The Poker Zoo Podcast

The straddle is a third blind added to the traditional two blind structure of hold’em and other related games. It’s not always a neutral proposition. The extra blind can help stimulate action or inhibit it, depending on the players and stack sizes. More controversially, the straddle often gets put into play with a certain amount of social pressure. For this reason, in the games I host, I allow unlimited straddling but never allow it to become mandatory – because there is always That Guy who doesn’t want to straddle, and I don’t think a good host forces people to do things.

Our guest today Brent Jenkins is that guy who is tired of what he calls “stakes terrorists” prodding him into putting on the straddle. Not a big deal you say? Just say no to straddles, Nancy reminds you – you have the option. Well, as we all know, it’s not that simple. Pro-straddlers can be pushy and unpleasant. There is a social stigma that if you are against the straddle, you are somehow against a “good game.” Objecting to the straddle becomes a form of poor behavior – it is stigmatized.

Brent doesn’t think it should be like this and has written what he titles The Anti-Straddle Manifesto. For the TLDR crowd it’s going to be a heavy lift, but I can assure you it is fairly straightforward and marshals many good arguments for his case. In the introduction he even lists the headers for the points he’s going to make, at pains to be clear.

To really understand his argument, we have to separate the social pressure aspect and the straddle itself. Brent makes arguments against both, but the former is what is most important to him. Poker is constantly concerned with “what is good for the game” and he makes a fairly reasonable case that “stakes terrorists” are not acting in its best interests.

The straddle itself, on the other hand, is going to be a less clear subject. Most players who love it confuse the correlation of action they bring with the incentive the straddle adds to the game, and therefore are under the delusion that they are the “good guys” here, when it is really much more of a grey area. Straddles halve the effective stacks and limit actions, while providing third blind complexity. Tradeoffs.

The notoriously bitchy, micro-edge seeking culture of the 5/10 scene at Wynn and other casinos has led to that leading room now removing the straddle from the game in favor of a big blind ante. Brent is obviously pleased by this contiguous development. We’ll want to watch and see how it all plays out. Brent argues the lack of straddles will stimulate players to play at their appropriate stakes size, and anecdotally already reports some of that happening. Conversely, I’ve heard negative rumors as well.

In any case, whether you are a die-hard straddler or one of Brent’s acolytes, hopefully today’s podcast makes you think about this hidden big deal within cash game culture. Enjoy the pod.

N.B. Dean is occupied, my apologies for the stripped down podcast and any balance issues.

The post PZ94: Brent Jenkins is That Guy appeared first on Out of Position.

One of the common twists of fate in poker is the change in personal relationships on account of strategy and results. At one point now nearly forgotten, the entrance of Alvin Lau into the Red Chip Poker forum caused a whole chain of events to unfold.

One end result was the rise of Alvin’s first poker teaching and programming, Overnight Monster, as ambitious RCP and other players flocked to his initial offerings. This established Alvin as a strong coaching prospect for low stakes online players. The forum feuding and questions of etiquette in turn led me to become more independent, as I could not deny Alvin’s superior strategies and reasoning in the forums. This interaction later became a series of interviews with Alvin which would become the most popular of the Poker Zoo’s first episodes, as we both agreed and sparred over a whole series of subjects and ideas, from Pluribus to race identity.

Today Alvin returns after several years in the Texas poker scene. It’s been a minute for sure, and he’s changed quite a bit: our far-reaching conversation reflects both personal and professional changes. As a coach who has a very straightforwardly successful and straightforward program, he has become popular with those who are absolutely committed to moving up fast online and live. While coaches and players do grumble about their competition behind the scenes, Alvin belongs in a special tier of slightly less-known experts you can count on probably better than anyone in poker yet are still accessible, a unique tier that includes player/coaches like Upswing’s Gary Blackwood, Peter Clarke of Carrot Poker, and now Marc Goone of Hungry Horse.

While Alvin had earned a reputation as a difficult person to deal with, relationships work both ways; I was not persuaded his apparent harshness was always unwarranted. Further, his many success stories bely the trouble he’s run into – even with students from my own community. He has also had an obviously huge impact on the vlogger with the highest number of subscribers ever – Wolfgang.

