Sorry the book wasn't for you ultimatecurse. However, you may never find a book that you can read in one night and not have to think very hard about, and yet will allow you to succeed in games filled with people who have thought very hard about the game for a long time. Life's just not that easy, unfortunately . Good luck at the tables.

Wow, no.

A-ha !
Good job, did you even try to read the subtitle ? It goes "Optimal and Exploitative Strategies"... What do you expect ?! Advice to check-raise tourists with shaky hands ?!

P.S.
If the mathematics no longer matters and you want a book that covers the psychological aspects of poker, then, I guess you have mastered the exploitative/optimal strategies ? Do share the knowledge !
Thank you !

You've completely missed the point of the book. You're a moron, & your writing style is far more "boring" than the deep & thought provoking ideas that Tipton's book presents.

lol

Stopped reading after that part...

Lol, he must be a losing player for sure.

Sorry to quote again, but this has to be troll of the year haha

Just started reading but been looking for something like this for a long time. Don't play hu, but more interested in the theory and it looks great so far.

Ultimatecurse is convinced online poker is rigged so take from that what you will.

On page 198, when you write down BB's range, is there any special reason why Ks8s, Ks7s and some 9x aren't mentioned?

Hah thx for the support guys.

And thx for the 1-star review on Amazon ultimatecurse. (I do think there's something special about books that only inspire 1-star and 5-star reviews )

To actually address those critiques, though, in case anyone else has concerns about them... the goal of the book is the effective communication of a ton of admittedly rather technical, complex ideas. I tried to write clearly and concisely with the assumption that readers are motivated to learn about the game for their own reasons (I mean, presumably because they like money). So, the book likely isn't the right choice for people who are uninterested in detailed analysis and require funny anecdotes about oldtimey cowboys to make poker advice enjoyable.

Of course, there are lots of free samples/excerpts available on various parts of the internet that one could check out to judge if the book is right for him.

No, no special reason, that's an error (see post 200 above) -- I'll add it to the errata page on the book's website next time it's updated.

One criticism i'd have of the book is, several times you use a hand example then model different scenarios (different board cards, bet sizings etc iirc) in great detail. However with each scenario, you only mention what change just occurred, so when reading these sections bit by bit, its often tough to follow what the original scenario is and you have to keep trawling backwards through the book to find it. So my humble recommendation is to maybe include a visual reference with each example of the board so that the reader can immediately know the scenario. I did read the book a lot in short spurts though so maybe this is specific to me.

Yea I can definitely see how that could make it hard to follow. And now that you mention it, I remember doing that in a section I wrote yesterday. I guess I'll go fix it . Thanks.

I don't wanna derail your thread but I checked the Amazon reviews and re the most recent 1 star review, you should check out some of the reviews they have done for other poker books for lols. They are one of the biggest winning players out there believe it or not...

For raise/shove game with additional open-push indifference principle states that EV (raise/fold) = EV (open fold) = EV (open-push) or I am wrong?

The indifference principle roughly says that, at equilibrium: if a hand is played in more than one way, the EVs of playing the hand all those ways must be equal.

Is there a particular hand you think should be played in all three ways with nonzero frequency in that game? I certainly don't think that's the case for all hands, nor for all weak hands.

I am amazed at how ungrateful people can be. As far as I know the author spent countless hours writing complex software that most of us can't write, interpreting solutions and communicating them through charts and examples in a nicely formatted book.

It is clear to me that he could have kept all this information for himself and most of us would be still guessing even more than we are after reading the book.

Thanks and keep up the good work and please don't lose motivation to write volume 2 despite the occasional negative feedback. I guess this happens in all human endeavors - there will always be ignorant detractors.

I think I misunderstood the concept of indifference principle becuase my assumption was that it applies to action taken with aggregate of hands, but it applies to particular hand played with mixed strategy at equilibrium.

Does for shove/fold game always exist some hand played with mixed strategy?

Thanks erdnase

Yea fundamentally it applies to individual hands, but we can think of it as applying to whole groups of hands when those hands are all equivalent.

For example, for the SB in the minraise/shove game, any hand not good enough to get all-in is going to either open-fold or minraise with the intention of folding to a jam. In neither case does he have any chance of getting to showdown. So, (except for card removal effects which aren't too big) it doesn't actually matter what hand he happens to have there. So we can think of all his hands not good enough to get all-in as pretty much the same hand: air.

I don't think theres always some hand played with a mixed strategy in the solutions to the shove/fold game. There very often is, but it's not easy to predict which one a priori, so it's not super useful in solving the game.

For raise/shove game can we remove some hands from raise/call and raise/fold range with some proportion and maintain the same EV for rest of hands? Then move removed hands into open-push range and gain addtional value of the new game compared to old game?

If Villain's strategy doesn't change, then the EVs of all the hands we keep playing the old way doesn't change either of course.

If Villain is trying to change his strategy to exploit our new ranges, and we want to modify our raising ranges so as to not incentivize Villain to change his strategy, then I think we need to do something a little more careful/specific than just removing the same proportion of hands from our raise/call and raise/fold ranges.

I got it! For example, SB can open 70% of hands at 15deep, but if we neglect card removal effect he could open all air hands but just keep certain x% (less than 100%) he does raise/fold with these hands.

What do you mean by saying we play with mixed strategy? Does it mean a particular hand is played in different ways with non-zero frequency, or it means that player does not restrict his actions to only raise, but he can also open-push or flat-call?

It's not just books, but pretty much any review on the internet. People who think something was average won't go through the trouble of explaining why ; you need a strong opinion to do so.
That's why Youtube went from stars ratings to thumbs up/thumbs down, for instance (http://youtube-global.blogspot.fr/20...e-ratings.html).

Says one of the best HUNL players: https://twitter.com/ikepoker/status/334335492453699584