Hi everyone - Now the dust has settled on my book - Mindblowing Poker, by Professor Poker, I wanted to re-open the discussion on these forums.

We had quite a good debate in the old Books and Publications section, but I wondered if anyone had any thoughts or comments on this radical new way to take on strong / GTO type players and to prevent the game from becoming 'solved' or stale. This is really important to me, as I don't want the game of poker to die a slow death.

In short we use a dynamic strategy of changing ranges and generally taking villain out of their comfort zone, in order to encourage them to make mistakes, which we are well placed to exploit. There are 8 new strategies, which put a villain in a new spot. If they haven't seen a spot before, they can't respond optimally, and certainly can't review accurately with a solver.

Would welcome any debate

I have thought about using a similar strategy to gain an edge over high stakes opponents, and it's cool to see that someone has literally written a book about a similar idea.

My thinking was that any range construction we use will always include the strongest hands. However much of the value of the weakest hands in our range comes from balancing out our strong hands by using weaker hands as bluffs, bluff catchers, etc.

So it seems possible to create multiple ranges that theoretically give up minimal EV vs optimal, but which have drastically different solutions. For example the bottom of one range could include weak offsuit broadways while an alternative range would instead include middle suited cards.

It seems that we may be able to create multiple strategies that give up a little EV if opponent responds optimally, but which have drastically different solutions and thus drastically different counter-strategies. This would put a human opponent in a difficult spot.

Another way we could put human opponents into difficult spots would be to use non-standard bet sizing. It seems that we could balance these alternate sizings so that we give up minimal EV if our opponent responds perfectly. They are likely to make massive mistakes though, because they will not have studied these alternate sizings the way they have studied the standard ones.

Anyway, this is an interesting topic. I think that we need to start thinking outside the box like this if we hope to succeed in the toughest games. Personally I think it's somewhat unrealistic to think I can gain an edge over the best players just by trying to make less mistakes playing the same strategy they've been perfecting for years.

In a way the high stakes crushers have been training us for years to play just the way they want us to. These strategies they teach work well to beat small to mid stakes, but we're going to get crushed playing the same game trees they've been working on for years against the best players in the world.

yeah im sure high stakes crushers are horrible at adjusting to villains... lol

First you need to understand when you can significantly deviate from what now is called GTO. There is a ton of spots for that. And then at another spots it is a suicide.

I'll read your book.

Why does this feel like an advertisement for your book? lol

There are a number of high-stakes players (Stefan, for example) using a strategy similar to this - intentionally using suboptimal preflop sizes/strategies in order to take their opponent into a part of the game tree where they're more likely to make mistakes.

It's similar to a gambit in chess - you concede a small advantage early on to induce mistakes later on. The problem is that it can very easily backfire. You can just as easily end up giving up massive edges if you exploit the wrong direction, or if they know how to counter your BS. That doesn't stop me from saccing pawns in the opening though :P

My concern is that this can very easily be used to justify random donk spew. Gambits are very sharp and require a lot of practice to play well. You need a well-practiced plan; you need to know how to recognize when it's working and when they're countering correctly.

Plus if the purpose of gambits is to take villain into unknown lines, then doing it at midstakes is torching money since you can take villains into unknown lines by just playing normal since they don't know **** lol

Lmao absolutely fair. I think at the highest stakes there's an argument to be made that zooming on further on GTO becomes futile since the mistakes are so small/infrequent. But for the rest of us mere mortals, just avoiding blunders is the hard part

@Tombos - I completely agree with what you're saying - and I'm really glad people are starting to accept this could be a way forward for Poker. I think it was a bit "ahead of its time" last year on release - Mason Malmuth seemed very resistant in the Book & Publications thread, presumably because I 'm not a 2+2 author - but what I am is a strong player who wants to nudge the poker community away from refining a strategy to death, towards a more varied and exciting game, otherwise in 5 years, were all playing near perfect vs eachother and all just losing to the house.

The book is very much about introducing new ways to make your opponents make mistakes, and being very clear on when we can and can't use these funky plays (i.e. 90% of the time you're much better off not torching the EV - either playing GTO yourself, or simple exploitative play). I don't intend this thread as an advert for my book - its really never been about selling books, but purely about trying to make poker a bit more interesting again, rather than people just playing a hand and scurrying off to the solver.

I think the key to what I term "mindblowing poker" is to be pushing into the unexplored gametrees on a really dynamic basis - it's almost like a series of ever evolving "hit and runs" on your opponent - so you don't run into the danger of them exploiting your (in some cases) very obvious mistakes.

Why do people think GTO cant beat Dynamic or unexpected play? Every time you deviate to try and confuse the gto guy is when the GTO player will passively make money. Sure you can try and overly complicate the game by just doing random **** or using 20 bet sizes per a street but you'll probably do more harm to your own game then their game. If you push the game into unexplored sections of the gametree doesn't that just result in mutual destruction

Well that's my theory isn't it - it's a zero sum game so if you push them into a bit of the gametree they don't know well, then they are less effective at executing a good strategy than you are.

I think this is a community thing. Solver poker is a boring poker. Poker is career not fun game. Very stupid but true. Like there are no other opportunities for career oriented people.

Old days poker was fun and people shared their ideas here. Today everyone try to stupidly hide everything. Stupidly since it does not make you Magnus Carlsen if you watch him play chess. Copycats are not good players.

