Tom "tombos21" Boshoff:
I often see Nik Airball needling players for being tight. That got me thinking.
Streamed cash games have a weird incentive problem. The structure of the game typically rewards tight play, but an entertaining show demands action. So players are socially pressured to give up EV and play looser to preserve their invite.
But that's dumb. Don’t guilt players into punting. Instead, build a game where the optimal strategy is splashy.
So how does one design a splashy game?
First, toss the rake. Timed rake or no rake will obviously play wider than a traditionally raked game.
Second, toss the blinds. Contrary to popular belief, adding blinds makes the optimal strategy tighter, not wider. So throw out the straddles. In fact, throw out the SB while you're at it. One blind is all you need.
Lastly, add a FAT ante. One player posting 1bb + 3bb ante is more than enough to make the optimal strategy very splashy. Plus, it preserves stack depth (compared to straddles), so you get deeper, more interesting battles.
— "Squid Game works, after all, everyone plays it now."
The Squid acts as a kind of virtual ante, so yeah, makes sense!
— "You wanna incentivize loose play? Add two more cards and call it a day. Put that in your sim and smoke it."
Funny you mention that. Most people play wider in PLO, but in theory it doesn't change how wide one should play.
Optimal open-raise percentage for three games— "Why does adding blinds make optimal strategy tighter?"
That's a deep question! The short answer is it's an observed effect from running sims.
The slightly longer answer is that adding money to fight for is good, but adding blinds also adds more defenders to the pot.
Imagine opening BTN with one blind behind. That's like playing a HU pot in position. Now imagine opening into a double-straddle pot. BTN needs to go through four blinds, so they open tighter. (assume a standard doubling each blind, not like some crazy 10x straddle).
Overall, straddles mean more money goes into the pot with fewer hands.
The deepest answer, and here I'm speculating a bit, is that the average GTO VPIP seems to be a function of how likely each opener is to be playing out of position.
In a BTN straddle game, for example, everyone must open very tight, because they are guaranteed to be OOP. In a one-blind game it's more balanced, since they have position on the most likely defender. In a double-straddle game play moves away from non-blind positions and towards blind-vs-blind battles, which means each blind is fighting an uphill battle.
— "Why 1 blind vs 0?"
TBH, my poker brain didn't even consider that was a possibility!
— "Anything to incentivize more play is good. Big ante, squid, firetruck, SB game
But in private/stream games there is this unspoken gentleman's 🤝 to play more hands than is optimal. It only becomes a problem when one person doesnt adhere to that and captures the ev the table is giving up."
Exactly, it's not at equilibrium. A gentleman's agreement works in low stakes situations. Not with life changing money on the line.
Better to design an incentive structure where the equilibrium is wide to begin with.
— "Running it twice is the worst thing that ever happened to streamed cash games."
RIT is bad for TV; it slows the game down.
But it also lets people play higher stakes and keeps VIPs alive longer (preventing "overfishing" so to speak), so I’m not convinced it's bad for the game.
— "Unfortunately, this is not highly incentivized for the host/casino. Why would you make 0 with rake while you can make thousands and thousands? Whales don't care about it… regs who are just calculating micro EV are often the ones who are not good for the streams anyways."
There's always timed rake though? That plays the same as chip EV.
On the no-rake front, you could make an argument that the casino gets value from advertising, so it acts as a kind of loss leader. Like a Costco hotdog.
Mateus Carrion:
It all depends on the ecosystem you're in. I don't know how high the rake is on the biggest streams from the US or Tritons, which have huge sponsorship potential. Here in Brazil, we ran two seasons of High Limit Poker Brazil. I was the CEO, and I can guarantee that 1) rake or no rake, the productions still lost money (which is terrible, because that was my dream life), 2) amateurs had no idea how to adjust their strategy based on the rake, and few regs cared.
A button blind works much better than a system with small and big blinds, and playing Squid greatly widens all ranges. But I'm not sure this is universal—poker is different everywhere. Overall, I'd say that the subtleties of the rules, like large antes, that are intended in the GTO world to encourage looser play are often simply overlooked or ignored by weak players. It's when you introduce a huge penalty, like in Squid, that action is created.
In Brazil, I often played at tables with 5% rake without a cap, and even with a Mississippi straddle in many cases. There were 8-9-10 players at the tables, and from early position, you had to play with an RFI of 8%. And everyone, even the regulars, opened 15-20%, as if they were playing with a low rake or even no rake at all.
I think the squid or minimum VPIP requirement would work best if you're looking for balance in an environment with weak regs and fish. Strong online regs will understand and adapt to any rake and blind structure and be able to adjust appropriately, but my experience shows that live regs and fishy regs have no idea how the structure affects them.
— "These are some of the dumbest takes ever^
Action players DGAF about blinds/antes.
Streams need a VPIP min. Min drops below a certain threshold, $$$ bounty paid to table."
VPIP minimum can work, but its arguably a less elegant solution. It's a bad incentive structure with a punishment taped on. Better to just have a good incentive structure.
— "Brother, as an action player at 10/25+, I’m telling you that we don’t care about a structure preflop as much as we want to battle post. Getting sniped by nut peddlers is the issue. If you want no nut pedal, then you need to be willing to mix it up and juice pots pre."
On behalf of the poker community, thank you for your service.
Splashy players don't need an incentive to play splashy; sharps do.
You want to prevent nut-peddling? Build a game that doesn't reward nut-peddling.
— "It’s simple, man. You tax nitty players into oblivion for low VPIP or ban them from the lineup. Action players drive the games above the misregs."
— "I think something that's deeply misunderstood about this whole "appeasing the VIPs" thing is that a nontrivial part of the joy of such VIPs is derived from forcing the pros to play suboptimally, some power dynamic/ego thing that manifests in degrading less splashy players.
Taking Squid Game as an example -- it's effectively an ante! But it feels more like you're coercing the pros to play some hands desperately to obtain a button. And that's why the VIPs love Squid so much. I think these incentives are a lot more psychologically powerful than antes."
I've never considered that.