Have just received the book, it is highly thought provoking and looks like an impressive theoretical work. I particularly like the look of the chapters on Postflop Concepts and River Play.

I have a general question which relates to the value of position both in solving optimal strategies and in devising exploitative strategies.

For instance, if both players get to the river with identical ranges and BB can successfully devise an optimal strategy for his range, then is there any advantage in having position on the river?

Or is the importance of position just that it makes it easier to devise exploitative strategies when BB strays from an optimal strategy. Is having position on the river likely to be an even greater benefit when ranges are asymmetric?

Yea there's definitely an advantage to being in position on the river when the players have identical starting distributions.

You might think of it like this -- both players generally want to get their mediocre stuff to showdown while value-betting their especially strong hands and bluffing their especially weak ones. The SB can do this -- he can check his middling hands and immediately capture their showdown value leaving his weak and strong stuff free to do what they want.

The BB, however, has a problem. If he just leads the river with a polarized range and checks all his mediocre stuff, he's very exploitable. In particular, the SB will bet a lot when checked to, and the BB will be motivated to include some stronger hands in his checking range for what you might call "balance reasons". Of course if he is value-leading the river less, he must bluff-lead less also. The overall effect is that position allows the SB to realize his equity much more effectively than the BB can.

If anything, position is less of an issue when players have asymmetric starting distributions. Of course, I go into this in the book and don't want to give everything away .

subscribing... seems like a very good book, that I need to read

Not that this needs my plugging it, but this is by far the best poker book, both in terms of strategical value in the content and interesting reading, I've read or listened to. It is also the scariest piece of poker strategy I've seen come onto the market.

Thanks, I appreciate all the plugs I can get. I'm sorry you were alarmed, though!

Just ordered the book on Amazon.de. Can't wait

Today, I purchased the book and tomorrow I will start to reading it.
I have a question, I have looked into the extra section and I find some
Mathematica file.
I didn't know about Mathematica before, I checked it a little bit an seems interesting, however I wondered if you can do the same exact things with CR EV.
If not, can you tell me the differences and why you are not using it?
ty mate

Hello,

Mathematica is a powerful mathematics software that can do all sorts of things. It doesn't include any poker-specific functionality. In the free extra content on the book's website, I used it mostly to just solve equations and make some graphs related to the GTO solutions of a couple different river situations. This isn't really the sort of thing that CREV was made to do.

All of the Mathematica content is available in PDF format also, but if you view it as a PDF, you lose some interactivity and the ability to see how changing certain parameters affects the solutions.

This supplemental content is meant to provide a bit of extra value for people who are particularly math-oriented. I imagine most readers won't do much with it, and it's certainly not necessary to read, understand, and get the most out of the book.

Cheers

by the way, some good discussion of the book in the heads up sngs forum:

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/18...-book-1287600/

easiest way to get hardcopy from czech republic?

I'd guess that ordering from a normal bookstore like Amazon (amazon.de? amazon.co.uk?) or Barnes&Noble would be your best bet. Do they ship to the Czech Republic?

I'm also in Prague and I ordered it via Amazon.de. Should get here in about a week I presume.

Yaqh your book is very interesting even though is difficult.
I studied a bit of game theory before, but as you know, the subject is hard and many concepts requires a lot of time in order to understand them correctly. Because of that, I will post a lot of questions
Again very very insightful book

When is volume 2 expected?

When it's ready . I'm going to try to have the draft to my editor in a few months...

great read . when will be the next volume be out ?

lol, do you read what yaqh say?

Bought this as ebook and Im almost done.

In my opinion, at times you find yourself just staring at the screen, wondering when anything being said is going to click with relevance to a real life hand or spot. It seems like it is a blueprint of game theory concepts, without every giving anyone an insight into how to apply these concepts to our advantage at the tables. To say that the book is suitable for beginners, with no knowledge of game theory is a bit off, imo. After reading the intro, and hearing what the book was going to cover, I was excited to start reading. However, although there is alot of good information in there, it makes for incredibly difficult reading. I think it will need to be re-read a few times before anything will click, and even then it is debatable whether the knowledge gained will have any bearing at the tables for the average, 50nl-100nl hu players or HUSNG players.

