Is Phil Ivey still considered the top player? I recall he was in like 2011 but it's hard to believe he still is.

It depends how much of an expert the math expert actually is who would win over a decent sample size. If the math expert plays GTO he cannot lose. I mean if someone programmed a bot to play GTO HU, do you think Ivey would want to play against it?

It's an interesting book but focuses on too many "toy games" and forms of poker besides Hold 'Em IMO. There were some eye-openers though, like applications of Bayesian inference I hadn't thought of.

It would be interesting if someone wrote a more modern book about advanced poker math, specifically as it applies to Hold 'Em. Closest thing I've read to this is Will Tipton's work.

I understand that. It just seemed you might be assuming I was arguing math > feel. I think in some situations it is, but others not. The problem with this argument in general though is they're not mutually exclusive strategies. You can play a mathematically sound game while incorporating reads and tells. Or you can play a game based mostly on reads and tells but use combinatorics and probability to make decisions when your reads fail you.

And I agree with you about heads up play. It doesn't matter if the GTO player has a hundred tells and is blind. If he doesn't deviate he can't lose.

Agree with all this except the strategies can overlap. Someone who incorporates math and feel well will crush the bad player more than both the math guy and the feel guy.

Andy Beal was a college dropout, as I believe Ike and WCG were as well. However, out of the 3, I think Andy is the only one that really qualifies as a math genius. Pretty sure there has never been a huge correlation between being a math genius and being a great poker player. Perhaps you'd like to see Bill Chen face Phil Ivey HU? I can only imagine that match ending one way.

It's not because you play GTO that you can't lose short term.
Also, if tells help your opponent find out if you're value betting or bluffing (even if you do it at a GTO frequency), you will indeed lose.

For proof that Im dont run hot at all times...

1) MP opens to $25. I make it $80 with KK in the SB. He calls.
Flop ($165) QJ4. I check. He bets $100. I have a really bad feeling he has QQ or JJ but I call.
Turn ($365) A. I check. He bets $75. UGH. If he had AQ or AJ, now Im beat. I call one more time which is probably a mistake.
River ($515) 3. I check. He bets $150. I fold and he shows QQ

2) I get all in for $100 AK vs KQ and lose

Lost small pots with AA and QQ when it was pretty clear I was beat.

I did win 1 nice hand

3) Limped pot. I have 33 in the BB.
Flop ($25) 8s3s6c. I check. EP bets $30. MP fish calls. I call.
Turn ($115) Kh. I check. EP shoves all in for $120. MP calls. I crai to $450ish. MP tank/folds
River ($475) J. MP slams his fist down and says "Damn it! I had KJ". I show and he pipes down. MHIG

Then I proceeded to go 4 hours and win one hand and that hand didnt even see a flop. Its amazing how fast you can go from blistering hot to freezing cold cards.

I have no idea what running bad feels like. Absolutely zero, zippo, nil, nada.

No sense of your perception being thrown off because you get raised on the turn every time you bet, fold, and they actually have the nuts EVERYTIME. Then you question yourself if your bottom set is good the next time they raise. Never happens.

Or the guy who under thinks you and in a vacuum the hand is a fold but he has TPWK and thought he was good when he raised you on the 3 flush, 4 straight board and you fold top set. Nope never has happened to me.... no really it hasn't. I mean it.

Or folding endlessly for hours as young wannabe sits down and in 10m hits 3 full houses and gets paid on all of them by the ass clown you have been trying to just hit TPGK on. I don't even think this last one exists. Never happened to me.

Or you are patient and finally get your set, get it all in and some idiot has 2s and runs out spade, spade, spade......, spade and you lose. You get up run down the isles screaming your head off. Ok maybe I did that once.

I'm not sure what you mean by this. What I meant was your expectation cannot be negative (aside from rake). From a game theoretic perspective results are completely meaningless.
I was being hyperbolic but yes, you are correct. It's theoretically possible someone playing GTO perfectly could still leak enough information for his opponent to win (seems doubtful, but possible if it's a very emotional player). However, I would expect someone playing GTO to have little to no emotional reaction to hand strength, board texture, etc. All decisions are part of a large math problem. I wouldn't even look at it as value betting or bluffing. You should play hand X a certain way given the board texture. It doesn't actually matter how you would classify the bet. Your play is game theory optimal or it isn't.

This is also how I look at exploitative play. I don't care if my bet is a bluff or a value bet. I don't mean I'm not aware whether it's a bluff or value bet, but said awareness affects me very little emotionally. I just try to choose the line with maximum expectation.

This is how my first 10 hours of live play went. Card dead, then I lose two all-ins for around $600 (lost more Sklansky bucks due to all the dead money) in absolutely ridiculous situations. Both times I had a set and my opponent's only outs were runner-runner diamond, while avoiding the board pairing. I took it stoically the first time, but when the exact same thing happened a couple hours later I felt like I was cursed.

