thepokerbaffer

“It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.”

-Charles Darwin

I have really enjoyed the discussions this week about the use of Assistance Tools, (Real Time or Reflective) during live poker.

I think it’s a complex argument with lots of angles, but the one I am most interested in is the one around “The Optics” for recreational players.

I wrote something a while back about my general distaste for underestimating and infantalising the engagement route recreational players have with poker, but today I want to specifically look at the impact of GTO Assistance Tools in live, low stakes poker tournaments, specifically €1ks and under.

I can’t speak on higher stakes because I don’t play them or know the market well; I will not be able to understand the mind of a proper rich recreational, so would love to hear from one!

Logic Is a Lifestyle

Allow me a moment to wax lyrical like an old lady by a fire.
Cuddle thee in, children; Gramma gonna do some remembering.

I used to deal BlackJack, and I had a regular punter; I shall call her Ms Wired.
She was a thin, white woman in her mid-sixties who drank too much coffee and had a spiky, nervous energy about her.
She would play BJ five days a week, between 10am and 4pm and she almost never won.

Croupiers love BJ, so I knew Perfect Basic BJ Strategy off by heart, and was convinced, at the time, that I had nailed the betting strategy of the gods.*
Ms Wired did not play basic strategy, or anywhere close. She played by “feel”, and I think her nerves were deadened by the caffeine.

I was so tired of watching her lose, one day I offered to spend my break explaining Basic Strategy to her. I had a training artifact, because when I first started dealing in the UK, the UKGC required licensed tables to have simple basic strategy on the table in a little card.

I have an easy way to start people on Simple Basic BJ Strategy:

1. Assume the card leaving the shoe will always have a value of ten.
2. If adding ten to your hand busts you, but adding ten to the dealer hand does not take them to 17 – do not pull.
3. If adding 10 to the dealer hand gives them a total 17or above – you must pull, (unless you already have 17 or above) regardless of if adding a ten to your hand will bust you.

Ms Wired wasn’t an idiot at all. She was able to lose at gambling so often because she had owned a successful cleaning business and retired in her early 60s. She enthusiastically absorbed the Simple Basic Strategy info, and seemed really grateful.

I felt I’d done a good deed and went off to a three hour stint on 25p roulette as a reward.

Later the same day, I came back to a deal on a BJ table with Ms Wired and another BJ Reg, a middle-aged Chinese lady who played Perfect Basic, liked fast games and spoke little English. If she was alone at the table she would play 7 boxes and was an absolute danger with an incredible capacity to retain a box-individual bet-pressing strategy; one of the heroes of my life, but that’s another story.

Ms Wired was playing box 1 and I dealt her 14 against my 6.

“14,” I said, pointing at her hand.
“Card,” she said.

I paused, looked at PerfectReg and back at Wired, I moved my hand to my card:

“The dealer’s death card,” I said, in my mind, absolutely toasting my employer’s bottom-line on this hand because I was determined that Ms Wired would grasp the concept of basic likelihood.

“Fourrrrteeeeen,” I repeated again, slowly, and pointedly, my index finger waving left and right in an attempt to directly tell her NOT to pull a card. PerfectReg may not have spoken English, but she spoke BlackJack, and she knew what was happening.

Let’s be 100% clear here, I believed I was cheating against my employer; by law we had to make the info available, I didn’t have to literally instruct her.
Actually, Grosvenor casinos at the time probably didn’t give a shit, because they already knew what I finally know now after 20+years working with gamblers, specifically, that punters gonna punt.

“Card,” she said confidently, an excited twinkle in her eye. A twinkle I never get to experience as a BJ player, because I know and believe the logical, mathematical rules. She smiled at me and said: “It’s a six because you have a six”.

I pulled the card as instructed, and it actually was a six. She clapped her hands, and shot me a look of triumph as I announced “twenty”.

PerfectReg, who had naturally adopted the anchor box in case of incoming worse BJ players than even Ms Wired, stood on thirteen.

I pulled two tens and bust. Ms Wired looked very smug, PerfectReg glared at her as if to say “you just try that again, bitch”.

I guess the point of my rambling story is to show how when it comes to gambling at games where a skill edge is possible, sometimes people just do not give a fuck.

Punters gonna punt, and punters come in all shapes and level of IQ and financial wealth.

This is not an accusation of stupidity. Of the people who dismiss all learning of previous humans, a very tiny percentage absolutely do change the world.
Life is a matter of faith and some punters are not followers the church of maths and statistics.

