Quote:
Originally Posted by Al Mirpuri
Does anyone else wish to say anything good or bad about this book?
I'm about a third of the way through the book so far.
I would agree with other posters that it does a very good job of bridging the gap between exploitative books and MOP and also with statictheory that:
Quote:
Originally Posted by statictheory
If you are already a true expert player who has read mop ,for example, and taken that information to create a "blueprint" for yourself, then you might not need this book.
There were many points I found myself agreeing with and a lot of stuff I've thought about or wrote about that I haven't seen in print or videos before. An example would be another thing statictheory mentioned, "in order to play exploitive poker its much easier to see spots to exploit once you understand gto poker".
However, there were also things I disagreed with. It's amazing that Dan Harrington's approach of randomizing play wasn't torn to shreds when all of the preceding chapter demonstrated why it was wrong. Instead Dan's given the benefit of the doubt with "deep stack poker raises the possibility of utilizing the other mode of deception".
Also, it may not be necessary to slowplay aces to avoid exploitation from squeeze plays. The original opener can have many strong hands which gives you protection from opponents looking to attack your capped cold-calling range. As well as that, hands like JJ/TT/AQ can often be 4bet in those situations anyway so having the very top of your range isn't a requirement.
I think no limit hold'em isn't the authors strongest game so perhaps he decided to defer to other authors.
For me, there wasn't enough proof or examples of game theory solutions to illustrate the points being made. For example, balancing your checking range by having a check raising range or raising range on the next street has very little benefit for your checking range, at least in the NL situations I've looked at. It might be different in limit games but there wasn't enough evidence given to show it.
This may have been by design since I think the book is aimed at people looking to get started with game theory who may not be comfortable with the mathematics.
At times there are pages of maybe 20 or so hands in a row which I found very tedious to get through but others may prefer. The way the hands are formatted changed as well which was a bit unusual but not a big deal.
I also skipped ahead to the investment section. I'm a trader with Susquehanna (same company Bill Chen works for) and I thought the section was excellent. There are easily hundreds of ways this section could have turned out very badly so I was definitely impressed.
Overall I would recommend this book.