#27, 5/13/2010--A new poker book

I've recently been going through the Full Tilt Poker Strategy Guide: Tournament Edition, edited by Michael Craig, with chapters by Andy Block, Richard Brodie, Chris Ferguson, Ted Forrest, Rafe Furst, Phil Gordon, David Grey, Howard Lederer, Mike Matusow, Huckleberry Seed, Keith Sexton, and Gavin Smith. All of the authors are very succesful poker pros, and some are very highly educated. For example, Chris Ferguson has a Ph.D. in computer science with an emphasis on artificial intelligence.

What's particularly interesting about this book is that each author tackles a different subject, such as bet sizing, playing with a big stack ["stack" refers to how many chips you have in front of you], or playing with a small stack. The kicker is that the authors often disagree on how to approach a particular problem.

For that reason, I would never recommend this book to a beginner. It's not that the concepts are too advanced, it's more that at the level at which these guys play, poker is both an art and a science. For someone just learning the basics of how, when, and whether to make a raise, this would be way too confusing.

The chapter that helped me the most is No Limit Hold 'em: Play Before the Flop by Andy Bloch. He talks about starting hand systems, and he details the starting hands that he uses, backed up by twelve pages of tables and charts of starting hand values in different situations.

This has helped me in at least two ways:

1. I am weak as far as being able to change gears, that is, change my playing style to keep my opponents off-balance. Bloch's basic system is to play a lot more hands than I do (more than twice as many), so I've been trying it out, with the book open next to me when I play online. The point isn't to learn to do it exactly as Block does. The point is to get out of my comfort zone, play more hands than I'm used to, see how it feels, and figure out what I can take from it to improve my game.

2. It reminded me how much work I still have to do on my fundamentals, especially the dreaded m-word--memorization.

I have commited the math of many common poker situations to memory. For example, I know that the odds of hitting a flush draw with one card to come are 4.11:1. That is, if my hand is 2 diamonds, and there are two diamonds on the board (the community cards), that means the final community card (the river) has to be a diamond for me to make my hand. That will happen 1 out of every 5.11 times, in other words, the odds against me hitting my diamond are 4.11 to 1.

So, knowing that I, can look at the bet I have to make to stay in the hand, and if I'm not getting 4.11 to 1 odds (that is, if the amount of money in the pot is not more than 4 times what I have to bet), I have to fold. Over the long-term, it's a mathematical loser. Knowing the odds for or against you is pretty basic, and it's hard to be a winning poker player if you don't.

But, if you want to get better, there are always more fundamentals to learn. Consider a young musician that thinks he has it down because he can play "the scale". Then he finds out that scales come in different keys, and that there are different types of scales to memorize, such as major, harmonic and melodic minor, modal (7 of those), and pentatonic. The same idea holds true in poker. As you get better, there are more and more fundamentals that you have to learn.

It's the same thing in poker. Remember the phrase from earlier in this post: " . . . backed up by twelve pages of tables and charts of starting hand values in different situations"? So, do I really need to memorize all that? Well, that depends, because the answer to that question is another question--How good do I want to be?

On the twoplustwo.com poker forums, I have often seen threads opened with a question such as, Do I have to . . . ? or How important is it to . . . ? The most common is, Do I have to understand math to play poker?

My response is that if you start a question with "Do I have to . . ", then you probably don't have the right attitude to be a really good player.

Do I absolutely need to memorize all the charts and graps in this book to be a decent, even good, poker player? No. But when I do memorize them, that's an edge that I'll have against every player at my table that hasn't done the work. I'll close this post with excerpts from the last paragraph before Bloch's six page of tables of tables, Hands by Position--Ante Tournament, followed by Hands by Position--No-Ante Tournament:

"Having these numbers gives you a starting point for all your pre-flop decisions. Your instincts and ability to read the table are important, but now you don't have to make decisions in a vacuum . . . The rankings and percentages of playable hands give you exact answers when you don't have opponent-specific information."