I started on a $1500 downswing over 50 hours at 1/2. I kept thinking I was playing poorly but I ran EV calculations of my major hands and was showing +30/hr. But I'm glad now I started running insanely bad, because I no longer react to losing in ridiculous spots like that.

Edit: Also, just noticed my previous post attributes some quotes of winky51 to Solomon_Peabody. WTF? I did quote Solomon_Peabody in another thread, but I used the multiquote feature here. How does that happen? LOL...

Anyway, winky51, you're Solomon_Peabody now I guess. The servers have decided.

ReEdit: Something is definitely up with the scripting here...I just tried to quote RJT and it instead quoted you, winky51.

ReReEdit: Multiquote is behaving oddly. It's like when I multiquote someone it stays cached and then gets requoted or misattributed in a later reply. Even across threads. Bizarre.

This seemed a lot clearer yesterday. Now I'm not sure what you want me to calculate. How do we shove all rivers and check back bricks? Wait...okay I dug up your original question.

Still pretty vague, but between the two posts I take it you were talking about two different lines:

Line 1: Bet 120 on the turn, check back rivers when we don't improve, and shove if we do?

Line 2: Bet 120 on the turn, shove rivers when we improve, and shove some arbitrary percentage when we don't? This is what your original question seems to indicate but the second says "mine bet 120 check back bricks."

I'm confused because I don't know what a "mine bet" is, and also the two messages seem to be saying different things.

Can you confirm if I interpreted Line 1 correctly, and can you clarify Line 2? I don't want to make the wrong assumptions and come up with useless results.

And for review, effective stacks are $350. The pot is $180 on the turn. The board shows T84A and villain has checked to us in position. We have J9. Villain is calling stationy.

Shai,

Sorry for confusion. I should have put a comma after the word mine. I was referring to my hypothetical as opposed to Mike's. Not a "mine bet". My bad.

So, I'm just curious about the ev of the 2 extremes. (we can ignore an arbitrary % of betting rivers. Your Line 2.)

Mike's extreme premise: bet 120$ turn, ship all rivers.

My extreme premise: bet $120 turn, ship all rivers improved to a straight or flush cb all rivers brick rivers.

If you feel like doing also an arbitrary % for shipping rivers too, that's fine. But it's not necessary. I think I'd be able to see a good picture with results of the two extremes. I think this exercise will help me visualize ev better in this scenario. Since obv this arises often.

Thanks buddy,

The ev of cb all rivers unimproved is -$120 x .70. We miss 70% of time. Right?
Ev of shipping all rivers we improve is $120 + money we make on river (I forget remaining stack sizes).

Combine the 2 and that's are ev given my premise. Right?

I guess I'm looking to see if "playing scared" on river is still ev overall, so long as we bet the turn and make x amount of money on the river.

Working this out as I type I guess we need to give a % that villain has to call a river bet to figure out the neutral ev?

Maybe you can understand what I'm getting at and go from there.

Edit: just realized we have to add the times we get Crai to the equation. Use Mike's 10%, I think it was. And the % he calls the improved river ship.

Here's another question I have that I think is relevant to the discussion. Mike, if you feel this is a hijack of your thread please say so and np ignoring it.

So my question about the 2 extremes relates, I think, to why we might have to randomize river bets. Let's look at those 2 bottom lines and go from there.

However, that's GTO, right? As I understand the concept.

So the question becomes in my mind, how relevant is gto in llsnl that is full ring and not HU.

I think discussion of this relates to the feel-math discussion.

Again, Mike, if you know all this and want me to discuss this in another forum please say so. This might be elementary to all posters here.

I assume one of the reasons your hourly rate is what it is has not only to do with how much you make in a winning session. But it has also to do with losing much less than x amount per hour. No?

Tell us what a normal bad day loss is. And what do you attribute your (what I assume is) less than many players loss rate relative to their win rate.

How much do you attribute this number to quitting earlier when losing and how much to other factors. What are those other factors?

I did not argue that. I argued a player who actually plays GTO will beat Ivey, or anyone else not playing the same strategy. This is patently obvious.

Whether there's anyone out there capable of playing GTO and motivated to do so in high stakes for hundreds of thousands of hands is another question entirely.

But clearly a bot programmed to play perfect GTO strategy cannot lose. At worst it can break even to another bot or person playing perfect GTO strategy.

And I have to emphasize again, pitting an amateur mathematician against Phil Ivey for 3 days, in 2006 no less, when Beal could not have possibly played GTO, and interpreting the results as meaningful towards your conclusion against the ability of mathematical geniuses to play world class poker is a fundamental misunderstanding of variance, GTO strategy, and what it actually means to be a math genius.