Professor_Poker = Y.J. = Yadoula8 btw

yes but i assume you've actually studied that section of the gametree?

kinda hard to hide everything when you can buy GTO+ for like 70 bucks. Also GTO isnt boring imo. It doesn't equal nit it up. If anything its to agro and has more bluffs then us mortals can execute properly. i Mean if you think good poker is a couple food old boys at the casino tossing money back and forth then yea you probably want like solver poker.

Oh yea if everyone is keeping info close to the vest how does this forum exist? Seems to me like theirs's plenty people willing to share at least some info

The first misconception is to think that high stakes crushers play gto or even try to. They don't.

You learn GTO so you can exploit more effectively, and leave equilibrium based plays as a last resort and against very strong opponents

I see it way that if you play chess then trying to copy what Stockish does is highly boring.

100% this. Look no one can copy GTO even if they wanted too. And the point isn't to play a fixed strategy, it's to know how to deviate.

I would go so far as to say that all GTO strategies are built on a precarious foundation of exploitative principles. If you don't understand exploitation, then you don't understand the underlying WHY of nash equilibrium.

Computer chess has produced some of the most beautiful and complex games known to man. It's just simply impossible to mimic or even approach that level of play.

Lmao, I suspected this might be Yadula. At least he's not spouting conspiracies about how GTO isn't real and Nash equilibrium is a lie.

@Professor_Poker, are you Yadula? If so, how have your views changed since last year?

Hi all - I think I agree with a lot of what's been said here - I don't like the trend towards this more boring style of poker where we rate our play vs solvers, and actually the basis of the maths behind my book is that our notion of "GTO" is the tip of a big iceberg, which has been arrived at by evolving norms and frequencies - we could easily find ourselves in another set of Nash equilibria in future.

I do fully agree that GTO itself isnt boring - it often will give you the funkiest plays you can perceive. But what I think is boring is the concept of us as a community accepting that there is one "optimal" strategy that is known. What i mean is there area lot more different sets of optimal strategies than we are currently playing with (the rest of the iceberg). I have lots of ideas in my book of where these other strategies may exist, but the really do require more investigation to get to them in a sustainable way.

I'll give one of the crazier examples - Imagine you have a villain who just cannot call ever. They have to only raise or fold - because of some crazy superstition or something. He's playing sub-optimally vs our current sets of strategies. But how do we respond - all of our best responses and Nash equilibria assume rationality of the villain - take this away and we no longer have a good strategy. Should we bet more of our weaker hands knowing villain folds more, should we check more of our middle hands? How do we re-balance ourselves etc? Do we need to? These are tons of questions that are very difficult to answer in the moment - and if we can present a different set of problems for the villain every time we play, dynamically changing so they cant "figure it out" then we can push them into big mistakes. Understanding and knowing how to do that without torching all our EV is a tough problem, but one I think that if we learn to answer, then Poker becomes a lot more interesting.

To answer the point on Yadula - I'm aware of him and I fundamentally disagree with him having had numerous debates on Twitter etc - He is very anti-GTO. I in fact believe it is the optimal way to play in many cases, and my book centres on players using that philosophy UNLESS they can identify a sweetspot for moving elsewhere - e.g. exploiting weaker players, or "range shanking" as I call it - where you alter your own range sub optimally, in order to over-realise in other spots in the game. I think if you were to read both my book and his 'book' you could quickly determine we are not the same person.

https://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/3...11/?highlight=

Wow at this thread.

Do you back up any of your work with modern tools such as node-locked solver analysis, mass data analysis, or game theory mathematics? Or is this just another half-assed feel play exploitative book?

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for gambits, hell my chess username is Mr-Gambit lol. But there are TONS of books that give terrible advice using misinformed exploitative ideas with literally no data or science to support their stance.

Every thread Yadula enters turns into an absolute tire fire of misinformation.

The priority of the book is appealing to a wide range of players and encouraging the philosophy of making these style of plays. In fact, I didn't want to include too much mathematical workthrough as by nature all of these plays don't work in a vacuum and so would be very easy to critique that way.

The fundamental maths behind the book is based on why a "GTO" strategy forms. In a given spot, if a player is expected to have bluffs and to have value with an optimal frequency, (i.e. the villain should not usually call either 0% or 100% of the time) then it stands to reason that sometimes the bluffs themselves wont show profits for the hero - the strategy as a whole shows a profit - because including the bluffs means villain must call sometimes to best respond to us - this is the Nash equilibrium. What I want to do is manipulate players into being able to remove bluffs in big spots, or artificially giving bluffs more folding power than they should have.

So as I say, I try to make these philosophies accessible to players who dont want to go into the detail of understanding where a Nash equilibrium comes from, and in terms of specific solver analysis - there's none in the book, mass data analysis - only to the extent of my own hand databases, with multiple million hands, but not in the sample sizes that can be achieved. As I say in the book, I've been using these plays for a number of years and noticed how well they work against top pros. I myself am not considered a top notch style pro, but have overachieved in tougher fields, over a significant sample.

The book isnt really about exploitative play or being half assed, but it's also not going to hold your hand through every hand you play. Its more about understanding why the poker community needs to move in this direction, and opening ideas of how to move there. The clever thinking part I have started, but individuals need to take the baton on and form their own ways to do things.

If you are interested, the book has been featured and discussed on both the The Breakdown by The Poker Guys and Poker Zoo podcasts earlier in the year.

Holy **** that's an insane thread. Glad I was able to lay my eyes on that.