Anyone read/saw this?

Are you curious about the book (subtitled "Optimal and Exploitative Strategies") or the extras/supplemental information available on the publisher's website?

TBH. I am interested in both. I really couldnt make heads of tails of the mathmatics of poker even though I purchased two copies via stars points a while back.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Expert-Heads.../dp/1904468942 this?

Extras

HUNL Preflop Charts (up to 100BB)

Appendix A - "Big River Game" Equations

SB bet-or-check game

Link to the "extras" for this book. Scroll to bottom of page provided by dandpoker.com. Aka: D&B Poker.

http://www.dandbpoker.com/product/ex...oldem-volume-1

I wonder if anyone has read it.

The thread title is quite confusing. Maybe a mod will change it... I have sent a request.

I'm halfway through the book now and I only have good things to say about the book. If you are interested in HU NLHE be it Cash or SNGs and you are willing to put some work away from the tables this book is excellent. It will give you the tools to properly calculate EV, solve games (push/fold, raise/3bshove and others you may find interesting), calculate maximally exploitative strategies, analyze distributions and a lot more. Plus the author is an extremely helpful and generous guy.

Bought this book a moment ago, will review in a week or so when done.

I like this book so far.

What do you guys think about his way of looking at EV?

Here's an example from page 32 of the book

He calculates EV differently than previous books have done. Do you think this adds to or detracts from the value of this book?

Even if his explanation is correct, his calculation is not one you would do at the table. How you make your decision at the table is what matters, so C- for the explanation.

Perhaps he gets into more practical explanations elsewhere in the book. If true, the grade of C- may be too harsh.

The same could be said of pretty much any EV calculation. Do you not think EV calculations are worthwhile?

When I read this example, I thought "3 combos vs 4 we beat, easy call", I was surprised to find out that the result was so close.

Writing 80.97bb vs +0.97bb is unusual but the mental switch to something I was used to was for me easily done.

I’ve read up to the River section (which I’m anticipating will be awesome).

It's a phenomenal book. The author does a great job inferring larger concepts from the approximate games he studies. And he always has an eye toward explaining how his inferences can be used in practice. He even shows how some of the generic advice I’ve read in e-books (specifically the chapter on barreling in some of Tri’s work, and others) could lead to severely unbalanced play if it’s followed unthinkingly.

If you’ve never done any work away from the tables studying ranges/trying to solve problems then you can’t appreciate how elegant his methods and examples are.

His tone is not dry as you might expect, but nearly conversational, despite the book being highly theoretical (there are even some LOL spots). The writing is very good overall with only a few sentences I noticed that could have been worded better or were a little awkward. But that’s nit-picking given the size of the book and the complexity of its topics.

I would recommend it for any non-beginner. Even for someone who would never be interested in better understanding game theory. The chapters on Equity Distribution and Postflop Concepts would benefit anyone seeking to improve their postflop thinking. Several your-head-will-explode moments.

In Foucault’s review of MOP, he wrote that he felt that book lacked examples and explanations of how the inferences from its toy games could be applied to situations in NL (i.e. he felt it left the reader wanting more). This book fills that gap and is no doubt going to be worth countless rereads. I would rank it with The Theory of Poker/MOP as the kind of book that could still be useful in 100 years.

Couldn’t recommend this book more to anyone who’s serious about understanding HUNL at a very high level. But they should keep in mind Thoreau’s saying: Books should be read as deliberately as they were written.

Of course I do. I'm a math guy. At the table I can do the EV calculation in my head using the approximation:

(4*.6 + 3*.15)/7 ≈ 40.57%

showing it is roughly break even to call given 3 to 2 money odds. I would probably fold the hand against a weaker player and call against a better player. A more exact calc shows a tiny edge for calling, but the impact of such a call is more about variance and less about profit.

Anyway for mods to merge the two threads on this?

This thread and the other one here: http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/33...ipton-1281938/

Imo it is much easier to calculate the EV of the stack size than the chips won as most people tend to do, simply because it is much less error prone since you don't have to keep track of the reference point. Will did a great job of explaining both ways which are obviously equivalent. And who calculates EV at the table? Rain man? :-)

BTW we have already discussed this topic here: http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/25...te-ev-1175246/.