And Chen vs. Ivey? Come on. The guy's not Grigory Perelman. He wrote a math book than anyone with a few college math courses could understand, not solved the Poincare Conjecture. He's also the head of an arbitrage firm. Do you think being the best poker player in the world is that important to someone like this?

Is this another way to answer/look at the question "to bet or not to bet"?

So long as we bet less than or equal to our equity AND if we get crai we still have the odds to call, then we can always bet some amount between zero and that number?

I mean that's basic pot odds math, right? I always think of pot odds relative to calling.

If this is right then I think understanding why always betting makes sense (easier to understand) and not betting is fine, simply low variance poker and/or for the reasons given by he OP, but not wrong per se.

Or am I wrong and missing something?

If true then let's look at another extreme. What is our equity given 1) he has a set of aces and 2) what is our equity given all of our flush/straight outs are to the nuts (no set, no 2 pair, not better draw, etc)? Then we see what the range for max equity bet is. (Obv simple math.)

Again Mike, if this are dumb questions I'll stfu.

First of all , nobody can pay perfect GTO. No way its possible.
Secondly, GTO is about as far away from optimal in low to medium stakes as the earth is from the sun.
There used to be a guy who posted in the strat forum who always tried to play GTO. He was saying things like "I have to bet 23% of pot here because villain will have TP 42% of the time....blah blah blah". Meanwhile Im shoving with a set in a spot where I know villain is a calling station and will call a huge overbet with TP. Who do you think makes more assuming my read is corect?

These questions are hard to answer without scouring thru my database but I ll give it shot.

My database shows I win 73% of sessions. 568 sessions that avg 4 hrs 9 mins.
So I win 2.7 times as often as I lose

I quickly scrolled thru all my sessions and counted 29-9 wins vs losses of over $1000 so I win more than 2 buy ins 3.2 times as often as I lose more than 2 buy ins. That's 5.1% of the time I win more than 2 buy ins. I only lose more than 2 buy ins 1.6% of the time.

I almost never quit early when losing. Ive probably done it 2-3 times when I lost a couple big hands and was tilted. I don't tilt off large amounts of money like you see some donks do, but nobody can play their best when they lose a good chunk of money quickly. We aren't robots and anyone who says losing doesnt affect them is lying to themselves.

The biggest factor is winning at poker is winning more on your good hands than other people do and losing less on coolers than other people do. We all get the same amount of AA, we all turn a flush the same percentage of the time that we flop a flush draw. ect.

An example is my KK hand posted yesterday. Most people are getting stacked in a 3 bet pot with KK on a QJx flop. I lost only $250 in that hand because I sensed I was beaten immediately and checked the flop. I probably shouldve gotten away with only losing only $180. I'd love to see a GTO bot not get stacked there.

75% session win is very good and that is the rate of some big name cash game pros win at.

Your profit comes from folding correctly and winning big pots.

And playing perfect GTO in a LSNL just means you lose the least and no one can make money off of you. But it doesn't mean you make the most. Exploitable play is the most profitable.

And getting opponents to show their hands to the winningest player in the room. (Not that you needed the info here Mike. Just saying.)

I know there is a lot of controversy with these two examples b/c of Full Tilt, but in an objective evaluation, how good are these two certified math geniuses at poker?

* Howard Lederer, professor's son and brewed his math skills at home and then the Mayfair Club pursuing interests in chess, then poker
* Chris Ferguson, son of two math geniuses prominent in their field, he went with computer science and is one of the better math based players

They have been a little out of the spot light recently, having both returned to the WSOP only last year after the FT stuff so their recent results are sparse, but their past results are pretty solid.

Also just to note, my son is in 7th grade and has started on probability calculations already. Not the complexity of these, combining multiple probability calculations as part of an EV algebraic equation -- those will come in 11th grade math. That doesn't mean its easy, a lot of people do poorly in math, its very common. And honestly, for most of life, if you can do a basic mortgage payment table calculation with compound interest, that's the most complex math most people will ever have to do. But poker is an area that leans towards having a bit more math ability, or at least it can be very helpful.

I dont think anyone is arguing that being good at math can make you better at poker. I'm only that a person with good math abilities and freakish abilities to read people will beat a person with good abilities to read people and freakish math skills.

Mike and I have actually different sets of abilities.

He has a far better memory than I do.
He has a better feel for the players and their tendencies.

I think I know how to mathematically get a better expectation from betting and preflop action than he does. *COUGH* Td9d hand *COUGH* oh excuse me.

I have a better ability to read tells than he does. Man you miss **** that to me is so obvious.

I overthink opponents.
Mike gets their exact level of stupidity perfectly every time.

