Even without all of the other stuff, the advice in WITHG was before the really good LAGTAGs changed the game. Phillip's books lay out GT thinking, but there hasn't really been a book that encompassed the game even circa 2011 as a general purpose guide to playing online LHE as well as people knew how to play it (that I've read). If someone wanted to start playing online shorthanded, I guess the book you'd point them at would still be WITHG... but you'd give a lot of "follow the general ideas, the modern game is really different" advice. Oh, and tear out the part about FSDR. I'd point them more to videos that you guys did, because that's how I learned (at least almost) to be decent in online games. You could have the best shorthanded LHE book for online play April 1, 2007 and 5 years later the game is going to be quite different. If you're using empirical data for starting hands (especially Euro game hands), there are going to be tough questions about applicability. IIRC, those charts lead to playing like 24/18 in 6m. That's not what the cool kids play these days.

I'm guessing the market for selling high level LHE books is about zero. Otherwise, you'd think you could find a list of geniuses who are willing to share the modern game because they've retired from playing full time. The tag line of "even though the game is solved, you can learn how to make a bit of money" doesn't light up the sales counter.

Maybe you missed it but i think Mason already answered this :

I bold the little in your post because if i understood exactly what Mason said, maybe you only did a little money overall because the ev neutral hand went slightly negative due to the short term luck factor .
But at least you had more fun.

What i conclude about this stuff is, if you run good play more ev neutral hands because the other players should react scared a bit more vs you and play slightly worst ( bluff catching less or not bluffing in spot they should when you check for example), so you would gain a bit more ev overall.
While if you run bad you should discard the neutral ev hands because players would see this and try play back at you a bit more, making ev neutral played more difficult and it should cost you some ev.... i think .

This is why i probably run bad a lot when i tilt .. i play more neutral ev hands to try to get my money back, increasing my standard deviation ( which if i loose , and should happen even more often , i would go up in stakes with an even smaller win rate lol..) when i should not !

Talking about tilt in a thread with MM is asking for trouble.

Mason thinks AJo UTG is EV neutral. I think hes wrong. I don't find his evidence a book from 8 years ago says so, is convincing.

Well like he said, nvm AJo and just put ATo.
Seem tho his point is valid as to when we talk about hands that are slightly above zero ev, we could say those hands are at the threshold of being optimal due to the short term luck factor.
And has a lot of GTO player says often ( even Newall wrote it in his second book), the best hand to play exploitative is the one near the threshold hands.

So in good game you play it and bad game you do not seem about right and if you run good, might take the advantage from it in either games.

Seem AJo is like that for the 2 of view and probably both of you are right.

i am not good in statistics but surely there is way to make a calculation and try to find a 95% interval confidence to say if AJo is profitable or not.
Seem like Mason point it it would be almost impossible anway to have such a database to reach a confidence that high.

And even than it might not even be a great deal because if the best player can play AJo with a profit, it might not be based on the hand value itself but because the players are great while a decent player would loose money with it...

That is usually what happen with a hand that has like 0 ev .

I might be wrong because i am not a math guy but this is how i understand it.

Out of curiosity, what does your DB say?

I checked mine. In limits between .5/1 and 10/20, I played AJo 88% of the time in EP. I played ATo less often (don't recall when I switched). In 420 hands, I won 75bb/100 with Ax (any A that was AJo or worse) played in EP at a 9 or 10 handed table. My big DB is in HEM1, so I'm not sure how to filter for exactly UTG. ATo wasn't that much less profitable than AJo. In my sample, these hands are hugely profitable. Proof? Not really. Evidence is that playing them was fine. Based on my DB, I wished I had played ATo more. It wasn't 0EV, and it wasn't close. Could be the times I added ATo were in games where my EP raises were getting through, but no need to throw 75bb/100 on the floor. Granted, these are small samples. For a while I was game starting as many 5/T games as I could and playing hands for volume (no game selection), so tough games don't seem to crush these hands as much as I'd have expected.
There exist in the world 5 and 10 million hand databases from SNE grinders, so multiple millions of hands were played in the same year. You'd have to do some math-proving to say that those are insignificant samples. People who played that much tended to play more the same over time than a lot of people.

If i offered you 55-45 on a coin flip would you say no, because you can't tell if its a profitable spot or not because of the short term luck factor.

Or would you say a ran 2 million simulations and concluded that a coin flips is 50-50 so if Take 55-45 I'm going to make money, the short term luck factor is irrelevant.

I looked at a small one I had on a laptop and was around 20bb/100 on a database where I was -40k overall. Not a massive sample but taken with knowing that AJo is green on my big one, I feel pretty good playing it.

Lets also remember these hands will do even better playing in live time raked games than online games that were raked $1-3 a hand when there was a flop. If you win a big pot live vs a big pot at 3-6 you are going to win 1/2 big bet more.

So you are saying AJo is profitable on a 2 millions try data base ?
And do not forget, like Mason said and the reason of this thread, game condition changes...

Players get better all the time or maybe the holder of the AJo is much better than the average joe who would loose money with AJo too...

I mean pretty obvious no one loose money with AA,KK,etc in EP but certainly AJo is not in the same range .

So maybe a lot of that sample came from very good games that do not exist anymore if it is too far in the past too.

fwiw, here about 6 max in though game, right ?

