I have only read 20 pages of it so far, but the themes running through my head are "population tendancies" and "adapting to your opponent".

The idea that there will be no edge and the games will die makes me laugh a lot.

If this book has the impact that you expect, then being a thinking, hard-working player, you will realise that the population tendancies are gravitating towards the "mers way", and then adapt your strategy to counter that?

As Mers says, most of it is exploitable, so once again, the clever people just stay ahead of the game and develop counter-strategies, and the people who play with the mindset of "this is what mers taught, I will do what mers says, mers rules" will not progress and hence not succeed.

Remember when "tight was right" in MTTs, everyone playing the same style. What happened, people clocked on and started playing LAG. Now what's happening? Too many people being LAG, so people tightening up to exploit that.

Things go through cycles, and if you keep yourself at the edge of learning, you will always make money.

Why would you be upset/miffed?

I think we made a mistake on this front and I mean no disrespect to maxv2 by that, he's just a busy guy with a certain $ expectation and there probably would have been preferable ways to get more people involved who would have loved to help out in the project without those concerns. But oh well. Live and learn.

Also over a third of these articles are 100% new and most of the rest is in some meaningful ways different than what was in FastTrack.

Glad people are enjoying! Those who seem surprised that this isn't a manual of ranges to robotically employ are pretty funny, is that really what you were afraid of? Book would be a massive failure if written that way.

i have a question for some ev calculations. Sorry if it was already discussed somewhere. I didnt read this whole thread.
In the Chapter Big Blind Play Against a Minraise, 10-15bb deep the author explains that against a 44.3% Minraising Range T9o has a -1.2bb expectation. How can we calculate this EV? I havent seen it in the Book how to do it. Also the author doesnt say what the Raise/fold and what the Raise/call Range from villain is. I guess we need to know those Ranges to calculate the EV.

edit: Just saw that one Range has a blue corner. Its difficult to see. I guess this Range is the Raise/call Range then.

Book is really cool, but pretty sure this book will not destroy games.

ppl who are lazy, and were lazy a lot of this ppl still will not work on their game, and this ppl who working on this game, this book will just increase there skills a little, some a little more.

I think the fear was unnecessary

gj mers, you are cool guy

Up to 2/3 as Mers said.

Was a bonus given to Fast Track people. Mers ran it by me and I thought it was a cool idea for a hard working premium study group to give some feedback on the early versions of many of these articles. By all accounts it was thoroughly enjoyed.

Anyways, given how well FT was reviewed, I would respond "that's what makes it so great" to your question.

No trolling please.

The fast track articles were far from copy/paste, as well.

Thanks all for the kind words - put of lot of soul into this so I'm happy people are liking it.

Very solid stuff Mers. Maybe after reading through this 2-3 times and really learning what it says I won't suck so much :P

I'm just kidding. I like editing stuff though.

I just started reading it and i LOL'D already :

"It's ok to play a random opponent called DogLoverAA.." hahahaha

Pure Genius

always followed your stuff mers, from what i've read a lot of stuff is repetition for me, but thers some other interesting things, still 40% or so so cant say much yet.

[ ] Kill the games

so far

Yea, but that is not what ppl are worried about though. Ppl are worried that they will now make less money, or they will have to play more/study more to maintain their yearly income.

Of course you can exploit an exploitable strategy, but some strategies are worse than others. Would you rather play against a guy that open shoves every hand or would you rather play against a guy that plays a Mers strategy? Like Joe said, weak regs will plug some of their minor leaks and some of their "wtf are you doing" leaks. Not to mention this speeds up the learning process. Beginners will not study irrelevant material, and they will have a good idea how to correctly approach poker from the start.

I am not saying this book will kill superTurbos or anything like that, I have only read 5-10pgs, I will comment when I am finished.

Still bemused by these types of comments, mostly because they seem somewhat serious (moreso from some people than others). The ebook I wanted to write, and the ebook I think I did write, is not trying to have the maximum impact on the difficulty of the games for established players. A book that did that would have had other characteristics that would have made it a failure in my eyes.

What I guess people were afraid of was me going through a whole list of ranges in different situations that would help you be close to breakeven against a good reg. But why would I ever write about something so meaningless? Is that really what you thought I'd spent my time writing so much about? You're completely missing the point and I don't even know why you would think it would be something like that in the first place. Something like that would be a terrible ebook. I think so, at least.


Sol Reader asked about criticism, and I'll be honest - I find myself surprisingly thin skinned, and have been lol'ing to myself about that (as per the chapter mentioning being able to make fun of yourself). I think it's because I put a lot of myself into it and I'm not asking for anything from anybody in releasing it, if it's for you, awesome, if it's not, no worries. In coaching/videomaking I want all negative feedback because I have a responsibility to give people what they want. This is more like something I wanted to do my way and if it's not for you or there are details about it you would change, it's different. The book is pretty much what I wanted to say. Does it say it perfectly, of course not, I made a decision not to stop myself from doing something like this because it was going to be far from perfect. Giving it a fancy cover and hyping it up does I guess entitle people to be public about negative opinions, but even that seems kind of weird. It's like it implies I'm trying to tell people how awesome I am by writing this (or hyping this), and thus a fair topic of discussion is said awesomeness or lack there of. Which makes me sad because in putting a lot of soul into this book if people come out with that conclusion, well damn, ouch.

