Guys, can you tell something about Eq solutions presented in Raiser's Edge book? The author says that they take into consideration posflop playability and pos advantage. Heads up solutions for 15 and 20bb involve a lot of limping and multiple bet sizings.

Good read.

ETA for volume 2?

I'd like to +1 on this being a phenomenal poker book.

This couldn't be further from the truth.

The author offers practical advice throughout the book, and if you're at all interested in improving your poker thinking - run and go get it.

But Mr. Tipton, a quick question:

WHAT did you do to ultimatecurse?

Great book.

I have a question for the author, or really anyone willing to help. I'd only post if I already spent a couple hours on it, so I'm a little frustrated.

I read through chapter 4 and understand what the indifference principle is and how it works. I'm trying to do the exercise on page 130 for a bunch of spots, but don't understand how we can start with:A flop and two ranges, say that SB has to shove 66% over a BB's halfpot cbet to make his bluffs indifferent...and then so easily come up with the enumerated hand range for SB's shoving range.

How is it done? I can't figure it out in pro poker tools.


In the example there is an 8h6c5d flop. (ph 124)
We find SB can jam 2/3 of the time to make BB indifferent between c/f and b/f with his bluffs.

How did we go from "top 35% of preflop hands", to "top 2/3 of these hands ranked by equity versus BB's range"?

What I'm doing now:
-Use Odds oracle to find out that SB has minimum equity of X, 66% of the time.
-Go through the range, and take out the hands that have <X equity.
-Be left with a range that always has too many combos for 66% of the actual range.

I don't understand why this isn't working. Help?


Thanks so much,
Semper

Hey, sorry for the delay replying here. Super busy these days.

Yea, I just mean that the hand is played in the same spot in more than one way with nonzero frequency.

Makes sense. I was mostly joking .

Yea, I was pretty excited about that tweet. My girlfriend was like, 'calm down -- who's Ike Haxton?'. Clearly I need a new girlfriend.

I don't know any more than you about how they modelled postflop play, but yea I think limping is certainly important in very short stacked play.

Out by the end of the year is still the current goal!

Thanks . I'm not sure. I guess you can't please everyone. And for those people, there's Decide to Play Great Poker. I kid, I kid... But seriously, glad you enjoyed it.

Yea, so the situation here is that we have a 3-bet pot with short stacks, and in this simple case, we assume SB is playing jam-or-fold versus a c-bet, and BB is either check-folding, bet-folding, or bet-calling.

At the beginning of flop play, the pot is 10 BB, there's 25 BB behind, and we assumed a half-pot c-bet. If we check-fold, we end up with 25 BB, and if we bet-fold we end up with 20 + 15*X, where X is SB's fold-to-cbet frequency. So we are indifferent between the two actions with our weak hands when X=1/3, i.e. when SB's jamming 2/3 of the time facing a c-bet.

So if he jams more than 2/3, we only c-bet with hands strong enough to bet-call, and this likely incentivizes him to stop jamming so much, and if he jams less than 2/3, we c-bet with all of our weak hands, and this likely incentivizes him to jam more, so the equilibrium is likely when SB is jamming 2/3 of the time when facing a c-bet.

So to make an approximation of his jam-versus-cbet range, we just take the top 2/3 of the hands with which he faces a c-bet -- that is, the top 2/3 of the hands with which he gets to the flop in the first place. We assumed he got to the flop with the top 35% of hands (not an amazing estimate of most players' 3-bet calling ranges, but that wasn't the point of the example) so we assumed he jams flop with the top 2/3 of the top 35% of hands. So basically, we start with the top 35% of hands (as ranked by preflop all-in equity) as an estimate of SB's flop starting range. Then we take the top 2/3 of those (as ranked by equity on that particular flop versus BB's flop starting range) and took that as an approximation of his equilibrium jam-versus-cbet range.

Of course, this is just an approximation. His actual shoving range will be the top 2/3 of hands versus the BB's calling range (up to card elimination effects and assuming the Indifference Principle's assumptions are satisfied), but hand rankings by equity versus his flop starting range should be pretty close to hand rankings according to equity versus his shove-calling range, so the top 2/3 of hands versus his flop starting range should be about right.

I don't understand your procedure using Odds Oracle. Perhaps my explanation has answered your question, but if not, could you explain further? I don't think I've ever used the software myself. What is X?

Hope this helps,

Will

My favourite non-fiction book ever

thanks, glad you liked it

Is there a ebook version of this one?

I got the Kindle

Yup, it's available for Kindle and Nook through Amazon and B&N, and if you want a more open format (PDF, ePUB), you can get that directly from the publisher's website.

Hey guys,

Got this stuff together tonight. Not sure if this is useful/interesting to enough people to post it on the book's website, but for now I've put it up here:

http://theory.mse.cornell.edu/~wtipt...r_examples.zip

There's a README.txt in the zip file -- let me know if it's not clear.

