A couple of book reviews

BaddBeatBobb reviews The Complete Book Of Hold 'Em Poker: A Comprehensive Guide to Playing and Winning
and The Complete Book Of Casino Poker

Ought versus Is

Poker how-to books tend to be prescriptive, they talk about what should be rather than what is. Some poker non-fiction is more descriptive, but those don't really tend to fall cleaning into the how-to genre. Examples of pretty straightforward how-to stuff would be my books, anything written by Harrington, that kind of stuff.

I always thought that was a pretty obvious characteristic of the how-to genre.

Which is why I was surprised when I saw the thread on 2+2 that started out

If you take a look at Harrington on Hold 'Em Volume 1, published just before 2005, you'll notice that in it Dan says "I like my continuation bets to be about half the size of the pot" and "...half-pot is an ideal size...". He goes on to say you can vary your c-bets from around 40% pot on the low side (for dryer flops) to 70% pot on the high side (for the very, very drawy flops). He appeared to believe half the pot was enough to deny proper odds even on something like a J82hh board

It seems to me the average size of a continuation bet has gradually gotten larger and larger since then.

Even more amazing than the question, it that none of the answers pointed out the question was based on a false premise, they all took it was a real question and tried to rationalize an answer.

The right answer was simply that the norm was never a half-pot bet. If used to be full-pot size bet, anthing smaller was considered an underbet. Since Chris Ferguson popularized the idea of a half-pot sized bet the typical bets have gotten smaller, not bigger.

Presentation style in books

In another blog I made some comments about a new book on playing sit and goes. I havn't seen the whole book, but based on what I have seen I'm not impressed by the book.

I've been thinking about it and have dediced that what it is I dislike about the book is style as much as substance. But the reason I don't like the style is based on substance.

A sample chapter posted on twoplustwo has a lot of examples that look like this

Hand 2-23

Blinds: t100-t200, 4 players

Your hand: You (t1,700) are on the button with KsJc. The small blind (t4,500) and big blind (t5,800) have been inactive for several hands, as have you. The blinds will soon rise to t200-t400.

Action to you:The LAG chip leader (t8,000), first to act, makes a characteristic min-raise to t400.

Question: Do you fold, call, or reraise?

Answer: Resteal all-in. There is t700 in the pot, over 40 percent of your stack. You have a decent hand with showdown potential, and the chip leader will often back away from a foiled steal attempt.

In addition, you need to gamble here. With the big blind at over 10 percent of your stack and just about to double, and the blinds hitting you constantly at 4-way play, you need to make a move. A situation like this one, when you have a decent hand and are the aggressor against opponents who have shown little strength, is the ideal place to risk your chips.

The presentation if very mechanistic, no narrative, no story, nothing that holds my interest. My eyes just kind of glaze over when I see this kind of thing and my mind doesn't really process anything as I read it (so much so that I'm not sure I actually read it).

The substansive part about what bothers me about this form of presentation is that it's presumed that you already know what information is going to be important. There's a preset template to put the information in, anything outside that template just isn't given, it's ignored.

Mike Caro wrote something once where he said at any instant during the play of a poker hand there's millions of things going on, from your opponent blinking to a fly landing on the wall. The key to success, he said, is to figure out which one or two things each instant is important to be paying attention to.

It isn't going to be the same one or two things every time.

That's what I think is wrong with that form of presentation. There's no room for the story, for picking out which elements of this particular story are important. Every hand is a story, it's not just a check list of some preset idea of what's going to happen.

Because of that I prefer a hand analysis told in story format.

Type size

I wonder what Tyler Cowen would think of books put out by 2+2 publishing?

Sklansky on Razz

I think Sklansky on Razz is one of the best books ever written on poker. It was a Gambler's Book Club published pamphlet that is long out of print. It's since been incorporated into Sklansky on Poker.

I don't have my copy any more and it's been a long time since I read it.

To me the key concept Sklansky pushed in that pamphlet was more the kind of thing you'd have expected from Caro rather than Sklansky. Back in those days Sklansky represented a mathematical approach to the game and Caro represented a psychological approach to the game. In Sklansky on Razz he preached the normal edict of Just Play Tight, but he grounded that in the idea that you should play tight from the point of view of the opponent. The strength of your hand comes from your upcards, from the range that an opponent would put you on. If you played tight with respect to the cards your opponent could see, and aggresviely represented nut cards as your downcards, then the opponent would tend to put you on very strong hands. Your downcards almost didn't matter.

