In October-November I played a lot of No-Limit Hold’em on PokerStars at the 10 cent small blind/25 cent big blind level. I frequently found myself at tables with a player named “yahai” from Hua Zhou, China who struck me as having some rather unusual playing habits.
First of all, there was the stack he brought to the table. You can buy into most online no-limit hold’em tables for anywhere between 20 and 100 times the big blind. I almost always buy in for the max, which would be $25 at a .10/.25 table, and most good players do. The reason for that is, if you find yourself at the table with bad players, you want to set yourself up to take as much of their money as possible once you get them involved in a hand. “yahai,” however, always bought in for the minimum – 20 times the big blind, or $5.
Secondly, good poker players in no-limit games usually size their bets in relation to the size of the big blind pre-flop, and in relation to the size of the pot post-flop. This is done to give information (or disinformation at times, since poker is a game of deception) about how much you like your hand. “yahai” didn’t do that, though. He’d either fold (which he did about 98% of the time) or he’d go all-in with his $5 stack, forcing his opponents to make an expensive decision. If he won and doubled his stack, he’d immediately leave the table. If he folded and lost money due to being in the blinds, he’d rebuy to bring his stack back up to the $5 starting point.
It was annoying to play with him because he didn’t seem to have a clue how to play proper poker – just fold or all-in. He was smart enough to only go all-in with premium hands. In most positions on the table he’d go all-in with only AA, KK, QQ, JJ or AK, the best starting hands in hold’em. On the dealer button or in the blinds, if no one had raised yet, he’d loosen up his requirements to about any two cards J or higher, and A-10 as well, and A-x where the cards were suited, and go all-in.
It seemed like he was wasting his time. With his strategy, his all-ins only seemed to get action from other players about once an hour, and I figured the $5 he’d win in those situations would evaporate due to him getting hit by the 10 cent and 25 cent blinds that had gone around so many times. “How is this guy making any money?” I thought.
“And furthermore,” I wondered, “there are dozens of tables at the 10 cent/25 cent level on PokerStars. How is it that ‘yahai’ and I end up at the same table so often?” I went to the PokerStars lobby one day when he was online, and did a player search for him. I figured he might be multi-tabling, playing more than one table at a time.
Was I ever right. He was multi-tabling TWENTY-FOUR TABLES AT ONCE.
Now things were starting to make sense. I decided to do an experiment. I got on a .10/.25 table and played for an hour. I played my normal strategy, but for the purposes of this experiment I was not mainly concerned with how much I won or lost, but how many VIP Player Points (VPPs) I got. You earn VPPs for every hand you’re dealt into, based on how much PokerStars rakes out of each pot as their fee for hosting the game. At the .10/.25 level, you don’t earn much. I earned about 4 VPPs for that hour.
For “yahai,” though, those piddling points add up. Let’s say that he multi-tables an average of 20 tables per time. Research I did about him online (because there was a lot of discussion about this guy) indicated that he plays online about 10 hours per day. That means he’s earning 40 VPPs per table per day, times 20 tables – that’s 800 VPPs per day. Let’s further suppose that he works a normal “work week” grinding the poker tables, which would be about 22 days per month. That means he earns approximately 17,600 VPPs per month. I actually think that number is conservative, because I think he plays more than 10 hours/day and more than 22 days/month.
At 17,600 VPPs/month, he’d qualify for PokerStars’ PlatinumStar VIP level, which requires a minimum of 10,000 VPPs earned per month. What does that get him? Well, a lot, actually. Higher-level VIPs can trade in their points for cash bonuses. A PlatinumStar VIP, for example, can trade in 50,000 points for $650 cash.
But wait. When you buy these bonuses, you’re not trading in VIP Player Points (VPPs), but rather Frequent Player Points (FPPs). PlatinumStar VIPs earn 2.5 FPPs for each VPP. So, the 17,600 VPPs “yahai” earns each month translate to 44,000 FPPs. That means, about once a month, “yahai” is able to get a bonus of $650 cash from PokerStars.
That’s not all. By June of this year, “yahai” will have earned enough VPPs to reach the next level – Supernova, for which you have to earn a minimum of 100,000 points in a year. Then he’ll earn 3.5 FPPs for each VPP earned. So his 17,600 VPPs per month will equate to 61,600 FPPs. Furthermore, he’ll get a better deal on a bonus – $1500 for 100,000 VPPs. At the rate he plays, he’ll be able to cash in his points for that $1500 bonus about every 7 or 8 weeks.
So, “yahai” can be a completely break-even poker player on the tables, and still earn $650 a month or more. In the US, that’s really not that much, but in China, $650-1500 a month should place him squarely in the middle class. “yahai” isn’t some ignorant donkey who doesn’t know how to play poker and doesn’t care to learn – he’s a businessman, taking advantage of a favorable economic situation.
Recently I’ve seen a lot more players like him, with names like “yazhou,” “chinlee,” and “zhaobao,” all from China, all at the .10/.25 levels, all employing the same $5 stack shove-or-fold strategy. Why are Chinese players flooding the low-stakes no-limit hold’em market all of the sudden? I had no idea until I came across this article, which provided some insight. There were many, many Chinese players making a living at World of Warcraft until recently. They’d play the game for hours and even days at a time, earning “gold,” the currency of the realm in WoW. They’d then sell their “gold” on eBay for real money, thus making a profit at the massive multiplayer online game. The Chinese government, however, banned this practice last year, causing the players to find a new venue to make money – poker. As I understand it, it’s not just PokerStars that has been invaded, but all the major poker sites.
What to do if you get tired of finding these shove-or-fold short stackers at your poker table? My advice would be to take a break from no-limit and play fixed limit for a while. My experience is that you can play about 8 levels higher in fixed limit – so if you’re playing 10 cent/25 cent blinds in no-limit, you can play $1/$2 fixed limit pretty comfortably. In fixed limit, you can’t use bet sizing to give information/disinformation about your hand, so you have to play proper poker. Plus, you tend to earn more VPPs in fixed limit games, getting you to the next VIP level faster – and getting you access to some of the bonuses that “yahai” and his friends enjoy.
Another option would be to play no-limit hold’em Sit’n’Go tournaments. If you’re playing .10/.25 cash games, you should be comfortable at the $6.50-$13 buy-in range for SnGs. There are players like “yahai” in these tournaments but they almost never finish in the money. They either get blinded off, or they get too aggressive and more experienced players take advantage of them.
I hope that sheds some light into why all these Chinese players have invaded the low-limit poker games. For months I was privately cussing “yahai” and his buddies, but now that I see what they’re doing, I kind of respect them. They’ve found a relatively low-risk way to avoid being prisoners of the corporate world.
This blog entry is sure to get a lot of traffic from search engines, as people frequently search for “yahai” trying to figure out who he is. If it’s your first time to read this blog, welcome, and if you found this post helpful, I have a tip jar at Buy-Paul-a-Beer.net where you’re welcome to leave a little somethin’ to help build my bankroll. 