18 Jan 12

Would A 2012 $1/$2 Grinder Crush The Games From 2004?

Were the games during the boom years that easy? Is poker so tough now that a typical $1/$2 grinder today would have crushed the biggest games less than a decade ago? Barry Carter discusses this often asked question.

Could Doyle beat $1/$2 in 2012?

The toughness of poker gets cited on a daily basis on poker forums and in discussions among players, and it seems like we have been talking about it for years. Everyone refers to the period between 2003 and 2006 as the 'glory days' of the game, where anyone with half a brain could win a life-changing sum of money at the tables.

And then it seems from about 2006 onwards, the games started getting tough (It is probably not a coincidence that it was around this time that the UIGEA was introduced). Today poker is a tremendously tough game for a new player to get into, as even the low stakes games are rife with professional standard players.

A regular argument which gets made is that the game has evolved so much since 2003, that a $1/$2 player today would be able to crush the biggest games from less than a decade ago (Or the flip-side argument is made that a star of yesteryear like Doyle Brunson would not be able to beat $1/$2 online today).

I have always disliked these discussions, because often they are made at the same time as ridiculing the old school players. However, I find myself unable to disagree with the core argument that a solid low to midstakes player in 2012 would have a skill-set rich enough to crush the biggest No Limit games in pre-2004.

One of the reasons I am pretty confident about this is from personal experience. I started playing poker around the end of 2004 and I can vouch how easy the games were. Clearly I ran very well in the beginning, but with a very small amount of good strategy advice from a friend, I became a winning player very quickly.

Sadly for me, I took it for granted and watched the games get monumentally tougher, without working on my own game enough to keep up. I have worked very hard on my game since, but despite being a much better player today than I ever was then, I now struggle to make a profit in much smaller games than I played four or five years ago. 

I cannot think of any form of competition where the standard of the average participant has skyrocketed so much in such a short space of time. The standard of football, for example, has increased massively in the last 20 years (Mainly because the players do not drink so much these days) but the idea that an amateur footballer today is closer to the standard of a professional in the 1980s is laughable.

The age of information

The poker boom coincided with the age of information. We no longer are uninformed about anything, all it takes is a few minutes and a laptop/iPad/iPhone and we can be brought up to speed on almost any topic. What this means is that anyone who knows how to use a search engine has access to an inexhaustible amount of poker learning material. At PokerStrategy.com alone we have thousands of videos, strategy articles, and live coaching sessions available 24/7 - in fact you do not really need to leave this website to get a complete poker education.

It wasn't too long ago that concepts like implied odds, squeeze plays, EV calculations, range merging, meta-game, semi-bluffing, and ICM, were known only by a select few in the poker elite - now they are a standard part of the poker curriculum.

Then of course there was the emergence of software like PokerTracker and Hold'em Manager, two products which have changed hand analysis forever. The level of detail which these innovations allow us to analyse the game is unprecedented. They allow us to break down every minute component of the game and think about poker in a way nobody could have imagined.

My good friend, mental game coach JaredTendler, describes mastery as 'when the small stuff becomes the big stuff'. What he means by this is that someone has mastered something, when they have the big core fundamentals of the game so well understood that they can concentrate on improving the tiniest of edges. PokerTracker and Hold'em Manager allows us to concentrate on the smallest areas possible to create edge, and by Jared's definition, gives everyone who owns them the chance to be a master by previous year's standards.

Dusty Schmidt has played over 8 million hands

The fact that someone like Jared, an outsider from the Sports Psychology industry, is a prominent figure in the game is another example of the rate at which it has developed. Ten years ago the idea of a sports psychologist in poker would have seemed ludicrous, but now it is a legitimate way in which hundreds of players have looked to create an edge.

Finally, the sheer number of hands it is possible to play online allow us all to gain a Doyle Brunson level of experience in just a few months. It is no surprises that players like nanonokoPS and Leatherass9 not only have played more hands than just about anyone, they are also two of the most highly regarded players in the game.

So would a solid $1/$2 player in 2012 beat up the games in 2004? My answer to that is yes..... with a but.

You can only raise the bar so high

The 'but' being that it would need to be using a time machine (Which even given my own poor understanding of probability, is unlikely). I do not think the answer is yes if the question is, could a $1/$2 player beat a table of people who were world class in 2004? Nor do I think that a $1/$2 player today could start under the same conditions as the players in 2004 and achieve the same results.

Do not forget also that these old school players beat the games with little or no learning materials. There is a pretty clear road map in front of the players who start the game today, there wasn't back then. The players 10 years ago had to learn most of this stuff off their own initiative, and independent learning is a vital skill not many of us have.
 
Utilising the vast amount of learning material available to us is an absolute must for every player today, but it can also be a crutch for some. The truly great players who progress beyond the stakes that have these 'road maps' are the ones who can teach themselves the stuff that is not widely available.

One aspect of the game that the old school has that the new generation don't to the same degree, is the ability to spot physical tells. I happen to think this is an over exaggerated part of the game, but it is still an area where the pre-boom live players have an obvious edge.

You can only raise the bar so much, and just because a player who was beating the games in 2004 couldn't beat today's games with the same skill-set, it does not mean that they have not adapted to the games today. You only have to look at some of the players who were considered world class back then and still are now, players like Ivey, Seidel, and Negreanu, who have always worked very hard to stay ahead of the grain.

But, we will never probably never find out the true answer to this question, because if any of us ever invented a time machine, there probably would be a lot more potential money to be made with better things than sending a $1/$2 grinder with 4BB/100 over to Bobby's Room in 2003.

by Barry Carter