Of course you could take that too far, but as a general guiding rule it's a powerful concept. Represent the hand that your opponents will fear. It's not just a Razz concept, it's a poker concept. For example, in hold'em if you raise pre-flop your opponents will almost always put you on AK and you can play accordingly on later streets.

Focus on what your opponents know about your hand and how that influences their thinking. That's the lesson from Sklansky on Razz

An old post at Anything But Hold Em points to an old 2+2 thread that questions whether Sklansky on Razz is outdated. If you think the book is about Razz then I guess maybe it is outdated. Games with both a forced bring-in and a forced raise were common back then (low card bring-in, high card then had a forced raise -- or the other way around, I don't remember which). That makes for a very different game.

But the book isn't really outdated. It's a book about poker, not a book about Razz.

Super System

There's a thread on rgp about slow-playing quads where somebody is quoting Doyle Brunson.

> If you read what Mr. Brunson has to say about slowplaying flopped
> quads in Super System 2, (see page 574, 4th paragraph), it would seem
> that you are reducing your EV (to virtually zero) by betting out on
> the flop. That is Doyle's whole point: Despite the fact that you have
> flopped such a powerful hand, it is not a very profitable hand due to
> the fact that the deck is crippled. Mr. Brunson states (probably
> correctly) that the only way you can reasonably hope to make any money
> on flopped quads is to check both the flop (and turn) and only bet a
> small amount on the end.

(The no-limit section written by Brunson in the Second Edition is the same as that in the Original Edition)

He's close to right about maximizing his chances to win something. But that's not the most profitable, it's not the same as maximizing EV.

He's close to right about maximizing his chances to win something. But that's not the most profitable, it's not the same as maximizing EV.

There's a trade off between getting small wins frequently and getting big wins infrequently. Which one you should pursue right now depends on the relative likelihoods of players having various hands.

If the flop is AAA and there's a good chance (based on pre-flop action) that someone has a big pair then maybe you should represent a pocket pair yourself on the flop. If not, then maybe not.

For some reason players are more likely to chase over-cards even if the board is 777. Pairing a 6 won't really help them any more than pairing an 8 but psychologically they're more likely to chase with an 89 than with a 56. So with small quads you should almost always bet the flop.

Doyle makes a lot of mistakes in that book, it has a good reputation because it was hyped in newspaper sports page advertising country wide, he did a really good job of promoting the book and there just weren't that many poker books with original thought in them, and he had competing thoughts from various original thinkers.

Guys like Caro, Sklansky, Baldwin, Reese, Hawthorne, and Brunson all thought about the games in different ways. That's what makes the book so rich, not that it covers different games, but it covers different ways of thinking. The richness of Brunson's ideas were that he was the first to advocate semi-bluffing in a major way.

He didn't call it that, I think he probably called it bluffing with outs, and it wasn't a new idea. But he was the first to advocate actually building a playing strategy around it. It was a powerful thought.

His details about things like psychic powers and slow-playing quads are wrong.

Misquoting my book (again)

There's another thread on 2+2 that starts with somebody asking about my hold'em book and ending up somebody being critical of the book by misquoting me.

Here's the thread.

The misquote is

I remember thinking it was quite an advanced book at the time but I just recently decided to re read it and some of the things he says seem way off the mark. Folding AK in early in a loose aggressive game?

I don't suggest that at all. I suggest that in some loose or very loose games that are very aggresive you might want to fold AKo in early position.

The reason is the importance of position when loose games get very aggresive.

And I make it a point to distiguish between aggresive and very aggresive and even give operational definitions for the two different conditions.

You aren't going to see those games very often. When you do see those games you can make a lot of money if you forget about trying to be tough in early position and get busy from late position.

Sometimes people also complain about me repeating myself a lot in that book. But it seems if I don't repeat myself a lot then the dimwits don't seem to understand the concepts very well.

Book of Bluffs

A long time ago I could pretty much say I'd read ever book on poker that was worth reading. That's no longer true, the market has exploded. But I try to keep up with the good ones, even if I don't get to them right away.

Last year about this time I was at a book signing/sales thing in Atlantic City with a dozen or so other poker book authors. The one that seemed to be selling real well at that event was Matt Lessinger's The Book of Bluffs. So I vowed to get around to reading it eventually.

I still havn't read it, but have read the first chapter and I've changed my mind.

The chapter starts out with "12 Bluffing Proverbs".

There are only two ways to win a pot: You can show down the best hand, or bluff the worst one.

