The Poker Chronicles has a pointer to an Ed Miller blog entry where Ed talks about whether poker games have gotten tougher recently.

Apparently there's some controversy about this, based on the idea that more and more book sales means more and more intelligent players which makes the games tougher. In a n internet Q/A Miller had said that he doesn't think it's true that book distribution makes the games tougher. Then some sort of controversy about that arose at 2+2.

Miller's right. The toughness of poker games is pretty much a self-controlling characteristic. It has nothing to do with the size or quality of the literature.

Poker doesn't exist without cronic losers. Winning and losing doesn't depend on fixed levels of "skill", it depends on relative skills between players. On average, good players will win against bad players. But good players will lose ag ainst very good players on average.

More books might well make more good players, but will also make more very good players. Books don't make poker more or less profitable. Opponents do that.

What's been happening recently is that poker underwent a boom in popularity as a cultural fad. That boom brought a boom in book sales. The books didn't make the game more popular, but the popularity of the game caused the books.

At the very beginning of the boom there were many very bad players and it wasn't difficult for a marginal player to find a game he could win at. But, the early learning curve is quick in poker, and those very bad players quickly became just bad, and marginal players didn't win as easily, they had to start paying more attention to game selection. So, in some sense poker might have become a little tougher because of a slight increase in game selection difficulty. But certainly not because of any books.

The cultural fad is starting to fad slightly and there may be slightly fewer new players every year in the near future. I'm not sure that's going to be as significant as some people might think though.

But there will always be beatable games. Because if the games aren't beatable they dry up, with the better players finding greener pastures, leaving the weak playrs to find another game, making that game easier.

The total number of games might ebb and flow, but the ebbs come from tough games drying up and blowing away. The games left after that ebb are always going to be soft games. Winning players won't play anywhere else.

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.