Taking a look at his BB/100 (big blinds per 100 hands) versus "normal" players (and against potripper, a known cheater) shows just how out of the ordinary Postle is playing: https://i.imgur.com/66i3Tii.jpg. Admittedly, the sample size is small (live poker is much slower than online), but his win rate is outrageous.
For context: against good players (e.g. perhaps NL1000 in the bay area, and maybe NL50 online), a winrate over 10BB/100 over a long period of time is considered very good.
For additional context, at most stakes being a 5-10bb/100 winner is considered being a very good player. The thin cluster of people winning around 100bb/100 are the actual top tier players representing the top ~1% of the player pool. And then there's Postle off to the side doing 10x better than them.
I don't think anyone wins 100BB/100 long-term. I'd say those are players who have won large pots and haven't had time for the law of large numbers to catch up. Back in the 2000s when I played online, four or five BB/100 was considered crushing it at anything above a penny table.
Yea that's fair. But the point is it's possible/normal for some amount of the player pool to put up those numbers over some time span, whereas 10x that is an outrageously far outlier. Who knows, some of the in-band high winners might be cheating too, but just doing a much better job at hiding it.
Also FWIW I think some live cash crushers can land in the 20-40bb/100 range with some consistency. The online cash player pool is known to be much tougher per capita.
> Also FWIW I think some live cash crushers can land in the 20-40bb/100 range with some consistency. The online cash player pool is known to be much tougher per capita.
Yeah, that's true. Especially in live games where there's a steady supply of players who are happy to show up just to gamble.
It's your total winnings divided by the amount of the big-blind (to normalize the stakes) divided by 100. So Postle averages a net positive of almost 10x the big blind per hand which is absurd.
The VPIP (Y axis) is on what percentages of hands he voluntarily put money in the pot (i.e. called without a blind or raised with a blind). He is on the high-end for VPIP which means he plays looser, and has higher winnings per hand. This is already looking bad, but playing so loosely should at least mean he has some big losses to go with some big gains, but looking at individual results he really doesn't.
VPIP - Voluntarily put in pot - So % of preflop hands where the player bet money. How 'active' a player is in terms of betting.
BB/100 is a calculation of how many 'big blinds' the player has won per 100, where big blinds is a specific $ amount. Effectively it's how profitable the player is.
As you can see, he's high on VPIP, which means he bets on a high percentage of hands. At the same time, his play remains highly profitable. It's so far out of the norm there's only one plausible explanation.
It's basically how many times he's willing to make what should be an extremely risky bet. Normally that kind of play would be reckless and exploited by the other players, but for some reason it almost always works out for this guy.
No that's not what the graph shows at all. It's just his win rate in terms of how many big blinds he's won per 100 hands played, against the percentage of hands he's choosing to play.
For context: against good players (e.g. perhaps NL1000 in the bay area, and maybe NL50 online), a winrate over 10BB/100 over a long period of time is considered very good.