But, no. You win whenever your opponent folds, whether you're bluffing or not. That's a reason to be aggresive, but not neccasarily a reason to bluff.

And even if he's right that you have to either bluff or show down the best hand, it's next sentence is laughable.

If you don't bluff you are throwing away half of your pot-winning potential

That's wrong on two levels.

1. Even if there are only two options doesn't mean they are equally likely to arise.

2. Money winning potential is the goal, not pot winning potential.

If he can't do better than that on his lede, then I'm not sure I have time to read any more of it.

I seem to have a minority opinion though. Maybe I'll read some more of it later.

Click on the cover art to see Amazon reviews. Those readers give it 4 stars. So it's popular, even though it looks really sloppily written to me.

Book Review

I'm always happy to run across a good review of my hold'em book.

Poker novels

A librarian recommends a couple of poker related novels.

Part II of a Review of Small Stakes Hold'em by Miller, Sklansky, and Malmuth.

The authors display a fundemental misconception about what's important in poker right at the beginning, in a section titled "Where the Money Comes From". (page 16-17.)

They correctly identify explotation of your opponents errors as the important source of expected winnings in poker. They get that right. But, they apparantly don't really understand it because they don't follow through.

Here's what they say.

"Money comes from exploiting mistakes. When your opponents make mistakes, you can make money" .....

Then in the next paragraph they say:

"People learn best through practice and feedback"....

So far, so good.

Then the next paragraph they say:

"This is the normal human process for learning. Unfortunately, it does not work at all for poker" (emphasis in original).

That's the point they dropped the ball. And I think they dropped the ball there in a major way.

They clarify what they're talking about in the next parapgraph where they say:

"The correct way to play poker is to understand it theoretically, and make sure you make the correct play, regardless of the results."

Okay, they're saying don't be results oriented, and we all understand that and we all agree with that.

But the most important part of playing winning poker is the identification of your opponent mistakes, not in determining an optimal explotation. Even if you don't always do the perfectly correct thing, if your opponents are making mistakes and you can identify those mistakes well enough to just make marginally correct response then you'll do alright.

Their error is in the emphasis of "does not work at all for poker.

The best way to learn to identify opponent mistakes is by practice and feedback and observation. It works very well as a learning mechinism for poker. It doesn't work for understanding the randomness of the cards that will fall, and it doesn't work as well as other methods for determing many nuances of optimal stratagy. But it works quite well for recognizing which opponents bluff to much and which opponents don't.

Experience and observation of the reactions to events of other players is key to playing winning poker. For the authors to dismiss that mode of learning right at the git go does not bode well for the rest of the book. It suggests there will be some major deficiencies in the analysis that doesn't really take full account of the range of responses that your opponents will make.

Stratagic thinking is the recognition that the opponent shoots back. The best way to learn about that is the method they dismiss as not useful at all.

We'll get a little deeper into the book in a later post.

Feel free to tell me where you think I'm missing the authors point in my observations.

Review of Small Stakes Hold'em by Miller, Sklansky, and Malmuth

I've been holding off writing a review of this book for a while now. The reason is that I'm really not impressed with the book, and the public opinion seems to differ from that. Given my history with being on Mason's short list of bad people it seems to me that any bad opinion I might have of the book would just be written off as sour grapes. Well, okay, go ahead and think that if it makes you comfortable.

I do recommend the book to most readers, and do think it makes a worthwhile contribution to the poker literature. But, I think it's way overrated and it's contribution is very small compared to the price and it has some major flaws.

The flaws in the book are typical of 2+2 books. Mathematically the writers of books published by 2+2 tend to think that the standard properties of the world include linearaity, continouity, two dimensional, symmetry, stationarity and other such mathematical properties that tend to make problems easy to analyze. Well, the world isn't like that and neither is poker.

I read the book about a year ago, and decided not to review it then. I've decided to do a long, somewhat careful review of it now because I'm writing a second edition of my hold'em book and want to make sure I addreess at least some of the holes in what's available out there.

I'm going to spend more than one post on a review. Right now I'm going to just close this first part with what my thoughts on the book had been after my first read of it.

I think Miller tried to integrate many of the ideas I had in my hold'em book with the ideas from Sklansky's Theory of Poker. I think he did a good job of doing that, but I'm not sure it was a rational thing to try to do. Theory of Poker is basically a cookbook of tactics intended for beginners. It's a very good book, but it's not theoretical. Trying to put some of my ideas into a theoretical framework that isn't a theoretical framework just isn't going to work out real well.