So basically if I used to be a winning player at microstakes back in 2008 and had a break since then, you wouldn't recommend this as one of the first readings to get a bit more up to date? I've been looking for something to get the rust off my game, but all I really achieved so far was getting more and more confused.

Imho, no. I would not reccommend jumping at the deep end with this book. I am a winning mid stakes HUSNG player and, in all honesty, I have never heard concepts talked about in such a way. I think the whole book would have to be read several times, and alot of interaction with a pen and paper over the course of several months would be needed to get anywhere near close to understanding 50% of the concepts spoke about. That is, for your average low-midstakes player.

I agree with jimmyjesus. It is more a book to buy if you want to fine-tune your game by approaching it at a game theoretic level. If taking the rust off your game is all you are interested in at the moment, you are better off just watching videos imo.

That being said, the concepts are something I really do want to understand, and im going to give it a go, and study the book hard. I guess if you want to reach a high level, this is what you need to know.

Well, as people have said, if you're just looking for a reminder of ABC play, EHUNL would likely be best left for later. If you remember the fundamentals and are coming back to the game with renewed motivation to study some advanced ideas, then it might be a good choice.

Great -- yea, if someone tells you that they can teach you to have consistent success in tough games overnight or without having to think particularly hard, they're probably lying. That said, if there's idea you come across in the book, and you just don't see where it applies to your own game, don't stress about it. Focus on applying the concepts that do resonate with you.

Also I've said it before but I mean it -- I find poker theory fascinating, and I'm happy to chat about it, so if you have questions about the stuff discussed in the book, don't hesitate to post them somewhere and PM me a reminder if I don't get back to you quickly.

Ok, so after hitting the book hard over the weekend, and making pages full of notes along with creating my own examples of the concepts spoke about, I think I was a tad harsh about it in my earlier posts. This really is a great book. For the first time in my short poker career, things are starting to make sense. One question, yaqh. You speak in the book about learning the hard maths and theory behind what we are doing, and developing an intuition along the way in order to apply it at the tables. Do you think that intuition can be gained simply by studying, even though we will rarely be doing calculations such as this at the tables? Also, what do u think is feasible with regards to doing calculations at the tables and what do you think the top players are doing, calculation wise? (I realise this is a trivial question).

Thanks.

I'm glad to hear it

Sure, of course the idea is to develop intuition for later use since actually doing a lot of the calculations talked about in the book would be completely infeasible at the tables. This is true for lots of things in poker, though. For example, estimating your equity versus an opponent's range is a pretty complicated calculation to try to do exactly, but with a few memorized tricks and rules of thumb gained through away-from-the-tables study, making pretty good estimates in real time isn't too hard. I mean, even a lot of the standard exploitative thought processes used by "feel" players are things they learned at one point and now use over and over again -- they don't figure stuff out again every hand they play. So yea -- I'm a very big believer of getting in good habits: whenever you encounter a decision you're not sure of, make a note of it and take the time later to figure it out. This investment of time will pay off over and over again in the future. The tools and framework to do this are much of what I wanted to teach in the book.

As far as top players' use of game theory goes, there was a thread in NVG recently about this that doesn't need rehashing here, but basically some players credit their success to doing a lot of theory work away from the tables while some players obviously don't know a lick about it. When I play, almost all of my brain power goes towards figuring out the players' ranges -- both Villain's and Hero's. This involves not only hand reading in individual hands but also gathering as much info about Villain's play as possible to use to understand his actions in the future. Once I have a clear idea of the ranges involved at a particular decision point, pulling up a strategy to employ from memory and maybe a bit of logic is usually pretty easy (because if it isn't easy, I'll make a note of it, figure it out, and then it'll be easy every time in the future).

Hope this helps.