledge that part.

But when most people talk about or think about variance in poker they think about how likely it is to have big downswings. I am arguing that not only will you win more overall against fish, you are far less likely to have big downswings against even wild aggressive fish then you will against good players.

Another thing to add is that there is far more nuance to this then most recognize. For instance not all fish are the same. Passive calling station fish should create less variance for the winning players regardless of how you define variance. The same with fish that fold too much. It also matters greatly how the winning players approach playing against the fish. Even different players with the same overall long term win rate playing in identical games can have vastly different variance expectations. And there are ways to exploit fish that some are far better at then others. Point being that it is far more complicated then simple mathematical formulas.

Again, variance is how much an actual result varies from the expected result
It doesnt matter if that expected result is +100k or -50k or whatever.
A game is more variance heavy when actual results are more distant from the expected.

What you explain in your coin flipping example is not variance, its expected value/result.
The 65/35 coin gives you a bigger edge, but the standard deviation is exactly the same so it does not affect variance at all.

When you say "most people talk about or think about variance in poker they think about how likely it is to have big downswings" its because they misunderstand variance the same way you do.

Nobody is questioning you get less downswings versus fish, but again this is because your edge and expected value is a lot higher. You are more likely to be 20 buyins under EV for instance, but because you have such an edge you are less likely to actually be down over that sample than if you were playing all-reg line-ups.
But for sure you are not the only one who gets these two things tangled up, thats why I said:

If you want to learn more about variance and how heavy it affects different types of poker primedope has an excellent variance calculator which could give many people a better insight 😉

Example:

First picture is more reggy, so less std.dev, and your wr is 2.5, bit more fishy your WR doubles but st.dev also increases.
The probability of loss is almost half when playing with the fish.
But the deviation from the expected winrate is also considerably higher.
With the WR of 2.5bb/100 in a 70% confidence interval its 3.16 on either side, with the more volatile games but double the WR of 5bb/100 its 4.43
You can see in the 95% confidence interval its -/+ 6.32bb/100 versus -/+ 8.85 bb/100

That last part is exactly what variance is, not the probability of losing.

PS: you can also see how easy it is to lose over 100k hands even though you are actually a winning player 😉