We talk extensively about Alvin’s work with Wolfgang today. Being the coach of a near-celebrity poker player means the spotlight is on the student. Alvin, however, is more than ever okay with that, even writing about it on his Youtube page.

Yet that’s not the real surprise today, because Alvin discusses a likely reason he has sometimes struggled in the coaching relationship, despite his passion for it: autism.

Does this self-diagnosis resolve everything? Alvin, a fierce solver and simplification advocate at the time, was hard on RCP and on a semi-related book project. Under the weight of Alvin’s public fire, the project collapsed, and the forum was retracted as RCP reorganized itself to catch up with the times. Was Alvin unnecessarily cruel or was he just stating the facts, an inevitable agent of the marketplace of ideas?

Through the lens of his diagnosis, it was neither. Instead, it was the manifestation of indifference or unawareness of social behaviors that is often the outcome of his condition. I’m not a fan of the medicalization of personality issues that seems to plague contemporary society and especially parents – why can’t he just have these traits without a diagnosis – but it struck me during our talk that if a diagnosis of a trait can bring understanding and peace to a person, and even change their behavior for the betterment of all, who am I to question the label or the process?

Our talk goes quite a bit beyond this and Wolfgang, as we get the real deal on the state of Texas NL, the real reason not every great poker mind plays high stakes, and even some strong live poker tell stuff.

I hope you enjoy Alvin’s return.

A few links:

Alvin mentioned Wolfgang’s ownership stake in Home – The Fort Card Room

Alvin on the Poker Zoo.

The post PZ93: Alvin Behind the Scenes appeared first on Out of Position.

The Poker Zoo continues its latest revival with an interview on a key poker subject: the quantification of winning and losing in games of chance. Going to play a session of poker is gambling, guest Mason Malmuth asserts unambiguously, but the question becomes more interesting and complex over the horizon of time. In fact, the answer now can change – or may not, depending on your expectation.

A new edition of his Gambling Theory and Other Topics covers this and all kinds of other poker statistics concepts. It seems like a forgotten essential text because the questions and the math don’t change, nor has the community really added much to Mason’s work that started back in the 1980’s.

Gambling Theory and Other Topics has been very helpful in creating my current article series on playing live one three. The interplay of expectation and standard deviation was not previously clear to me before, especially as forum posters continuously toss around arbitrary sample size requirements and myths about “variance.”

The final section of the book is unexpected, however, being a long series of short reviews on poker and gambling books. As I went through some of the reviews, I realized how valuable this summary is, should anyone want to get a picture of the history of poker strategy. That said, there are two key books (and maybe others) that are not in the reviews, unless I’m mistaken. The first is Easy Game by Andrew Seidman, probably the finest of all poker general strategy books in overall quality and influence. It’s somewhat dated now because of the precision of today’s tools, but Seidman’s thinking process and his teaching knack remains unmatched. Second, Let There Be Range by Tri Nguyen and Cole South similarly shared high stakes high ideas in the transformative years of modern no-limit. This was a breakthrough read for many.

Thanks to Poker Zoo member Kent D. for reading the book with me and preparing questions. Thanks also, of course and as usual, to Dean for putting our podcast together. Now go find some peppers!

The post PZ92: Malmuth on Gambling appeared first on Out of Position.

Poker pro and instructor Marc Goone has created a bit of a stir in saying he can beat the low stakes, specifically his local 5/5 game, for at least $100 an hour. Interestingly, it’s been done and is being done – the shock is not actually the number but how few do it or challenge themselves to get there.

On today’s Poker Zoo I get the details on the challenge (he’s already well into it) and find out why he thinks he can take the lead in the under-appreciated, temporal excellence of the modest and modest-stakes crusher. After all, if you are good – like Marc is – you don’t hang around here, right?

We also go over Marc’s coaching and staking program, Hungry Horse. He’s not the only one out there providing this exact kind of poker education. More and more of your opponents in the low to mid stakes are part of programs or study groups or professionals. That’s the inevitable effect of time, inflation, and shrinking cash game liquidity. Players move down or laterally, looking to find the existing soft games. Hungry Horse is just that, hungry, and is gathering and focusing many names you know on grabbing more dollars. Marc’s recent tweet about content creators being fish probably hit all too close to some client homes.