I wouldn't count too much on it. I sent a request to the mods to get the thread renamed to something more correct but got ignored.

I wonder if author sent this book to 2+2 publishing, and if they did receive it, why they chose not to publish it..?

Hi 1aday:

We did review it and were interested in publishing it. And to that end we sent the author our standard contract which he returned to us and by my count wanted 28 changes made.

Since our production work includes extensive editing and significant rewriting by the author if necessary, it was obvious to us that this was not someone who was going to be easy to work with. So I told Will Tipton to take his book to another publisher.

Best wishes,
Mason

I'm very much a beginner and was looking to purchase this book. Unsure at this point, as I don't think I have the base yet, being so new to poker. Definitely one for the future it seems with all the high praise people have been giving it.

This is a question to You, Will or anyone else who has read it. What knowledge should I possess before studying this book? I'm sure I could get a lot from it, but at the same time I don't want to be googling a word or concept twice every page as I'm unaware of the basics around it.

Or does the book contain all the information for a beginner like myself to start without a firm grasp on the fundamentals?

Thanks!

Hey, sorry for the delay in responding. I was sort of hoping that someone with an outside perspective might opine on this one.

I wouldn't say there's anything in particular that a new player who carefully reads from one cover to the next won't understand. I'm pretty careful to define all my terms, even if they're really basic, just to make sure everyone's on the same page. For example: what is a raise, what is a 3-bet, a c-bet, a range? (Incidentally a lot of this stuff is in Ch. 1 which is freely available if you want to check it out.) I doubt you'll find yourself googling terms very often.

So I think most new players could certainly read the book and understand it at some level. The thing is, they might not have the contextual unerstanding to make the most use of it. If you read something and you don't really see why it's important, your brain tends to just forget it. But if you read something and you can say to yourself, "yea I get put in that spot a lot against my regular opponent X because he starts out doing A and I adjust thusly so that leads to this sort of situation, and now I see how I should deal with it!" then it sort of attaches itself to that situation in your brain and next time it comes up, you'll remember what you learned. So, I'd say that you need some experience and some big picture knowledge of the game before you'll be able to see where a lot of the more subtle concepts fit in exactly.

I mean, what a true beginner usually really needs -- the fastest way to get them from clueless to breaking even at the micro stakes -- is for a friend or book to just sit them down and say: "from the SB, open raise hands W, call 3-bets with hands X, and from the BB, defend hands Y and 3-bet hands Z. Size your bets between half pot and full pot, c-bet a lot, and try to put a lot of money in with top pair or better." Buuttt I really don't like saying those sorts of things, at least in public and certainly not in book format, because they're oversimplified to the point of being wrong. Each of those things depends on tons of variables. I guess the standard approach to dealing with that issue is to go into a long discussion and try to cover a bunch of conditions under which different strategies might be appropriate, which ultimately still leads to an over-simplification at some point, since there's more possibilities than you could ever cover. So, I usually try to just give you the tools to think about things yourself and then do an example or two -- I think this is simpler and ultimately more useful for people. But of course it also requires a bit more sophistication from the reader.

Thank you for the detailed response, appreciate it. Think I'll save the book until I have more games under my belt. I have it saved on my wish list on amazon, so no doubt I'll benefit from it fully when I've got a better contextual understanding of the game. I've been informed that you are doing a video series for husng.com, could you please shed some light on what you will be concentrating in the videos? Will it be more classroom theory based, expanding on the salient parts of the book or are you going in a different direction. Would be interesting to know.

Thanks!

D&B is the best poker publisher.

After 2+2 of course. Don't want to get banned

Hi will,
your book is a blast!
I'd say that nothing comparable to this has been released in the poker literature before.

Just some curiosities about your project:

1) was this thought like a 2 volumes book from the beginning?
2) are you already working on volume 2?
3) do you think volume 2 will be more "complex" than the first one?
4) can you give us some "detailed" preview of what to expect in the next episode

Thanks and good luck