Max Silver: SnapShove App and AMA
8 years ago
22 Feb
Just over a week ago, live poker tournament specialist Max Silver, with the help of his good friend Sadan Turker, released a new poker app designed exclusively for the mobile environment. SnapShove is a brand-new tool that can help any player with his fold/push range. It basically calculates the Nash Equilibrium ranges for preflop Texas Holdem up to 25 big blinds. To popularize the new poker app, Silver made an Ask Me Anything on Reddit where he talked about a variety of topics, from his humble poker beginnings to the future of SnapShove and the future of poker in general.
The Beginning and Live Binking
Like many other poker pros, Silver started to play online at a very young age from the very bottom. By the age of 18, he was already pondering upon the decision of going pro while playing the micro stakes, 10nl. He quickly moved up to 50nl and stuck there for a while, until he was selected as one of the participants of ‘Jcarverland’ - a six-month group coaching experience with daily sessions and hand analysis led by Jason Somerville. With the help of Somerville, Silver took the next step and reached the mid stakes, 200nl.
His poker professional career however was put on hold when he decided to take a job offered by Full Tilt, But not for long. At Full Tilt, he met one of his best friends and decided to take a shot live, so in August 2010, he registered at the UKIPTEdinburgh Main Event and never looked back. He finished sixth and under one month later he binked the UKIPT Dublin ME winning €72,000.
Silver said it was:
A huge boost to my bankroll and really enabled me to take a few more shots and not have to grind my roll up quite as slowly as it would otherwise have taken."
Then Black Friday and the closing of Full Tilt forced him to make yet another life-changing (yet obvious) decision: resume his poker duties full-time.
The Present and Live Poker Tells
A very good decision indeed as he’s currently one of the most successful live poker tournament players out there. According to Hendon Mob DB, he currently has over $2.35 million in live tournament cashes, winning a handful of UKIPT side events not to mention the Aria High Roller in 2015 for his biggest cash so far ($432,960).
With all that live experience gained in the last six years, many went ahead and asked him to share at least one of his ‘aha’ moments. Silver was kind enough to share with the rest of the community one of the most bizarre live tells tips: Look at your opponent’s feet!
Amateur poker players tend to be fairly decent at guarding obvious live tells in visible features, the face, the hands etc. One thing that players won't make an effort to control is the feet and with everything else trying to be kept still the feet are often a release of nervous or excited energy. Try and see for yourself!"
He also talked about Barcelona being his favorite EPT stop and about calling the clock at a live tournament. To speed up gameplay in general, Max Silver also had a very interesting suggestion: if a player delays his decision a certain amount of time, he should be forced to show his hand at the end of the play. Some pros are already doing it, and since giving up information can be the difference between winning and losing, many would be forced to speed up the process to avoid giving that edge.
The Future Of Poker: Drastic Changes Coming Up
Among other things, Max Silver also talked about the future of the game. He admitted he’s not ‘hugely optimistic’ about the future of poker and that starting from scratch and becoming a successful poker pro will become tougher and tougher ‘if not nigh on impossible.’
The information available on the web - training, coaching - has made poker very hard to beat and with ‘ Amaya ruining a lot of games’, things will only get worse. He said:
Many (of the poker pros) won't be able to sustain six figure winning years and will either move down in stakes or leave poker altogether. This will have an effect of making each stake tougher in turn and really punish the weaker players."
Furthermore, the live environment isn’t as friendly as it used to be, so to make a living out of playing poker, you would have to be much more disciplined, selective, and hard-working. In other words:
If you’re willing to put in the time, it is not impossible to make a living from poker, but it's not something I'd recommend to my friends as I would have ten years ago."
SnapShove: More Features Coming In
Last but definitely not least, Max Silver also talked about his new poker app, SnapShove. He admitted he was surprised at the lack of options that mobile players had and considers the mobile environment the next step forward for poker software out there.
Testing is the hardest part when building a poker app, according to him. Adding a new feature can more often than not break several other already-implemented features and fixing all those bugs can be time-consuming.
And since we’re talking about new features, it’s time to share with you SnapShove team’s next moves. The app has two versions - free and premium - and many poker enthusiasts complained about its lack of complexity. This issue however will be solved in the coming months. Silver said that a review of the incorrect answers that appear during the training mode is already added to the Android version and very soon will be added to the iOS version too. Some other features that will be soon implemented are the addition of ICM, card removal from hand ranges, overcalling, and reshoving.
With all those features added, SnapShove will have every chance of becoming the next big poker hit in the mobile world.
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