Part of Hungry Horse’s marketing is Marc’s appeal to younger players. With his tattoos, mustache and opinionated yet mildly ironic attitude, Marc presents the slimmer, more contemporary face of live poker, a scene which is often otherwise filled with alternating slobs, fitness lifestyle freaks, untrustable social media baiters, and withdrawn or tempestuous shitregs. Hungry Horse is not aimed at the average the aging boomer or gen-x player who no longer studies and still identifies with a fat accountant’s inexplicable tournament run, but at those who still want or need a growing future in poker.

Of course, much of the appeal, as with everything, is in the presentation. Surrounding some intriguing tactics in Hungry Horse’s free Youtube videos are all the classic hits of strategy adjustment: nihil novem sub sole.

A few extra notes: it’s worth listening to Charlie Wilmoth’s six month fall from grace and his subsequent time at the $5 games, in a series of podcasts focused on a major, attitude-changing downswing. Moreover, Charlie coaches for Hungry Horse, if I am not mistaken.

My latest series on a similar challenge contains some data and statistical stuff that might be of use. Further, a Zoo podcast with Mason Malmuth on those ideas is done and is being produced.

Here’s the Aero vlogger I mention who is having big success in my player pool. His style doesn’t look as sustainable as Marc’s but on the other hand, demonstrates the money available and is an argument in Marc’s favor for succeeding in the challenge.

Lastly, check out Limon’s interview with Mike Basich, another known crusher of the California five-dollar games, and how he does it. It’s interesting to listen to how little things change, despite solvers and data and all the stuff with which we scare ourselves.

The post PZ91: The Marc Goone Challenge appeared first on Out of Position.

Legendary poker theorist and writer David Sklansky joins us on the Zoo. We discuss Twoplustwo Publishing’s new book, Small Stakes Hold’em: Help Them Give You Their Money, an already controversial strategy work by David and his business partner Mason Malmuth.

Freshly published in January 2024, the new book focuses on adaptive play in the softest small-stakes games and against the absolutely worst players. “When I started to play these games,” David writes in the book’s introduction, “which are the large majority of poker games spread today, it was shocking at how badly many of the players played, and this included many opponents who were regulars in these games.

A book wasn’t far off from there, especially as Mason was already in the Vegas low-stakes scene and was seeing many of the same things; here’s his PZ interview. Early versions attracted attention on Twoplustwo thanks to some provocatively strange hands that were unsurprisingly misinterpreted; even Bart Hanson, king of live poker training, when correcting a forum statement about wide ranges, felt further compelled to drop some literalist outrage as well as scold Mason over a nitty drawing recommendation. On one hand, everything is fair game, and the examples were not perfectly representative, as David explains in our podcast. On the other, a little unfair given how many ideas Bart (and all of us) has cribbed from the old theorists – think of all those endless podcasts on set mining, implied odds, and effectively value betting that derive straight from Sklansky and Seidman. Ideas, especially in books, are best understood as questions to be discussed. Instead, we have social media, whose arc is short and bends toward conflict.

It definitely didn’t go past me that many of the experienced posters in the book’s forum thread didn’t seem to understand certain poker fundamental ideas. One recurrently loud poster kept challenging Sklansky on the expected value of a hand multiway, not understanding where EV comes from or how the game might differ from the “allowed” calls in a solver abstraction. Now what was interesting was that this player is a studied one, a student of the solves and the population data. He probably is quite the online threat. Yet when his conversation extended itself to why we open and to what size, he revealed only further misconceptions. The urge to assume prolific poker authors don’t have some slight idea about what they are doing is odd to say the least, and the ability of players to play in certain environments without knowing what is going on underneath is a fascinating surety.

These short interactions demonstrate an interesting leak in today’s poker education culture: we love the model and its outputs, while we are quickly losing track of the theory. The model is not theory; we improve theory from the model’s outputs, but the model is itself mute and is only possible because of theory. Consider how often smart players say to study the big picture, not every detail; what do you think that is really all about? Yet aspiring players immediately run home to check their lines against GTOW, the seductive application which has become as much of a soothing AI doll for regs as it is a strategic tool. Further, consider how often someone in your Discord starts a foolish statement with “in theory we should,” then goes on to refer to some obscure spot in a solve output. No, theory explains the data and is enhanced by the data; we can’t even get out of first gear when we talk so rashly and incorrectly about first things.

