I got a copy of Mathematics of poker by bill. Would that be a good book to start learning optimal strategies and applying them to badugi/PLO5/Shortdeck/irish when needed?

I wanna learn GTO first for these mtt games and then move into exploitive.

also is there a irish poker equity cacualtor available? thanks.

I want to learn calculus then learn how to multiply

so you reckon we should learn exploitive poker first?

I have to disagree with six four, learning GTO comes first so you can understand why you’re making the exploits against villains that you are. This goes for any game type. How do you know what to exploit if you don’t know what the baseline is?

how do you work out gto lines without a solver? I have equilab for nlh and mathemactics of poker book.

So kind of an awkward question because I use GTO+ (a solver) to confirm lines lol.
But what I did before that was looked at my entire range in each spot and tried to sort each hand I had into upswing labs categories. They sort their hands into value bets, call downs, bluffs, and garbage. Trying to balance these by matching up value hands to bluffs and call downs with folds helped me balance my ranges very well. They have a $7 intro to their thought process that can explain it much better then I do.

You don't need solvers to work out if someone is too tight, too loose, can't adapt to ICM, bluffs a lot, doesn't bluff enough, never folds if he has any piece of a flop, does that stupid thing where a min raise is the nuts, you just need eyes and a brain, which many people here are happy to not use and just do what the computer tells you to

Game theory math is incredibly complicated. You won't be able to skim through that book and start designing GTO models; that's super unrealistic.

Mathematics of Poker came out in the early 2000's, and many people read it, yet even the best in the world were horrendously far away from GTO.

If you really want to do this you'll need to code a solver (or hire a software developer + mathematician to code it for you). But if you could do that you could get rich on the solver alone.

----

All that said, understanding pot odds/expected value/simple game theory is a huge benefit to any player. But the implication that you're gonna be able to design GTO strategies is a huge reach.