No, you fill out form 5754 which requires some info from your backers. Then each person pays their own taxes. If they don’t provide the info then you keep whatever percent you agreed when you entered the agreement, normally ~30%.

The catch is Vegas is hot in the summer and you have to go outside. It’ll be around 107 F.

5/10 300 cap sounds like Palm Beach Kennel Club.

Counterintuitively, the more people that call the more you’re supposed to fold in the big blind. A hand like A8o, which has 30% equity against one opponent even if they have KK is a solid defend heads up, but if most of the table calls this hand is a fold. It has poor multiway playability, you’re probably dominated, your positional disadvantage is magnified, and you have to beat a gaggle of opponents. It doesn’t make up for the increased odds. 

There will be some legit good pros in those games, but for players above some level of competency, it’s difficult to know who is world class versus mediocre reg with small samples. There are winning live pros that online games would run around if they played online. 

The actual top dog in that game will make money, but more importantly also have a seat in the game when a VIP shows up. It’s hard to game select those stakes because as soon as you see the VIP walking in the door you’re never getting a seat.

And no one is winning 100-300bb/100 in any game. 

“No, that’s no realistic, but I’m happy to talk through how I’d solve this.”

That's the point of the DSA interviews even at FAANG. When they ask you to "code" on a whiteboard (or Google Doc, w/e), they don't want you to start with code. The majority of the time should be spent talking through (and writing down notes on) how you would solve it.

They're looking for critical thinking, thought process, communication, handling ambiguity, and yes code, but it is last on the list. To some degree the candidate has control over how much code they write. Google is known for not always requiring you to implement helper functions if you broke the problem down well. If the problem wasn't broken down well and it's all in one function, then yeah you'd better be quick to make up for the design deficiencies.

Perfect code and a poor thought process is an instant fail, but a great thought process and non-working so-so code can still be a pass. Now if there are a lot of great candidates with amazing thought processes, then yes the coding becomes more important to distinguish candidates.

There's plenty of jobs that don't require DSA interviews, but almost all of the high paying ones do. Spending a few months interview prepping for an extra $100-500k/year is a pretty good deal. People spend years in college or grad school for way less than that.

This is a reverse free roll. One day you’ll insist on seeing their losing hand for information except they misread their hand and you lose a pot you would otherwise get. 

There’s a rare bucket list sort of play where you can call with the losing hand on purpose. If you notice your opponent just mucks every time they’re caught bluffing on the river, it doesn’t matter what you have so you can call with 5 high. 

This is mostly true but some rooms may have house rules where you have to show to win the pot. 

This tell might be pretty accurate but it doesn't matter and isn't worth the energy.

It is a misconception about how profit is generated in poker. Most hands will be always raised or always folded from two different positions. The only hands this would potentially matter for are hands right on the fringe of opening.

But, those hands are also by definition very close to 0 EV. A borderline hand you're already opening might be 0.01 bb of EV. So if you're able to play one hand worse because you know a person behind you is folding, you're going to capture at most similar EV to the worse hand you were already opening from the next position.

If you're opening 40% from the button and 30% from the cutoff, that means this only matters for 10% of hands and for a tiny fraction of a bb, if your tell is executed perfectly.

If you get 3-bet once you have to fold, and now you've lost 2-4 bb which in the most generous of assumptions means you need to execute 20 times perfectly to win that back (assumptions: you're min raising, and you're winning 0.1 bb of EV from that open).

But wait, there's more. By playing this hand you're also costing yourself the opportunity cost of folding and moving onto the next hand where you can win your average per hand win rate. If you win 6 bb/hr and are dealt 30 hands/hr then you win 0.2 bb just by being dealt into a hand. The better player you are, the worse this strategy becomes because you have to overcome a higher base opportunity cost.

tl;dr: it doesn't matter because math

It doesn’t really count as a tells hand if the game theory action is the same. This hand is already a pure fold before even taking into account live tells.  https://youtu.be/8MG8d-cYazI?si=IZ4QR0Pa3Xg99BRE

Bart has also done a fantastic job of staying relevant as an old school pro. He has embraced modern poker strategy and stays up to date with current poker theory. 

Seems fine. For your own hands you should always know the exact positions, because strategy changes in each one. If you're reading a book and it uses these terms, then perhaps the precise position isn't important to the concept being taught.

A pot-sized raise in the last player's spot is a total bet of $30. You put in whatever the call amount is, then count everything, then add that additional amount to figure out how much that the bet should be.

So the player says he raises the pot, he puts in the $5 to match your bet. Now there is $5 preflop plus $20 from four players post flop or $25 in the pot. That means a pot-sized raise is $25 and thus the total bet is $30.