These people will never feel disadvantaged by not using strategy tools, because they define their own strategies. They will perceive you as disadvantaged if you only follow rules, specifically rules laid out by other people, such as a team of MIT student BlackJack beaters**.

In Blackjack, this logic is music to the house’s ears, but if we look back at the exact example of RTA GTO Strategies and $500 buyin live MTTs, there is an element of sense in this logic, because if you are actually able to play perfect GTO and are doing it against the average crazy €500 MTT fucktard, you are just leaving money all over Europe.

I know there are recreational players who have serious strategy engagement with the game. They are probably a bit quiet in the recent argument because they know they are using tools like this.
Not all the time, not every hand, but yes, in very sweaty spots, or (and I fully believe this- show me data that details different) PRIMARILY to look back at spots.

Not because they are trying to consciously gain a major edge on their current opponents, but because they are such massive poker geeks, they cannot even wait as long as it would take their mate to look it up if they pinged them via Whatsapp, a method of getting in-game assistance that is absolutely invisible and un-Policeable.

I also know there are recreational players who like the game on a different level to what perhaps the majority can understand, and no amount of walloping them over the head with strategy will make them scared or care.

If I am deeply self-critical and honest with myself, I believe there is a good chance I am closer to the 2^nd type of recreational poker player.
I study poker. In game I say to myself that I should do X, but then I do Y.
I look back at the spot after and see I should have indeed done X. I feel proud of myself that I correctly thought of X in game, even if, this time, I did Y.

Next time, in-game, in a similar spot, I do Y.

Shut Mouth: Give Solution

All this said, I don’t want to give the impression I support some people having access to tools, where some other people who might get on board with that nerdy shit don’t know they exist.

My solution to most gambling industry problems is transparency, and a focus on operators’ integrity; I would suggest having these type of companies who operate these tools at live events of this type.
Organise some TedTalk style presentations at the live events: I know I’m a fat old geek but are we not tired of player parties? Just have one good one and then let’s comfortably be geeks.

We have massage teams mooching about; they are a tool to provide a physical advantage in the live game.
Why can’t we have some GTOers on the floor? A live team with i-Pads and a super strong understanding of how the tools work. They can be paid per, er… I dunno, Sim? Or whatever services these tools could reasonably offer.

Any learnings are shared at the table with all who care to listen, and maybe the person who paid gets the added value of some charts emailed to him after?
I dunno, I appear to be inventing a market category on the fly here, so maybe somebody who actually sells these tools can look into the details.

I think this has two positive functions within the low-stakes live environment.
Firstly, it exposes all potential long-term recreational poker players to the reality of modern poker. Old skool pros, regs and recs can piss and moan all they want about GTO Assistance Tools, they are here, and they will only improve. You do not want them underground to a point you no longer recognise them.

Secondly, it allows the “use of tools question” to be lifted out of the realm of the problem of the poker floor. If the house is providing paid “GTO Tool Services” then the use of your own can be banned at the Front of House level.
The same way it isn’t in the poker rule book you can’t bring in a crate of wine from the outside and stash it under the table to imbibe over the night; poker team give no shits, but the FoH team won’t let you do it because it’s eating into their bottom-line.

Front of House rules are a far looser, discretionary set of rules, and if you’re told you’re breaking them, you are.
Couple this with now having at least a small team of paid GTO Tool Experts lurking around in the field who can eyeball over shoulders and KNOW what to look for, we seem to be moving closer to joining reality with transparency and integrity.

We will lose some recreationals, and it will be the fabled Dream Recreational, who is stupid, and loves to lose all his money with no idea what is happening around him, but maybe we gain some real contenders?

Maybe making the game more complex, more statistical, creating more space for exactly the right kind of personality to want to put money into poker. The kind of person who will financially back their belief that they understand the perfect game strategies, with support from a type of tool(s) they are used to using elsewhere, either in their job or in other intensely complex digital strategy games.

As the tools improve in speed and accuracy, the best we can probably hope for is that as many people as possible recognise what they look like and how they work.

To retain people as recreational poker players, they must find engagement with the game either via faith they can absorb and understand the rules, or with faith that they enjoy gambling on cards and no rules of earth apply to them.

There is no need to eliminate GTO Assistance Tools in live low-stakes poker, only a need to spread the word, so the ones who want to use it know what is available and the ones who think it’s “going to be a six because…” have full clarity on what they are ignoring.

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