So ok ATo is there but we speak FR right ?
In a tough game , would AJo be there ?
Maybe but it would actually be at his bottom range for sure no ?

ps: i am not trying to be a dick or w.e btw, i just tend to agree with mason that if it is a very close decision, it should be very difficult to be sure it is in fact a winning hand.
If you are very sure it is a winning hand by far well hey good for you but maybe it is not a winning hand for everyone tho, that should be taking into consideration i think as well because like you said, it is slightly profitable for you and you play great.

I mean take a racing car like in formule 1, true the car ( or the hand like AJo) as value in it self but the driver still have a say in it.

Probably bad analogy but anyway

they dont when they cant play online anymore. the games i played in 5 years ago were significantly harder than the games i play in now

Hi DougL:

You wrote:

Okay.

I think this is reasonable.

I agree,

I agree but small samples may be much larger than you think since you're trying to see if a hand is slightly profitable when the individual results for each played hand can actually be quite large.

This is an important point.

Yes but we're most interested in those hands which we think are close to begin with. This says to me that for these hands you'll need a larger saample size than most people will think is correct.

The data and the computed estimated standard deviation should answer this question which is why I asked JL to produce his data for one of these close hands.

Best wishes,
Mason

can you produce any data that says AJo is not profitable UTG?


I'm not going to look up, search and then manually input the results of over 1,000 unique hands. Its to time consuming and I don't care enough.

Mason to give you an estimate of my sample, when I played FR online I estimate I was dealt AJo UTG once per hour. I think this will work out to a large enough sample compared to live where you will likely be in the same spot maybee 1-2 times a week

Hi Bob:

This is an argument that a lot of people make and it's consistent with our "playing fast" comments in HPFAP. However, I also think there is value in having a tight image in limit hold 'em.

In addition, there may be another issue. It has always been my suspicion, that some seemingly marginal hands which appear to either have small positive expectation or small negative expectation, but you don't know which, tend to have either a small positive expectation or a higher negative expectation, but you don't know which. I can't prove this but it is consistent with my philosophy of a good statistician tries to error on the conservative side.

People play poker for different reasons and now that I'm semi-retired playing for fun is important to me. But I have always found winning to be more fun than losing, and the more I win the more fun it is. But perhaps that's just me.

Best wishes,
Mason

I don't agree and this is a subject we at 2+2 have given much thought. My reasons are as follows:

1. While no-limit hold 'em is definitely contracting, I think the opposite is true of limit hold 'em even though there are still far more no-limit games than limit games. That is in the games I play in, which is mostly the $20-$40 limit hold 'em at The Bellagio, I'm constantly looking at semi-novice players, and this effect seems to be increased with the influx of all the WSOP players currently in town. So if their database reflects weak players, that should be fine for the large majority of players who want to read this book.

2. I agree that this was disturbing, but there is also a co-author on the book who was never criticized in this manner. So is it fair to hurt him? In addition, there is also a publishing company involved, us at 2+2, and we never did anything wrong and I believe we acted properly when these allegations came to light. So is it fair to hurt us as well? But just so you know, Winning in Tough Hold 'em Games is currently a small seller and limit hold 'em would have to grow a lot from its current state for this to change.

3. And finally, I think it's a very good book that has a lot to offer beginning and intermediate players who want to improve their games. Of course that's just my opinion, but is it fair not to let these people know that this book is available where instead they might purchase something much inferior?

Best wishes,
Mason

Hi Montrealcorp:

This has always been the standard idea that has been around a long time and I think it does have value. But I also think that having a tight image has value when playing limit hold 'em.

Okay. But keep in mind that most people who tilt tend to play more hands than just the EV neutral ones.

Best wishes,
Mason

Why don't you produce your data on this particular hand. I suspect that when analyzed properly, it won't be so convincing either.

Mason

right after you produce yours

I'm not sure I understand, but are you saying there is really no difference between 6 max and full ring, and opening AJ utg and even A10 should be profitable for good players in full ring?

ATo and AJo is basically the same hand since AJ won't 3 bet Us so At and AJ basically ha e same equity vs AK and AQ. The only difference is AJ does much better vs TT

I've been sitting on about 220 pages in Word for like 6+ years.

I'm going to keep playing AJo UTG, if there are games out there that I shouldn't be, I'll probably quit playing LHE entirely.

Didn't Doyle Brunson say in his book that if you don't think you can play AJ under the gun profitably in your game, you should find another game? Guess he was probably talking about NL, but I think the same thing applies to LHE.

so i wanted to contribute to this but its amazing how few times you actually are dealt a specific hand in a specific position. Anyway here goes.

Stars fullring, 2012-2014, 430k hands.
I'm including utg and utg+1 as stars is 10 handed.
32,262 hands in those 2 spots, .06 bb/hand won
Dealt AJ off 305 times, played it 97% utg and 79% utg+1 (I honestly can't explain this other than I prob had decisions on a few other tables at once and decided to fold a marginal hand) I was in the green, but obv meaningless over 300 hands.
I was dealt A10o 291 times and played it 3 times

-Whats is the worst Ace people are opening UTG 6max? Mine is ATo.
-Add in 3 or 4 players, I would side with Mason that you should easily ditch ATo and probably AJo, too.

PS 9handed and 10handed games are very dull in the early positions.

I think this is likely easy to explain; you played it less often utg+1 because sometimes the guy utg open raised so you folded.