Against non-pros at a cash game broadcast on the internet. Odds are half the people he's playing against are out of their comfort zone, playing higher stakes than they should just to be on a stream.
Not to mention there's no buy-in limit on these stakes, BB/100 means nothing if they're playing above the expected stakes (happens often if the biggest stakes are relatively low).
Again, none of what you're saying is actually proof.
There are plenty of other pros who have played on Stones Live, who Postle has repeatedly gotten the better of.
Even if the average hands are playing 2x or 4x above nominal stakes, that's still an outrageously high, many std-dev above elite, win rate.
Yea, it's hard to prove things generally, but I don't really feel like the standard of "proof" matters here. I'm 99.99999...% sure the guy is cheating. I'm not saying put him in jail because of it, but definitely raise the alarm and don't play with him. Would you play with him on the Stone RFID table?
I've played tons of games against whales so yes, I'd play in his games. That being said, often it's +EV to simply stay out of pots with pros and merely prey on the other players.
Admittedly I haven't seen a ton of his hands, but just watched a few, it's not that unusual. One used as 'proof' of cheating where he plays low connectors and hits a pair with a draw to a straight, then he bluffs off a passive player with an over-pair. If he actually had the info wouldn't he fold? Dunno, seems to me he's just a pro preying on fish. His play is pretty standard for good cash players. It's his opponents that seem unusually bad, but whom observers are overrating.
None of these were super convincing. I did however eventually get around to watching a bunch of Joe Ingram's content and a stream last night, now I'm more convinced. One hand that had me convinced more than any here was a board that was 899T and forgot the fourth card (inconsequential). Anyhow, Postle has 8s full and on the river, instead of check-raising leading with a feeler bet, or any other kind of action you'd expect when you have 3rd nuts but a monster, he simply check folds. No way any normally aggro player actually check folds a boat in a cash game.
Also, Postle's mannerisms and interviews are the most damning IMO. He's arrogant, cocky and can't explain any of his lines, not to mention has said some questionable things that actually suggest cheating.
Reading this thread at first I thought maybe he was a Victor Blom kind of character; loose aggro playing against passive amateurs (shoving 54 would give that impression). But no, he's a fucking moron who basically is giving himself away by folding monster hands or playing weak hands strongly post-flop then needling opponents and bragging about it in interviews.
Glad you watched the content and came back to reply. And if you watch the non-god mode sessions (most of 2018), you will see a completely different type of player, and all of the physical tells (touching the hat and gazing down at crotch while pretending to look at cards) and cheating indications are no longer present, and he never gets into the type of hand situations and/or crazy moves and perfect-for-all-the-hands decisions he was making in God mode.
I feel like my examples are just as convincing as the boat over boat: they're all theoretically unsound lines that no winning player would take unless they had x-ray vision, and if you claim you would x/f TPTK on the flop because of your sick live reads I'd like to play with you. But whatever, glad you saw the light I guess.
Yes I play 10/20 live multiple times a week. Explain to me how a winning reg would ever consider calling a 5 bet all in with 54o and then fold KK pre to a 4 bet?
Clearly you have not done your due diligence if you dont even know the most famous hand. It was a 3 way all in and he called with 54o and both players happened to have AK
Im not wasting any more time talking to you and i stand by my previous statement that you dont know what you are talking about.
Calling allin 54o 3way is loose, crazy and extremely losing play in the long run. You have no idea what you are talking about. Some tournament shove has nothing to do with this.
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.
I almost gave up on this series halfway through book one, but I'm so glad I stuck with it. The characters were fantastic, the world was wonderfully built, and there was just.. so much of it. Took me quite a while to get through all 10 just due to their size.
I haven't read any of the off-shoot books yet, but they're on my list.
Hey! Just wanted to say that although you haven't come to my house yet, everyone I've talked to in Alameda loves you guys. Having worked at an ISP startup, I know how tough it is to succeed -- hope you guys manage!
I haven't had any issues sleeping in Amtrak coach seats the handful of times I've taken overnight train trips. I sleep much better than on airline coach. Amtrak seats recline pretty far and have much larger pitch than airline coach seats. It's quite comfortable for a single night, really.
Interesting; thanks for your reply. I guess I'm doomed to airplanes for work travel; I can't justify the added expense and time of the sleeper cars, and can't sleep in the coach seats :(
I strongly disagree with this sort of attitude. It scares people away from learning how cryptography works. We should be encouraging everyone to write their own crypto: it's a fantastic learning experience. Just don't use your first go in production.
I realize this doesn't add anything to the conversation, but as someone whose mom passed away from ALS, I welcome anything that can remotely improve this terrible disease. Watching her go from walking to barely able to lift a glass in six months was devastating and I'd have given much for 33% more able-bodied time with her.
Me too. I almost can't keep it together reading this. 33%!! I do wish it's mechanism was known, hopefully anyway it will open up the door for better treatments.
I feel for you. Just two days ago I learned that an old friend of mine, one whom I haven't seen in many years, has been suffering from ALS recently. I hope to see her soon.
How do you suggest structuring an interview to find candidates who are able to think abstractly? I don't think the current trivia-esque style interview works.
I've worked for places with trivia-esque interviews and I agree it works really badly. The only things worse was the "tell me about your greatest weakness..." style favored by the MBAs.
I'm very happy with the people I work with now, who were mostly hired by an audition-style interview: here's a problem that's simple to explain and not simple to solve; solve it with a mix of whiteboard coding (required) and (optionally) proofs, drawings, arguments...
I like to give candidates a word problem. It doesn't need to be complicated, but I want to see the candidate turn it into code. Doesn't matter what language. Just show me you can read and understand a problem and write down the solution. I never cease to be amazed at the number of people who freeze like a deer in the headlights.