Small Stakes Hold’em: Help Them Give You Their Money is a book of theory and the attendant primitive math of proofs and samples and suggestions. It is often exploitative and so the examples can look ugly- yet how else would such a word and action perform? The elegant totality of GTO solutions is not replicated here. However, that doesn’t mean theory is not at work in every single spot. In fact, many of the hands are simply unmodeled spots that the reader is not used to seeing. At one point David gets impatient with me as I bridge the gap between his exploit and generally good play. When he the general speaks of GTO, he’s more focused on the big picture of what it is and what are its tell-tale effects; I’m the tired grinder and poker coach who needs to unite disparities into clear directives for myself and the platoon.

I find this book to be enjoyable, but you will need an open mind to have that experience. There is a great deal of poker irony in reading about doing some stuff exactly the way many of us learned to avoid; pot-builder anyone? Limp-fold sound good to you? I don’t want to do everything it says, even with bad players as the target, but in taking the ideas on, I get a better understanding of why. If you, on the other hand, are like the posters in the thread, if you need examples of absolutely replicable plays, as the posters or Bart want, you may not like it so much. There is a lot to read; its contradictions must be reconciled; its arithmetic must be tested.

Of course, there it is, another big picture: poker books are not out of fashion because you can’t learn from them, they are out of fashion because they are not content. Content has a play button. Content is the waking dream on tap. We are in the prime era of content because we are pinnacle consumers.

Books, on the other hand, perform more awkwardly than content. Books demand your full attention and worse, they unfairly demand that you wake up, all while their requisite quiet and solitude also put you to sleep. Books are difficult because they are storehouses of ideas, even storing wrong ideas that must still be dealt with. A book sits in front of you like a dusty ammunition box, one loaded with danger and pain to your mind. You let your books sit there, you let that ammo go unspent, because there are other buttons more safely pushed.

Just put on a poker vid or vlog, my dear shitreg, you deserve a nice, long break, don’t you? Yes, you’re just running bad, that’s it.

Our book today is merely a poker one, but the principle remains. We’re a silly industry and we think about silly things, but we’re still a part of a greater culture and its greater trends. I spent some of today in minor horror at the suggestions of our poker betters that they would simply back-channel solve the inconveniences of our annoying democratic processes; yet we openly wonder why we can’t have nice things in the greater society. In other words, even studying to beat the spots at your one-two game can be a stimulating if not enriching experience. The mind must work on something and should generally start where the stakes are small. Sklansky and Malmuth provide some guidance for doing exactly that, as usual.

Here’s the Poker Stories interview with David that I mention. Thanks for listening.

The post PZ90: Sklansky Goes Bumhunting appeared first on Out of Position.

OOP Oberleutnant Greg Porter returns to the Zoo pod for an update on his successful career as poker pro. I can’t believe it’s been six years! Time has really flown since the early days of our little group and teaching community.

Greg is an indispensable and senior member of said little community. He runs the OOP training games, providing high-level poker feedback, and specialized coaching. Greg edits my more challenging pieces and, more importantly, provides timely puns in the Poker Zoo chat.

On today’s episode, we hear about his games, and in particular about the influence of the Stand-up Game on mid/high action.

We then go through some of the highlights of 2023 in poker, the year of Doyle’s departure, Berkey’s ascension, and the long-needed return of produced poker content. Speaking of, here’s that opinion piece where I called for the return of production and writing to poker media.

After a short mental game interlude, we get into some hands from his local games.

A previous episode with Porter.

Here’s today’s hands discussed:

Hand #1 10/25 6.3Ke 8h

s5 75

s6 c

s2 c 88ds

Ac5d4h

s2 x/f

s5 100

s6 c

6d

s5 275/c

s6 1100

Jh

s5 x

s6 5025ai

Hand #2 10/20/40 8Ke 8h

s7 130/c

s8 c/c

s1 650 AJss

Qs9d8s

s1 600

s7 c

s8 f

8h

s1 x

s7 x

2c

s1 x

s7 2500

Best wishes in 2024.

The post PZ 89: Porter Returns & 2023 Poker Review appeared first on Out of Position.

It’s been a long time since I played in Washington, but the scene continues to evolve, however strangely. See, it’s all about the weird rules and regulations. Podcast guest Mannes N. gives us an update on the state of the games.

