They are right now, at 04:43, but hopefully they will come back to life again tomorrow :P

Mers has done a fantastic job, the games are better than ever!

I've had my 4-bets called with Q2s, J4s, 63s, 42s, and 62o in the past session

Seems like telling people which hands to 3-bet bluff with (and nothing else) has worked wonders

haha i've been noticing the same things :P

Mersenneary: Please put page numbers in the table of contets of the book. It is hard to find the chapters without page numer in the table of contets. Thank you very much!

Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrreat read. Thanks, Mers!

Yep, now pretty much everyone at midstakes shoving wide over mr out of the bb. Thanks mers.

Nice book, just printed on pdf.. ty!

There a spanish version? pls

Portuguese is supposed to be coming.

Hungarian is in progress. Russian is released.

A few others (Italian, possibly Spanish) have been discussed and somewhat planned, but those are not definite (Think volunteers within the community or speculators looking to potentially translate, market to sites within that language and use the publicity/exposure to affiliate sell husng.com memberships).

I'll bump the thread if a spanish version comes out though.

a german version isnt released right?

What goes on around here...

Why in the world should I prefer my poker coach be a strong winning player?

Not currently and no official plans for this.

We have a strong base of users from Germany and they appear to largely understand english very well.


I don't understand the first part of this question. A strong winning player is a better indicator of a good coach than a losing or marginally winning player. I wouldn't use any of this in absolutes though. If you have experience in this game, watching free material and reading public posts/articles made by a coach is an excellent way to really gauge the quality of a coach. Newer players have to rely more on the reputation of a coach, but it is still a good idea to check out public strategy from any coach that you are considering, even if you don't know a lot about the game you're getting coached in. The style of teaching or analysis may be appealing or unappealing to you and make your decision that much easier.

I had dinner with the great atakdog tonight. He pointed out that my solution to the key problem is not technically correct. And to paraphrase Neil deGrasse Tyson, not technically correct is the worst kind of not correct. First my comma usage, now this! Here's the problem again:

My solution - in two worlds, it's in your left pocket, in two worlds, it's in your right pocket, in the last, you don't have it. You know it's not in your right pocket, so there are three possible worlds remaining. Your probability should now be 2/3.

The solution takes into account the fact that because of the new information that your right pocket is empty, 4/5 becomes 2/3. However, it fails to adjust one more probability - the chance that we were good at guessing what our probability was in the first place, given all of our possible biases in doing so.

Let's say you went through a ton of these situations and found out that over time, you were too confident you had the key with your murky initial guesses. Consistently, you thought there was a 70-80% chance of having the key when the door first closed and you first began to wonder, and you only ended up with the key half the time. Shouldn't you then, the next time it happens and you go through the same guesswork to come to 70-80%, stop yourself and say, "Wait a minute. I've been wrong about this guess before. I should guess something lower"?

Now let's go all the way back to your first key-estimating situation. You do your very best to take everything into account, and guess 80%. There's some probability you overestimate your chances in this type of scenario. There's some probability you underestimate your chances in this type of scenario. You factor all of those possible worlds in to all possible precision, and say "OK, 80%".

Now you draw the first pocket and is empty. Before we even know if we have the key or not, which is now more likely, given new information of one pocket: That you are the sort of person to underestimate the probability that you have the key in this sort of situation, or that you are the sort of person to overestimate the probability that you have the key in this sort of situation?

The best guess once the right pocket is empty isn't actually 2/3, but rather slightly lower.


It's fun reading threads in the forum and seeing the way I talk about things seep into other people's posts. It's even more fun realizing suboptimal aspects of certain strategies I employed and in broader philosophies about how to think about problems. To me, it's a good reminder of the Galfond-esque teaching point that your goal in learning about poker should not be to learn the current best wisdom of what moves to make when, but rather the best wisdom about how to think about the game, to verify what other people know, and set yourself up to move past it in the future. If you can combine confidence in-game with a skeptical approach to evaluating what you really know outside of the game, you're in a really good place. That goes for whether you're playing poker, trading stocks, being in a relationship, whatever. Find your own way to combine swagger with a merciless hunt and kill (or quarantine - don't take your irrationality too seriously, it's always going to be there) operation for your own bull****, and you're going to be in good shape.

^ Mers, your ex. with the keys reminded me of Einstein's many arguments with Neils Bohr over Quantum particle entanglement. Einstein's argument goes like this: you put a right glove and a left glove in separate identical boxes, lock them, ship one to the Antarctic and the other to your house. You go home, open your box and you will immediately know what the box in the Antarctic contains without ever looking at it.

Of course Bohr won the argument when particle entanglement was proven correct by experiments but the probability and physics behind it remains a mystery to man. Anyways, the idea is: the study of probability is so thoroughly complex that even one of the best minds of all time in Einstein got it wrong. And yet we as poker players work to subdue it. If you are interested in studying this stuff on a deeper level, take a look-see at Quantum Physics, the probability it purports will blow your mind.

Quantum "probability" works in a completely different way to our everyday experience of probability but it certainly doesn't "remain a mystery to man". Studying it, while interesting, will do absolutely nothing for your understanding of classical (in this sense meaning non-quantum) probability.

Yeah the problem with the glove thing is that both boxes 'contain' a right and a left glove until you observe them. A little OT though.

This is what they used to think. Quantum Mechanics and "probability" has now been shown to work just the same on our level as on a microscopic level, it just isn't as apparent, so no, it does NOT work completely different, it just isn't apparent (i.e. you and I are both waves and particles, but b/c of our sizes, our frequencies are so large it is not evident)...so Newtonian Physics, while it is consistent in our environment, breaks down when looking at particles or outer space, Quantum probability remains consistent in all spaces. Anyways, my point was not to compare Mers' example to this, or to suggest that learning Quantum probability will make u a better poker player (lol no!), it was merely a suggestion that if he is interested, he can expand his horizons. I'm not here to have a physics argument, I'm a math guy!

Yes exactly. Mers' ex. just reminded me a little of this, that's all.

Your response has enough semi-correct ideas in it that it's likely you've read some sort of decent pop science along the lines of Scientific American/New Scientist, however you are wrong about probability. The "probability amplitudes" which do weird things like interfere with each other in QM are absolutely not the same as "probabilities" in the classical sense.

If you're genuinely interested I'd suggest getting a copy of "Six Easy Pieces" by Feynman. If you're looking for something harder (and are ok with calculus) then Shankar's "Principles of Quantum Mechanics" is an excellent introduction to "real" quantum physics, while "QED" (Feynman again) is an interesting read that should be a bit more challenging even though it's nothing like as technical as Shankar (as it's not a textbook).

Another pretty plausible bias is you being typically more likely to put the keys in one pocket than the other but having no clue of that tendency. Left being empty makes "more often right" more likely.

Time to make a gameplay video. lol merge

Sick bump

Reading your book now Mers...ran into the part about Durrrr arguing against Nash Equilibrium, but can't find any of it on 2+2. Anyone have the link(s) to this?

I think maybe it was in one of the monthly **** threads? There was one with a ton of GTO discussion in there anyhow.

searched for it... here's a couple of his posts on the subject

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/19...l#post29121114
http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/19...l#post29121314
http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/19...l#post29121450
http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/19...l#post29121464
http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/19...l#post29121514
http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/19...l#post29121780
http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/19...l#post29159463

anyway, he's wrong, and his comments indicate that he doesn't understand the relevant math.

Thanks for the links

thank you mersenneary for the e-book , reading the book helped me enormously ! :thumbs up:

Most epic free material out there regarding HUSNG-s. Thank you mersennary and HUSNG.com