1. What is Poker?

A. Game of Information
B. Game of Reciprocity
C. Game of Transfering Wealth

2. Poker Economics

A. 90/10 rule
B. Survival
i) Money Management
ii) Game Selection
iii) Networking
iv) Emotions

3. How to Win?

A. Who wins the most?
B. Poker Science
i) Calculating outs, pot odds, EV, odds simulator
ii) Repitition
iii) Position, Ranges, Stove

4. How to play like a professional

A. 10,000 hours
B. Serious play
C. Serious study
i) Session reviews
ii) Networking
iii) Training sites
iv) Reflection
D. Ambition
i) Road Blocks
ii) Balance

1. What is Poker?

-Game of Information-

Poker strategy is information based. You will not win in the long-run without a keen apt for detailing information and making sense of it. There is a misconception that poker is bravery based -- “fortune favors the bold” is often applied to the game. Another mistake is that it is a game of thievery, and that being a good liar or shady character gives that person an advantage. Both are romantic interpretations of poker, whether it be from a scene in a classic movie, or stories told straight from the mouths of professional gamblers themselves, they are misleading in what the game is all about, despite being very entertaining.

Poker is a game of decision making. Using anything in the realm of gut feeling/karma/continuous probability/and instinct as a main component of your decision making process may lead to some big wins occasionally, but will leave you in the dust compared to those who know what to study and apply themselves to it. When beginning to take the game seriously, a player should familiarize themselves with recording hand histories, keeping meticulous records, and learning to identify the weaker players in their game and how to beat them.

Winning players are constantly looking for information to help aid them win money. They are honest with themselves about their play. They aim to be logical in the way they do things, always having a reason for why they acted at the table. Winning players understand that poker play is a lot of guesswork, but they do everything they can to minimize the difficulty of those guesses.

Losing players love to take guesses, often or always assume they are right, and don’t care about the details of how to win at poker. They just like to play. Occasionally a player of this mold becomes elite via their own genius, though chances are good you are not them.

In game, a player is flooded with pieces of information. Away from the table, there are many places and ways to add relevance to your game. What you will chose to record, and how it is processed and stored, let alone used, is something players should consider as they embark on advancing through the ranks. A notebook, pen, and calculator is a good starting point.

Reminding yourself, or writing a book one post at a time?

Apparently not blog-worthy, whatever it is.

-Game of Fractals-

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Poker strategy is abstract and oftentimes very complex. To know which strategies are dominant compared to others, and vice versa, would be a challenging task for anyone but a top professional if assuming everyone is trying their best to win. Furthermore, It would take a long time, or a database of past information, to figure out which way of playing is superior. However, if the top professional happens to be an A.I. program, it could quantify each strategy based on perhaps a single spreadsheet of information pertaining to each player's strategy. As a human myself, I cannot visualize what this spreadsheet looks like, but I have intuition that it is comparable to fractals and geometry.

If no-limit hold'em can be solved -- that is to say there is a singular perfect strategy that would be favorable in any game -- it might resemble the picture in Ex-A. Compared to the other pictures, it is more harmonious. If you zoom in you start to notice repeating patterns, and it appears to be an infinite series. If some being were to play perfect poker, its "spreadsheet" might be a photo copy of Ex-A.

Ex-B is what my own potential to play perfect poker looks like. Notice that it is beautiful in its own right, despite being a little more chaotic and stylistic than Ex-A. This is because no human could ever play perfect poker. Perfect poker requires using perfect frequencies. Say you have a certain holding, and the perfect play is to bet $100 29.4% of the time. It is literally impossible to do this. However, getting closer to perfect play is still worthy of pursuing if being reasonable with oneself. Sitting around trying to make Ex-B look more like Ex-A might not be a great use of time though, and could be unnecessarily expensive.

Ex-C shows fundamentally strong, winning strategies for the smallest stakes. Notice how simple they are, and how much more geometrically sound they are compared to Ex-D.

The lesson is that when sitting down to carve out a strategy, it's critically important to not try and draw an immaculate fractal -- unless you have the tools to do so. Otherwise it will become an ugly mess, and you could miss out on making easy money.

Note on the impossibility of maintaining perfect frequencies: It is possible over time for a player to converge on a specific frequency. But to keep track of all converging frequencies requires a supercomputer.