Hi Guys, My name is Cory Mikesell and I’m excited to announce the release of my newest book for serious PLO players:

HUPLO: The Definitive Guide.

This book is the culmination of years of my own creative approach to studying and the work I've done with numerous HUPLO crushers.

If you want to find out more about it, check out the latest Runchuks Podcast where we discuss the book and a myriad of other topics. Thanks!

Did Mason write the forward?

if not. could be problem

Trying to advertise your book for free without mod approval might not be the way to go

I may be wrong but I think self-promotion of books is allowed now (with certain restrictions).

https://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/2...olicy-1619293/

Best wishes,
Mason

Is there a preview, table of contents, or anything you can share? I understand you have a reputation as a good player but paying $1600 for a book based on reputation and a one paragraph description is a stretch.

This is not a troll but meant as a constructive criticism as I am a potential buyer. I immediately googled the book and was planning to buy before I was aware of the price. I understand it could easily be worth the cost, but I would prefer a more precise description/reviews/more info before making the investment.

At that price you have to suspect it Mike not Sell

i dont think your RIO videos are good (i used to specialize in o8)

i definitely would not buy your book

that kido pham incident was funny too

Hey man, yep, I'm happy to provide both. Can you PM me with your email address and I'll send them to you?

Sorry I couldn't post a longer description of the book. The rules say we have to keep it under 100 words which makes it hard to provide any depth about the book. I made a longer post on RIO and a few of my students have responded with their experience working with the material from the book.

Cory is a friend of mine, I have been a HU PLO 25/50-50/100 reg for the past 4 years and I wrote a short foreword to the book. If you're sceptical - I have no % in the sales and at this point I'm close to retired from poker so my take is honest here as I have nothing to gain or lose.

While I understand 1597$ for a book might seem like a lot, if someone can afford to invest that amount in learning in HU PLO it's going to be the best ROI on the market hands down. It's not possible to get a comparable amount of knowledge about the format for a similar price through coaching or coaching sites (not enough high level HU PLO vids covering the same variety of topics, would need probably like 50 in-depth theory vids spread out thematically to hit all bases). The book is actually so dense in valuable information many sections will deserve repeated slow-reads. In terms of HU PLO (quite a lot of concepts will transfer to 6max as well) this is the absolute investment you can make if your goal is to become a crusher in the format. Highly recommend.

Not to derail, but if you're still sceptical about Cory's claim about him here's a well known fact in the HS HU PLO community - not long after the thread kidopham was banned on Partypoker.

i don't think solving 20bb plo HU requires 1600$.

Hi and thanks for your interest,

The book covers all stack sizes and focuses the most on 100bb with 40bb being the secondary focus. That being said, the game space at 20bb is actually quite complex, given the presence of high SPR limped pots where somewhat large asymmetries are created, leading to frequent donks on low boards.

I weight the coverage of each stack size based on how readily available they are to players. 20bb isn't really a viable option (due to rake) on most sites until we reach 10-20 so I agree that it doesn't deserve our full attention.

Have you used the book and apply it to your game?

Think I have seen Cory claim that you can use this book to beat the best players in the world, but I have never seen him play above 5/10 on Stars.

Sent, ty. Another question, is the book digital or physical? If digital is it searchable or a pdf?

I originally wanted to make it physical, but the dark charts I used this time around (before I decided to put them in a book) just don't print well. They look nice on a computer screen, but printers don't like all the ink.

It's in a PDF, but I just tried entering a chapter name in the search function and was able to jump right to that chapter so I think it's reasonably easy to navigate.

I'm very curious how you came to the exact price of $1597 for your book. I assume you determined that this is the optimal value to maximize your EV on book sales, but what was your process to calculate that price? Was is done by modeling, and if so, what inputs were used? Or was it simply spit out by an RNG, as it would seem any amount over $50 for a poker book would asymptotically hit a flattening demand curve in relation to price rather quickly.

At the time, I was charging $3500 for 10 hours of coaching (I've since increased that to $4000 after getting so many snap calls) so this was roughly half of that. My thinking actually was that if someone took 50 hours of coaching with me, that is roughly how long it would take for us to cover all of this material and for them to essentially "buy the book". So I thought it was reasonable to sell the book for 1/10th what it would cost to teach those hours.

You allude to an interesting problem. I've written books at various price points and was thinking about where I should put this one. The problem is, if I charged a small amount for content like this a) it would be so far over the heads of the people who would buy, they would feel they are getting ripped off and b) the players it would help, would never consider it. There is actually an element of "signaling" built in.

The final element is "how many buy ins should 200/500/1k/2k PLO player be willing to pay to dramatically improve their game and how quickly will they win back that investment. That's up for each individual to decide, but I remember starting out at 10-25 cent NLH and paying $1500 for lessons with Andrew Seidman. I'm still getting a ROI from that purchase.

Thanks for the explanation, makes sense, and good luck with the book!

What are your public SN's?

I've been stuck in the US for close to a year now so I haven't really played for a while (really hard to play HUPLO in the US). When I was last abroad, I put almost all of my action in on Party Poker. There my screenname was 420isaPSB, but I also played under my real name at their real name tables.

Looks like I also played some HU on 6 max tables at one of the Chico sites under BigSlick7478398. I quickly lost action there because I won like 15 buy ins in a few thousand hands of 5-10. kurvakolousek on Betsson which is a tiger skin I think. No one would play there though.

Can we see your graphs from HU PLO somewhere?

Do you play HU PLO these days? If you do, what stakes and with what evBB/100?

Are you planning to release some free content, so that we know what we are buying?

Hey, Sure happy to release graphs from the last time I played. I had to come back to the US when my visa expired in 2020 and haven't played much due to being in the US where HU really is hard to find, writing this book, and writing a novel. Find it hard to write and play at the same time and the writing is more important to me RN.

https://gyazo.com/d6f2e8797b9418a5a246984f285b2f80
https://gyazo.com/29a005739065b1356140df866d577bdc
https://gyazo.com/78f8517d171bf408dd86218114d65928
https://gyazo.com/d5e8ec5578dd92b2392b843cd5554d63

Please note a few things. I'll also answer some FAQs here:

1). These are all the hands I've played since switching to HM3 and was basically my entire 2020 and some 2019.
2). The 7.5bb/100 average is inaccurate as well. During the same period, over another 3k hands I won like 15 buy ins at 5-10 on chico (I think), but didn't have tracking set up. I'm sure people will say I'm lying which is fine, but as we all know, graphs are easily faked anyway so at some point it's a matter of trust
3) Included my graph on Party where I put in most of my volume. Why didn't I play much on Stars? Games are worse, I had a sweet rakeback deal, rake is better, and zoom is too fast for my brain
4) Did I just bumhunt on Party? No, The only player I wouldn't play is the one I suspected of being a bot. I even made separate databases for each player which means I can show exactly how much I played vs regs
5) Why didn't I play higher if I was beating 5-10 so soundly? Combination of factors including weak mental game, not enjoying the game, being cheated a lot of different ways in the past which limited my bankroll.

I'm sure people (not suggesting you, but rather various forum trolls) will twist some of the things I'm saying as "proof" that I'm bad or ripping people off and that's fine. Feel free to check out some of the results my students have posted on my book thread on RIO. I believe in the content and so do they. Cheers and thanks for your interest!