Cheers

hello I am Mark and I just bought your book. Unfortunately I am (so far) supremely, exceedingly crap at poker. I expect I could WIN the world's most pathetic poker-loser MTT - the "WMPPL", or at least reach the final table in two consecutive seasons (a feat unsurpassed in poker history). When I started reading it, which was just yesterday, I have found myself thinking "gee-whiz Tex, is all this science and total theory really necessary?" I mean, what do I know? Anyway, I really just wanted to say that I have read a couple of posts elsewhere in which folk have knocked your writing style as being too dry. I totally disagree. I find your writing concise and clear and efficient, even light in tone if heavy in subject. I'll let you know what I think after I finish it.

Does anyone want to recommend a "Highlights" section/few pages?

I am short on time right now and would like to read the summary's that apply most/have the most in site and then work backwards.

An Example is I notice that in one of the first sections you have to call 50% of of villains three bets in order for him to not profit from 3 betting any two cards.

Anything else like this? Much appreciated...

TBH you couldn't really pick a less appropriate book to try and tackle in that manner. I suppose you could jump straight into the river play chapter and maybe pick up some stuff you could apply directly to your game, assuming your understanding of game theory as applied to poker is already pretty good. But really, I'd recommend waiting until you have time not just to read but to study the book. For a bit of perspective, I got distracted after the first few chapters the first time around (shout out to Phil Newall's excellent LHE book, which was more relevant to the games I predominantly play) and when I came back to it, it took me several goes before I was back into the flow of the writing and the subject matter. Which is in no way meant as a criticism; the point is, this is a serious academic work, not something to read for fun or to pick up quick tips and tricks from.

Hi Mark,

I'm glad to hear you're enjoying it so far . Don't hesitate to post if any questions come up.

Will

Yea, I'd mostly agree with CoronalDischarge that the book builds on itself. You need Ch 1 to understand Ch 2 and you need Ch 2 to fully understand Ch 3, etc. Hopefully, however, you'll start finding useful things (if not "quick tips") pretty early on. If you want to get the gist of what's covered in each part of the book, check out the list of topics in the "You should now know..." sections at the end of each chapter.

The exception to this, I think, is Ch 6: Postflop Concepts which is sort of a quick and dirty intro to a lot of... postflop concepts. I can't promise you'll get all of it if you skip the first 5 chapters, but it has a pretty high density of ideas you should be able to apply directly to your game without much further thought. However, those ideas are mostly what you might call standard or exploitative type ideas rather than game theoretic ones.

Actually, it's not just the book that doesn't lend itself to reading for "quick tips" -- it's the subject matter itself. Your example actually provides a good illustration of this:

Some players have sort of latched on to this sort of "auto-profit" calculation as a way to estimate unexploitable play. Here's another random post that illustrates this: http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/15...efend-1285384/. In fact, the result that's just taken for granted by that poster depends on a number of assumptions which are almost certainly wrong, and it sounds like he's going to end up playing badly because of it.

Having bad theory or partial understanding of theory can often be more dangerous than knowing no theory at all. So, looking for quick tips on game theory in poker is likely to be counterproductive.

Yeah maybe your book doesnt work like this. Thought I would share what Matt Janda said about a related question for his book.

The first two of those points fall into the category of standard/exploitative play that you don't need game theory to tell you, and the third one is like the autoprofit calcs -- the result depends on a lot of assumptions and is often just wrong in practice. No matter what problem you have, you'll always be able to find someone saying they have a magic pill to sell you that will solve it with no work on your part, but unfortunately it isn't always so. I've done my best to make this stuff as simple as possible, but no simpler. Set a bit of time aside to read the first couple chapters, and I'm sure you'll find plenty of practical info.

edit: Even though I think it's too complicated to do justice in a few one-liners, the fact is that this game theory stuff really is not all that hard to understand, and any serious poker player owes it to himself to put in a few hours to figure it out, imo.

you could also use this as a shortcut for the MoP

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q4w5GoNq4Ac

jk

OP could you give a estimate of when the 2th book will come out? Ur first estimate was not before summer 2013, and prob a bit later that year. Any updates on this?

Cheers

By the end of the year is still the current goal. It's a lot of material to get together, but I'm very excited about how it's coming along.

Page 42, 2nd equation. So I went ahead and wanted to see the results for 32o.
Villain's shoving range is left the same.
His folding frequency is now 0.5731, shoving frequency then is obv 0,4269.

My final term is max(9,5BB, 9,7193BB)

Just want to make sure that I got this right because if not this could become the biggest leak in my game :P

Regarding the equation, am I right to minraise any two cards preflop given villain's shoving range? I think that even regs don't have enough exploiting shoving ranges in a lot of times, fish won't anyways.

Yea, those two numbers are the EVs of open folding and minraise-folding. Since we're assuming the BB is playing shove-or-fold versus a minraise, neither line has any chance of getting us to showdown, so it doesn't matter much what hand we have. So, you should expect your result for 32o to be pretty much the same as that for the 74o shown in the text.

So yea, you should definitely minraise any two cards against a BB playing shove-or-fold with the ranges given. More generally, if BB is continuing (with a call or a raise) less than half the time, minraise-fold is definitely better than open fold. If the reason for that isn't clear now, it should be very shortly as you continue reading.

Cheers