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Online Poker Collusion

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Collusion Online or Poor Strategy
Ed Hill wrote...
> For all players that have been dealt in 150 or more hands while
> I was sitting at the table: Of the players who have been seeing
> approximately 20% of the flops; 90% of them are losing players.
> Of the players who have been seeing approximately 35% of the flops;
> 70% of them are winning at least 2 big bets per hour. Well, now aren't
> those conclusions odd? The loose players do better than the tight players.

Even though I don't think we have ever sat in the same game, I know, Ed, that you have been a top player a long time. However, your statement here is flabbergasting. It should be extremely hard for a player only seeing 20% of the flops to win in a ten handed game! That is too tight, too passive, to darn weak. Of course players seeing 35% of the flops are winning. They are playing better (or more obviously, they just happen to be players who coincidentally got a random bunch of better cards in this small sample).

More than that, the level of play online is so weak that seeing 20% of the flops is strategically extremely poor. *Extremely*. You play with a bunch of poor players are you are not getting in there and mixing it up? That's poor poker.

> Does that mean I am playing too tight and should loosen up?
> I don't think so! In other words, if I were to add in AJ, KQ, and 109s,
> etc to the hands that I was already playing then I would be a winner also?
> No, no, no. Looser players should not have an advantage over tighter
> players because they can "read" their opponents. They can't see their
> opponent, much less "read" them. So that can't be it.

I don't understand what you are saying here. If you are saying you can't read your online opponents, again, that just is a flaw in your game. It is pretty darn easy for me anyway to read my opponents. Okay, now that happens to be one of my best skill in casinos, and I can't use it as much online, but I still know precisely what my opponents have a significant percentage of the time.

I honestly have no clue what you mean by the above paragraph because it just makes no sense. Now also, you play Holdem and I play mostly Omaha, and they are different. But you would have to put a gun to my head to have me lay down the equivalent Omaha hands of AJ, KQ and T9s! I find it hard to believe that the Holdem players are all that much different than the Omaha players. Maybe as a group they are significantly better, but they would have to be nearly infinitely better for me to laydown AJ against the crew I play with.

I could be wrong of course, but it seems like you are playing a Las Vegas ring game strategy in a game that most definitely does not call for it. I just don't see how you can expect to win playing so few hands.

> So what other conclusion can be drawn? COLLUSION!

I've been playing 10/20 Paradise Omaha8 for seven months or so. In that time I have hardly found fifteen opponents who play solid, semi-pro level or better. I have also not seen more than five questionable, possibly effectively collusive situations come down. It's true that the game is so weak that half the time I pay little attention, but when I do pay attention to the game, I look for collusion and timing out cheating. I have no doubt people talk to each other on the phone about their hole cards, but I have never once seen a clearly collusive hand. I get sick of requesting hand histories to check out suspicious plays, because virtually always the actual hand or hands around the questionable hand turn out to be nothing. Since it is easier for smart people to collude in Omaha8 than Holdem (I wouldn't necessarily say that is true for dumb people), I find it hard to believe that there is HUGE amounts of collusion in the Holdem, to the point that a solid player playing correctly would actually lose.

Then, of all the excellent players I know who play online, Ed Hill is the *only* one who says he is losing. Of course, people might be bullshitting and saying they win when they actually lose, but the way people's eyes light up when they talk about playing online, I just think that hardly any of these are lying to me.

> But just gaining the knowledge of what is in the muck would be
> tremendous, more so if we all got into the same Omaha 8 or Better game.

Perhaps cheats are missing an opportunity, but such people simply do not exist at the 10/20 Omaha8 level.

> I don't approve of cheating in poker. The game, if played correctly,
> is very lucrative without cheating. I am a living example of that fact.
> I have won a lot of money playing poker over my 25 years. In fact,
> I have never met a game I couldn't beat until I ventured into the online
> poker arena. Online, everything is different. The loose players are not
> being punished for their loose play. They are being rewarded.

As they have been in California for 15 years. This is not news.

> There are a few conclusions that can be drawn from my results:
> 1. I am nowhere near as good as I think I am. Well, I have stood the
> test of time in the Vegas games for 25 years and still have a lot more
> money than I came to town with. But there will be those of you who
> will want to believe what you want here.

20% is a major error. So is not adjusting to the level of your opponents. I'm amazed anyone would lay down AJ, normally.
---

Steve Fiete wrote...
> In this thread others have argued that it is possible, maybe even optimal to
> play looser on-line than in casino games of Holdem. Even if we accept this,
> I don't think we should expect 70% of the 35% category players to be
> winning. So another statistical question for those who think that seeing 35%
> of paradise flops is optimal is what proportion of these players do we
> expect to be winning, and what is the chance that 70% of those in this
> category would be winning given your sample size. You could make some
> assumptions and do a lot of number crunching, but I would be surprised if
> you found that 70% was significantly higher than expected in statistical sense.

As usual, incomplete data can lead to illogical conclusions. You seem to think that 70% of the players of the players who played 35% of their hands were winners. Of course the information does not say that at all. It says 70% of the players won who played 35% of their hands -- who played over 150 hands!

Leaving aside this is too small a sample to truly draw big conclusions from, it is very illogical to not draw obvious conclusions based on even more data that you can observe while playing online. For instance, it is very likely that the big majority of those 35% players who didn't make it to 150 hands were losers who went broke and quit. Lots of rotten, too-loose players quit playing online poker. At the same time, good-loose players tend to be big winners and play a lot.

It's a big mistake to analyze online poker play without clearly understanding the group of players. There is a huge turnover among terrible players. I have a list of over 80 terrible (and I mean very terrible) players who I have played 10/20 Omaha with. Just glancing at it now, about 85% of the names that were entered more than a month ago no longer play on the site (at least under the old name). Very many of these players will never have achieved any statistically meaningful amount of hands played to draw the kind of conclusions that Ed was looking for (while I could see they were terrible by watching them play a couple hands).

35% may be about the right percentage of hands to play if you are a good player, but that does not mean at all that if a person plays 35% of the hands they will win, or do win.

For a significant degree, players who play a lot online are decent, winning players. They feast on a smorgasbord of players who drop in, play like crap for a short time, and leave.
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Online Poker Rookie
Mike Hood wrote...
> I had a similar experience with Paradise - In my first month playing
> (i.e. I was a complete rookie) , low limits, I managed to turn $100
> into about $900 - I just could not lose... I then started to lose...
> In no time at all (despite being a much better player by now) that
> money disappeared and I gave up after maybe putting another $300 in.
> Are there any sites which do not appear to be fixed? As I am a computer
> programmer perhaps I should write one... :)

You mean are their any sites where newbie players will not have large bankroll fluctuations and at some point be a loser of 50% of the peak of their winning?

No.