The most important details are the rules for the tribal casinos and the rules for non-tribals, which are particularly hard on the poker player. To complicate matters, the tribes have basically quit the poker business, taking the big bets with them, and forcing all the traffic into small rooms around (but not within) Seattle.

Basically, that’s why Eric Persson, owner of many of the small poker rooms, can punt your rake money off at a surprising rate. It’s a great time to own a poker room in Washington State.

Mannes regularly plays at the Caribbean and Fortune rooms, two of the most popular in the current Seattle poker market. He occasionally posts on his “Owlkeeper” blog about poker, mainly tournament trips to Vegas. Here’s a post regarding the local games.

In the second part of the pod, we go over a couple hands under the Spread Limit regime.

HH #1:

HH #2:

– S4 20

Mannes is also a thoughtful commenter on my blog, I want to thank him and all those readers who like to leave their thoughts – kind of the whole point, some would say.

The post PZ 88: Washington State Poker with Mannes N appeared first on Out of Position.

The poker world loves tournaments in the 2020’s. Online, tournament culture is vital and MTT-heavy while cash game action stalls. GG has challenged Pokerstars with huge tournaments series. U.S.-facing ACR continues to thrive. As for the live scene, everyone is amazed at the action, with WSOP and WPT now vying almost non-stop for your dollars; did I see they were bringing back the NAPT? I give in. Today we talk with one of the best in tournament poker, Enrico Camosci, and hear what it takes to rise to the top of the MTT food chain.

Enrico has had a huge 202o’s so far, with an online bracelet and multiple big results, leaving him with about $2.5 million in online wins. In Spring he took third for a massive score at the EPT Monte Carlo high roller; maybe that’s why he’s even started to scale back the grind and hang with the live whales.

Despite his success, the only way you may know him is that Enrico was the televised victim of a curious slow roll that got a little attention in 2021. Not really sure what Sam Grafton is thinking here.

In this interview I didn’t focus on results and trophies too much, but process. I wanted to hear how Enrico got to the top of the (specifically Euro) MTT world, and so I asked a lot of questions about what he does. In general, it sounds like an intense dive into specific spots but also returning to the spot later, in cyclical fashion, is his studying and coaching key. It’s certainly true that two weeks on a single board BU V BB is going to yield a lot of fruit, for instance, but you must also come back to it to truly own the knowledge.

I’m thinking he’s doing it right. If I study like him, can I be a thirty-year old vacationing in Paris, tired from beating the games in Monte Carlo? Definitely.

Once a novelty, there is now even a school of thought that tournaments have more complexity than cash games; with changing stacks, levels, and tougher competition, I think they may be right. Hope you enjoy my first chat with Enrico. You can find him on Insta, and also contact him at his in-development coaching site, MTTgod.

The post PZ 87: Enrico Camosci’s Tournament Focus appeared first on Out of Position.

Vegas is home to more than just gaming, it is home to the history of those games and to those who created that history. Richie Brodie, lifelong “poker bum,” has played with all the greats, from Doyle and his “southern” crew, to the Mayfair’s Erik Seidel, to California’s rising 1990’s NL scene with Bobby Hoff and Barry Greenstein (along with an apparently more reluctant Dan Harrington). Today we hear his story and the story of a whole age of poker, from the pre-internet obscurity of the late seventies to a comfortable seat at the Sahara deepstack game of the Covid era.

Richie starts in upper New York but is soon drawn to the Nevada games, led by his older brother, a gambler and expert sports bettor. I say Nevada deliberately, as there is a great deal of less-told history surrounding Reno, Tahoe, San Jose, and the rest of western cards; Las Vegas just wasn’t the only place. As Richie emphasizes, the games moved, and the players followed, from famous rooms to forgotten obscurities. (One of the casinos Richie mentions, Harvey’s in Tahoe, was even bombed.)

It sounds like a lot of fun: a bunch of guys who love poker gathering at Caesar’s Tahoe for two weeks of around-the-clock-play.

Think again. This is serious business.

The approximately 100 entrants in the casino’s third annual Superstars of Poker tournament huddle intently around the fifteen tables in the roped-off tournament area.