A quick sanity check is raising the pot will always give the next player to act 2:1 on a call. So from your perspective, you have $5 out there and it is $25 additional for you to call. If you total all of the money out there it will be $50 ($5 pre, your $5, $10 from two calls, and the raising player's $30) or $50:$25 (2:1).

It depends on the usage. If you say "only UTG is able to straddle" -- great, that's perfect and unambiguous.

But, most people use it during the description of a hand. If you say "UTG opened to 3x and it folds to me on the BU, what should I do?" -- it's impossible to know because UTG has different meaning depending on how many players are dealt in. You have to specify the number of players for it to remove the ambiguity.

EP/MP/LP are inherently ambiguous terms, but generally people are talking about pre-flop, and don't consider the blinds as part of this. So if you divide EP/MP/LP roughly evenly between UTG and the button then that's basically it +/- 1 position.

UTG (and MP) are bad, ambiguous terms. It's much easier to always count backwards from the button: BU, CO, HJ, LJ, LJ-1, LJ-2, LJ-3

It makes the positions the same regardless of the number of players dealt in.

3-handed is no different than 4-handed after the CO folds and isn't a special case IMO. Only heads up is different.

For me, hiring a coach was the inflection point where my game really took off. If I could go back in time I would have done it sooner. Some people have a natural understanding of game theory and don't need to hire a coach. Without poker educational content, it would have taken me lifetimes to gain the understanding I learned in a couple months with a coach. With poker educational content, it would have taken me years.

The most important thing I gained from my coach was how to think about poker. With that, I could organically reason through unknown situations and arrive at a good answer, and also have the ability to consume strategy advice from other resources. I had tried books, courses, and peer hand review in the past but without the ability to know how to think about poker I couldn't absorb more than a superficial understanding.

Self-study would be like trying to observe the world and then coming up with physics theories on your own.

Using poker training content is like being given a textbook on physics, but you don't know algebra, and you have to figure out algebra on your own while learning physics.

Working with a (good) coach, they'll recognize you don't know algebra, and then teach you algebra using basic physics concepts at just the right level of complexity for your current knowledge.

(This analogy isn't perfect, in this example algebra would be something closer to intuition and would not be something where there was a class or textbook available to teach it.)

Outside of naturally gifted individuals, hiring a coach is by far the best option for anyone regardless of experience level, but costs the most in the short term. Whether the cost makes sense as a function of your expendable income, bankroll, or goals is a separate and individual question.

No one is “targeting” you because you usually play lower. If some kid in a hoodie with a Crown Royal bag of chips 3-bets you three orbits in a row he probably just had it. Countless money has been lost by people leveling themselves into thinking the players at the next level are some wizard son-of-Galfond deity robbing them dry. The reality is that even at 5/10, 10/25, or 50/100, mostly people are just going to have strong hands most of the time.

You’ve already made a best effort attempt at maintaining records, that’s more than enough before a consult. Russ used to do the consults for free and then would charge for you returns. This was a while back though so I’m not sure about now. Whoever you choose, I’d recommend a gambling specialist; I wouldn’t trust a general CPA for this situation. 

It’s not worth it to do your own taxes as a gambling professional. Hire a gambling tax professional and you can ask all of these questions to them. It’s not that expensive. Russ Fox is good. http://claytontax.com/

This is a “you don’t know what you don’t know” situation and it’s impossible to know the right questions to ask here or Google. For example, if you get audited the IRS is going to ask to see your hand written logs with table numbers on them. 

I’m not convinced 3 blind games are better than 2 blind games, other than to raise stakes. 3 blinds incentivize every position to play tighter. I’d rather play with a big blind ante as that incentivizes every position to play more.

Time instead of rake is another big one. The fact that 2 blind anteless raked games are the standard is unfortunate. 

There’s a few spots where very small (min-ish) raises can sometimes make sense. 4/5 bets preflop IP, dry paired flops bb vs bu, or river spots where you both can easily have the nuts (think xKQJT). Unique to live poker you might also raise the minimum amount to keep the action reopenable if there is a shorter stack in play.

The Uber expenses are significant. Let’s say you drive 20 miles an hour during work. The IRS puts a value to each mile driven at $0.67/mile. So after you subtract costs you’re making $6.60/hour—then you still need to pay taxes on that.

Additionally, I think the estimate cost may be low because I don’t think it accounts for the additional insurance cost to add ride share coverage. It’s usually for normal business driving. 

If you need the cash then Uber may be an option, but it’s more of a loan against your car than it is earned money. The net pay is actually below minimum wage for most people. 

I don’t know. However, there is a Colombian beer called Poker that used to have a four of a kind on it.

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