One ability he has that far surpasses me and I will never catch up. The number of golden horse shoes up his ass.

I can see that from the HHs. Geez. there's a guy in my room who is a nit. I never pay him off. I don't play many hands with him. When he does get it in less than me, seems to chop an unreal % of times if not suck out.

I'm sure it's blue car effect. But I kinda believe in luck, seat running hot etc.

I have this special situation happen to me. I get involved in a pot and on the turn I realize my opponent's frequency and range. I XC or call a donk bet appropriately to see how he plays the river. Then the 1 of 3 cards come on the river that gives me 2nd best hand and he bets small enough I am forced to call.

Like I had this pot. loose player raises UTG, I 3b with KK UTG+1. He shrugs and calls pretty quick... just by his behavior I know he doesn't have AA/KK.

Flop is QJ3 with 2 spades. Pretty sick. X, I bet, he calls quickly.
Turn T (3 spades now) - he donk bets 1/4th pot...... sigh..... I got Ks..... I call planning on folding the river if he bets because I am fairly sure I am behind. I lose to all 2 pair, sets, AK, and AQ is never betting this turn.

river is a 9 ....sigh..... He bets 1/5th pot because he is scared with his set/2 par/straight..... I'm like **** me.... I call with the straight he has AK.

This has happened to me so many times I lost count. And by the river a small bet can be $40 compared to the pot of $180 or $220.

I had one the other day where I flopped the nuts in a multiway pot and I just BOMBED it turn and river. The nuts were counterfitted with the two callers.... OBVIOUSLY counterfeited. The 1st player bet 1/9th the pot... Which on the river was $70. The other player called. And I'm like I am not folding getting 10:1 **** that. I call and I'm good..... WTF?!?!?!

Im not sure why I keep hearing comments about me being lucky. I assure you Im no luckier than anyone else. In fact, I keep track of my equity of every all in hand I play. Ive been doing it for over 2000 hours. Now, there's plenty of other lucky or unlucky things but they cant really be accounted for and people tend to forget the lucky things that happen to them and only remember the unlucky things. But one thing is for sure, I can track my equity in every all in hand I play and compare to my actual results for those hands. I know exactly how much more or less Ive won than when my EV was. I use the word "exactly" a little loosely. When I lose the hand I know that the other guy had of course and can easily calculate EV. When I win the hand sometimes they show. Sometimes they dont. When they dont I have to estimate my equity based on hand range but its really not very hard to get a pretty good idea within a few percentage points.

In 2017, Ive run $210 under EV in all in hands. I'm really happy with that because
In 2016, I ran $7935 under EV in all in hands. That's about $5.35/hr in lost EV. My actual win rate shouldve been $5.35 higher than what it was in 2016 just from being unlucky in all in hands. That's a massive amount of lost equity.

Another thing I track is pocket pairs and sets. I keep notes on every pocket pair that sees a flop. So far in 2017, I've hit 18% less sets than I should have. That's a huge number because 63% of my profit comes from hands where I flopped a set. Based on the number of sets I mathematically should have hit this year and the amount of profit I make with each set (including the ones I lose) I should have a little more than $7000 more profit so far this year than I do. So this year I m running right about where I should be as far as All in EV, but the poker gods chose to screw me in the set department.

It may look like Im lucky because Ive posted quite a few big winning hands but I have plenty of boring hands where I lose $50 here and $100 there.

I went another 6 hours today and won 3 hands. Ive won like 7 hands in my last 10+ hours of play. I lost for my 3rd day in a row today. In 569 sessions (some of 2 sessions in the same day), Ive only lost 3 days in a row 9 times. Ive lost 4 days in a row 1 time and Ive never lost more than 4 in a row. Here's hoping that streak doesn't change.

There's a guy I play with occasionally who plays something like 90/20. He almost never folds to a raise either whether he limped first or hes just flatting a raise. As loose as this guy is, this guy has completely given up calling my raises. When I say he calls just about every raise, Im not kidding. Unless I am the raiser.

Twice today he limped in after 3-4 other limpers and when I raised OTB and got 3-4 callers, he still folded last to act (he was sitting on my direct right). This has been going on for a few weeks now.

Anyway today he limped in EP. I folded. The pot goes 5 ways to the flop.
Flop ($25) As9s4c. He shows me his 72 offsuit and says "this is how you play a hand". Its checked to him and he bets $20. There's an ace and a FD on this flop and he thinks he can steal this pot. He gets 2 calls and then the SB check raises to $125. I could barely keep myself from laughing as he folded. Honestly I thought he might reraise.

I'm just joking. I assume Winky basically is too since seems like a buddy of yours.

But read some of the HHs you posts and let me know if it doesn't seem like you smash the flop an unreal % of times.