Their concentration is so intense it is nearly impenetrable. Neither the smoke hanging heavy in the air nor the persistent clanking of coins in nearby slot machines is enough to jolt the players out of their poker-induced trance.

A television broadcasting a college basket all game goes unnoticed for hours. Finally, a passing cocktail waitress turns it off.

from the Reno Gazette-Journal, “Poker More Than a Game for Tournament Players,” probably early 1990’s

For point of reference, when Richie first started playing seriously in the late seventies, David Sklansky, with whom he would soon be playing against, had just published Hold’em Poker, one of the first modern poker books. Doyle Brunson’s Super System would not appear until 1979.

I think I missed some questions that poker players would like – the real details of the games, and I mean down to the nitty gritty: what were the sizings, how many players per hand, and such.  We know Bobby Hoff introduced a lot of three betting, but what about the others? Yet Richie hints at the answer during the interview, “in reality,” he comments, “the games haven’t changed that much, but the number of players who know what they are doing has.” I think we know what that means.

Enjoy this interview full of poker history.

The post PZ 86: Richie Brodie appeared first on Out of Position.

Picture late 2019. Britain was finally Brexiting, Trump was somehow still presidenting, and general protests for a more liberal, freer society were happening all over the world- remember Hong Kong? Remember life before mask and vaccine discourse?  That’s when I last talked with Gerard S., aspiring pro and studied player who had worked with a number of noted pros and organizations, including Fausto Valdez and Solve For Why. Gerard had a poker blog, a girlfriend, a residence in sunny Florida, and was finishing up a year cleaning up at live ring games and MTTs.

Then it happened: Covid went from zero public awareness to a full-blown hysterical crisis that would shape the next decade. Covid would also trigger a sequence of events that changed everything for Gerard and his poker life. Soon he’d be signed up with Poker Detox and battling not only to beat the games, but to understand them at a new level, all while making rent.

Today, we find out where he’s at and what he’s learned.

As any poker player will tell you, a significant element of skill is involved in winning at the tables long-term. However, it’s also important to acknowledge the role luck plays in poker too.

We have zero control or say over the poker hands the dealer gives us. Nor do we have any control over the community cards dealt on the flop, turn and river. These variable outcomes can cause short-term volatility in your poker results, known as variance.

Game selection has a major bearing on the cause of variance in poker. If your preference is to enter vast, multi-table tournaments with fields of hundreds or thousands of players, it’s fair to say your poker bankroll will encounter immense variance. That’s because these big-field tournaments carry so much volatility. If you’re playing for hours or even days, it’s possible to experience run-good and then run into the brick wall of a downswing and be knocked out before you’ve even made the money.

-from “What is Variance in Poker?” by poker.org

The Poker Zoo often visits with Coaching for Profits players, check out episodes such as

Episode 43: Luka turns to CFP and Nick Howard

Episode 40: Coaching for Profits with KYT

Episode 36: Odb_Blackbaron/DLF on CFP

PZ 71: More Coaching, More Profits, with Luka V – Out of Position (persuadeo.nl)

and others, including from a coaching perspective.

Hot Pepper Jelly

2 C Green Bell Peppers cut into pieces for the food processor

For a red version, substitute red bell peppers and just 1/4 C thai chilies

Combine these in a food processor and mince accordingly

Ingredients:

Pepper mash from the food processor

Combine Pepper mash, sugar and vinegar in a sauce pan and boil for 5 min, then turn heat off and leave for 20 minutes.

Add fruit pectin and boil hard for 2 minutes.

Ladle into small canning jars (we use pint size) and can using typical water bath canning procedure.

For a quick appetizer for parties, you can simply serve over a block of Philadelphia cream cheese.

If you have access to a smoker you can take it to the next level by sprinkling some BBQ rub on the cream cheese and smoking it at low heat (190F) and then serve in the same way as above.

Pepper Jelly also works well for Holiday parties (thus the red and green colors) on a charcuterie tray with other cheeses and ‘Nancy’s famous cheese ball recipe.’

8 oz Cream cheese

Outer covering:

½ C Walnuts, chopped

Mix all the cheese and seasonings together and form into one large ball or 2 smaller balls.

Chill until ready to serve

Thanks for listening. Be sure to rate the Poker Zoo on Apple podcasts or elsewhere.

The post PZ 85: Gerard Moves On appeared first on Out of Position.