Process and Content are both important to having a meaningful earn in poker.

Lots of deliberate practice, along with the right ideas, helps many people get better.

Study... such as really getting into a good book, like this one, often helps. Having even one light bulb turned on, etc.

Being around the right people often helps.

Being in the right place and tume often helps.

However, there are extremes: A small number of people are meaningful winners almost from the get go and others who seem to try very hard never aquire a meaningful earn.

Side Note: It is entirely possible that a bright young person would be better off not getting deeply involved in poker, for all the obvious reasons.

Bottom Line

For the great majority of people, I recommend the book.

My neighbor is a dumb guy and a comprehensive gambler-- for him I recommend professional help.

Haha... I meant to write:


My neighbor is a dumb guy and a compulsive gambler-- for him I recommend professional help.

David, you said you discuss PLO. Is this in the same way you use triple draw hands to illustrate a concept or is it more thorough? I basically only play PLO so am wondering how valuable I would find it to be. Is the book being sold at Barnes & Noble so I could take a quick look?

Hi Your Mom:

I'll answer the Barnes & Noble question. The short answer is maybe.

We've sent a sample book to B&N, and it's now in their system. But any orders for B&N go through one of the book wholesalers that we deal with. All we know is that the wholesaler has ordered books, but we don't really know where they have gone. Furthermore, even if the book is stocked at B&N, it doesn't mean that it will be at one near you.

However, if you go to the Amazon page for The Theory of Poker Applied to No-Limit:

https://www.amazon.com/Theory-Poker-...XQK97P80S5GE2W

You can use their look inside function to get an idea of what's in the book.

Best wishes,
Mason

More than half the concepts can be applied to plo. The main exceptions would be where I discuss larger than pot size bets.

Thanks Mason and David. Going to check out Mason's link and likely buy a copy.

Picked up this book with very high expectation. So far David has examined risk from a granular perspective, and gave a forethought on edge-seeking. I'm on page 7.

Not a how-to book. If I run a GTO simulation, I have a how-to table. No tables here. One needs to think those tables also, though. But this is a theory book, not a system book like that table.

The more you know, the less you get, so this is a book for beginners and intermediates who will all learn or think they learn and as so this is an advanced book.

It won't be easy to get stuff out of this book for practical use but a bit by bit one can add stuff.

While I think some stuff here, much of the stuff I add from my other knowledge, past thinking and the current thinking, so what I get from books like these is dependent on what I think about the information.

It is often or generally not complete (like the physics books are not and you often need to invent the wheel yourself to understand it) and so not coming with the major variations and pages of examples except that the text is often detailed and one might hope it not to be.

DISAGREE

I prefer to have the LAGs on my right or the opposite when playing online. The issue is being OOP heads up vs. a less predictable player (with a large stack). I want the more passive/predictable players on my left.

ADDING

I don't disagree with 77 folding on Q84 full ring vs. an early open though I didn't check it out but if the opener is LJ (3 of the button), it is a call vs. a 0.4 size bet; the GTO does not yet defend vs. any 2 bets there either like it pretty much does vs. the button.

THE LANGUAGE

The "then" seems to be very American as I have seen it so often here also instead of the "than" and sometimes it is the opposite. It is partly possible that the proofreader doesn't see "than" as a world and recommends to make it "then".

Some typos etc. need to be corrected and maybe the "eg" (looks like "egg" to me) should be written as "e.g." or is that wrong or too academic? I am also dreaming of the "ex." (example) being used. Big dreams but I have learned my English reading gaming books.

I understand the English and logic in all these books and that is nice compared to some academic books written by professors that take me 30 to 60 minutes per page. I have read some of the gaming books in a day or two. This book will just need to be worked out a bit by bit if one wants something out of it to really integrate into one's technique so one can't just read this book as it isn't a book but that's not an English issue. Books like these could have an additional workbook or ten.

THE PHYSICAl BOOK

The book wasn't in full shape, having been dragged on some black dirt on one white side (got it 85% off) and the cover and some on the back had a little bit of paint missing like it would have been in use or something had been dragged over it. Like the bottom of the pack book upside down from Amazon (EU). Makes no difference to me but buy only what you see if it matters to you.

The pages inside were in too good shape as I didn't find anything wrong with them and I always do (maybe I missed something as haven't read it all but nothing much). With at least 90% of the books that doesn't matter to me as I am a book destroyer. The pages are not too thin nor too thick (for me) and the book seems strong and elastic enough.

There is nobody that proofreads English for a living that doesn't see "than" as a word. Yes, there are several places where "then" is used when "than" is correct, but these are clearly typos and oversights as "than" is often used correctly, even in the same sentence where "then" is incorrectly used. I imagine that the emphasis of the proofreading is on ensuring that the technical content is clear and correct. These are minor errors than don't really diminish the value of the book.

I'm sure you can understand that typos occur as you have one in the same sentence you mention proofreading in the quoted text above. Granted, this is just a forum post, but it is a bit ironic for someone who is such a stickler on proofreading.

I highly recommend the book.

* except for my opponents. I don't think they should read it.

Hi!

When will it be available on google play book?

Thanks!

Has a TOC been shared anywhere?

We've had issues with quality on Google and don't plan to put this book there. It is available as an Amazon Kindle.

Best wishes,
Mason

A question about the section beginning page 251, "Your hand strength and bet size."

This section demonstrates that always using the same bet size in preflop opens is not optimal. The example shows that in a simplified thought experiment, there's is higher EV from betting the nut hand larger than the mediocre hand. The mediocre hand, although it wins sometimes, performs better with a smaller bet.

How generalizable is this? The passage does not draw conclusions about how much we should vary preflop bets, only that it can be done to advantage.

Can we conclude that if there were no penalty for giving information, we should scale bets by hand strength preflop?

If I understand your question, we can conclude that it in some cases it could be better to scale bets according to hand strength even if there was a penalty to giving out information (as there was in the thought experiment).