top coach: Phil Galfond, featured on bluefirepoker.com
It’s been a barren 2009 for many high stakes regulars – Tom Dwan and Gus Hansen find themselves stuck millions online. But it isn’t just the household names who have struggled to make an impact.
As twoplustwo user ‘PokerStorm’ stresses, this year has proved an uphill battle for training coaches. The likes of Jay ‘pr1nnyraid’ Krantz, ‘whitelime’ and ‘wiltontilt’ have all floundered as of late, which begs the question, are training websites still packing a punch?
‘pr1nnyraid’, seen struggling on the reality TV series ‘2 Months 2 Million’, shoulders an ice old rating according to pokertableratings.com. His profits graph resembles a flatlined heart monitor, as he finds himself stuck $676k since March 2008. ‘balugawhale’, author of copious strategy articles on the twoplustwo archives, has endured a steady downswing over the past year, whereas Cardrunners instructor Cole South looked like he was in desperate need of Brian Hastings’s $4 million victory over Isildur1.
Just how much should we read into these results? Are such instructors still worthy figures of authority? Or are we getting swindled out of our $50+ per month subscription fees for sites like Stoxpoker and Deucescracked? Probably not. The NLH market is becoming more saturated, and players who were crushing the games two or three years ago are struggling to adapt. This doesn’t render their insight ineffectual, it just means we should incorporate their advice into our own, unique style. The new generation of players who have thrived over the past few years – the likes of durrrr (until 2009) and Phil Galfond, have manufactured their own approaches to the game. Rather than seeing teachings as objective, we should view them as an aid in the learning process.
Moreover, the volume of high stakes players has increased. The stakes themselves have also risen – games of 6-max $500/$1000 PLO are more commonplace, and so the variance is warped. To put it bluntly, it’s very difficult to find a player who is a consistent winner, year after year. Pot-Limit Omaha is also a very complex variant – there’s no ‘optimum’ strategy, as such. It is also important to remember, that instructors covering limits of $25/$50+ are catering for a large proportion of middle/ micro stakes players. ‘Plays’ discussed, that might not work at these higher limits, are still guaranteed to work at lower stakes.
Finally, we should be a bit shrewder in our selection of instructional sites – take note of players currently ‘crushing’ the games. One astute twoplustwo member ‘d0nk3y’ pinpoits ‘DrGiggy’ as the ideal coach. The Canadian has a 91 ‘on fire’ rating on pokertableratings.com, and is a consistent winner since Sept 2007 at NL400 and above – tabling a $543k profit. ‘DrGiggy’ is attached to bluefirepoker.com, a new instructional site launched by the one player excluded from the durrrr challenge – Phil ‘OMGClayaitken’ Galfond.