>“just play better poker” like that’s an easy thing to do in a game of chance and incomplete information
you just need to beat the table, you don't need to become an over-average pro.
that decades long tail you mentioned is for pros chasing profitability in tournaments -- it's a much shorter tail when you're playing fish in setups.
being better at poker than the guy at the table who is good at making money isn't a big leap, it's what sharks and hustlers have been aiming at for hundreds of years.
You're illustrating why the phrase I am nitpicking is silly, and why poker is somehow still profitable even after the boom of 20+ years ago. What is the definition of "beating the table?" Is it winning? Because I promise you, that's a poor definition. You can be playing perfectly great poker and get slaughtered, you can play terrible poker and win. Look at the career of Phil Helmuth, for instance (joke, I'm joking). Playing live poker, you're very unlikely to get a large enough sample size to have a close to 100% confidence you're actually beating the game. You're even less likely to get a large enough sample from a single table/group of players to know either. And like I said up thread - what is "good" or "optimal" or the highest expected value play can change drastically depending on information. Poker is a game of incomplete information, and you can conjure tons of scenarios where folding something like a pair of Aces is correct before the flop, even though many people who have a shallow understanding of the game or haven't studied it deeply would say you should never do that (for instance, in a double or nothing tournament, where half the table cashes and half doesn't, folding AA with a large chip lead to an all in from a certain stack size is the correct play and happens surprisingly often).
Or like, say you're against a "fish" that goes all in preflop with exactly J7 offsuit and nothing else, no matter how big his stack is, because that's their lucky hand or something. You're not playing as profitably as possible if you lack that knowledge, and if you somehow have that knowledge, there are tons of hands you play there that you normally never would and would appear to others without that information as playing "bad."
It's a deeply complex game people try to trivialize. I've been studying for about 20 years and every year that goes by I think I know less than I did the year before. And I'm just talking no limit hold'em right now - there are tons of variants that all have their own areas of study, and that's not even to get into weird live game areas of theory like tells and stuff (which is not as important as people tend to think).
> it's a much shorter tail when you're playing fish in setups
A lot of rich people know more about poker than middle-income scrubs. You don't want to find out the fish you're chasing was a shark all along. The point here is to turn a game a chance into a profit center, suggesting they just do it legitimately missed the point and assumes the scammers themselves have the time or talent to become good enough to reliably fleece people legitimately. It also means you have to vet the people you invite, rather than confidently turning out the pockets of scrubs and capable players alike.
you just need to beat the table, you don't need to become an over-average pro.
that decades long tail you mentioned is for pros chasing profitability in tournaments -- it's a much shorter tail when you're playing fish in setups.
being better at poker than the guy at the table who is good at making money isn't a big leap, it's what sharks and hustlers have been aiming at for hundreds of years.