-1.2bb is the expectation from 3bet jamming T9o given those assumptions. I just used ProPokerTools.

Raise/call and raise/fold range in the images, yes.

haters gonna hate, mers. Don't worry about it, it's a solid e-book

I know, it kicks ass. I know because I wrote it and I'm the best.

Sure, I understand your point and agree with it. What you say is so so true "people will have to play more/study more to maintain their yearly income".

And also agree with the point that it gives people a much stronger grounding to start from.

So what does this mean? It means that you must work that extra bit harder to be ahead of the game, and I think this is a bitter pill to swallow for a lot of people who have been able to make a steady income from the incompetencies of their opponents for so long, without actually having to work that hard.

As Tommy Angelo says, everything is a door A door B decision. You can take door A, work as hard as possible, and make sure you maintain a good income, Or take door B, complain that Mers killed the games, be unwilling to improve when there is still money to be made, and end up quitting the game.

When Tiger Woods entered the golf scene, it revolutionised golf. Other golfers started getting physical fitness coaches, they started getting mental game coaches etc. Tiger remained on top of the pile despite everyone else trying to catch up. Why? Because he kept working equally as hard to stay at the top of the game.

I am not saying that it won't make things harder for your average grinder, but by the very nature of the game, if you are not willing to adapt when something like this occurs, then you perhaps do not have the right mentality to achieve long-term poker success.

I am nobody to talk, I am at the low stakes and just working my way up, but I do understand how success is achieved in various fields, and if one does enough "deliberate practice", success is sure to follow.

How many people do you think will "deliberately practice" this material? I think very few. 90% will read it and think they know it all, but the concepts will be misapplied on a mass scale.

And if you think your edge has diminished because too many regs at the $100 level have read this e-book, well why not move to 4 tabling $30 games and achieve an even better hourly there?

I think if you have the determination, some decent intelligence, and a willingness to constantly improve, you can find your edge in many different ways.

I am not a high stakes player (yet), so maybe my viewpoint isnt considered so important, but I do know how success if achieved in various fields and how people react in the face of adversity.

When a rival company releases a product that makes your companies' product obselete, what do you do? You can either say "those bastards, now we wont make any money, our company is guna fail", or you can take a step back, think about what this actually means, innovate, and make sure your next product eclipses anything they have achieved until now, and stay ahead of the competition.

People inevitably catch up at some point, its how you react at that point which determines your true willingness to be successful in your field. Even if everyone played perfect strategy poker, the mental game is so powerful, that you could probably achieve a much better ROI than your opponent just because you are able to absorb downswings better and have high levels of focus.

In conclusion, I think Mers has put his e-book together in a very clever way. He has taught us how to think, and from that, it is up to us to apply/misapply the concepts in the best/worst way possible..................what we do it with it from here is entirely up to us.


Peace

I for one mers find this an incredible read and extremly thought provoking so dont feel like it is going unappreciated. Whats that stat? a business is 4 times more likely to hear feed back from an unhappy/customer expecting more than a customer which is satisfied.

Something that has had me asking questions for some time now. When ever i have seen peoples post flop stats mine have always been way different than others. Namely my wtsd %s have always been high and my won$@sd <50% at the same time as having pretty similar win rates (bb/100) in the same situations. Im really not sure what to think about these situations.

For example in your optimal vpip opp chapter, i plugged the range you used as an example into hem. Your stats read -59bb, 30.6w$wsf, 26.6wtsd%, 51.4w$sd and 55.4 fold v cb. Mine read -60bb, 40.8w$wsf, 36.6wtsd%, 45.7w$sd and 45 fold v cbet.

Whats your opinion on having a low won money at show down percentage, obviously i would love to have it higher but is it likely to just be a product of playing style meaning by making adjustments to try and improve it im likely to damage my game by a greater degree than what i would gain from doing so?

This is just a comparison in a specific scenario given as thats what you have given stats on, however the same trend seems to flow through my whole game.

It sure would be sad if more people dislike you for doing this rather than salute you! The guys who really want to improve buy information like this, but you're handing it out for free in multilingual, for a game with an already tiny edge. Even the now non-caring russians might read it . I don't want to be another "game is dead"-preacher, but you/HUSNG.com should at least have charged a hefty sum for that book! And preferably only released it in english so people have to work even harder .

Anyway, it was a deep 65-page book, thanks for it!

el oh el @ the haters. I just keep picturing everyone with tears running down their cheeks as they curse merc for destroying the games.

lol yeah by releasing it only in English would really help them achieve promoting husng.com as far and wide as possible. Why would you possibly try and restrict your customer base on purpose?

I thought the smiley in the end was enough to make the irony shine through, you did clearly not

yh sorry im in serious mode, guess ive heard way to much self beneficial opinions on this book over last few days. The thing is there have been plenty of comments like these where the poster has been entirely serious.

Indeed, but I still think that russians should have to pay for this e-book!

sorry but i clearly said i havent read the book 100% and cant say much yet
i appreciate a lot the work u put on this book and so far its been good, just was pointing out a good bunch of the start was repetition for me and this all hype about killing the game is nowhere even close with this ebook (imo), just to let everyone know

i pretty much agree with all of the above , ill give my final opinion once i read it completely