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At 88, Poker Legend Doyle Brunson Is Still Bluffing. Or Is He?
- Victerius 4y agoFor those of you who would like to learn the basics of poker, Johns Hopkins offers an online course: https://hopkinspokercourse.com/ https://hopkinspokercourse.com/ MIT OCW also has a course on poker theory: https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/15-s50-poker-theory-and-analytics-january-iap-2015/ https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/15-s50-poker-theory-and-analytic...
- eof 4y agoThe book “no limit theory and practice” continues to be the most valuable poker book I’ve read. That said about 80% of that book and 95% of anything written about poker before about 2019 is irrelevant to today’s games. People never intended to play game theory optimal in the past; it was a war of “leveling” your opponent into making the wrong move. You would make money by playing an “exploitive strategy” meaning, you would make decisions that are not game theory optimal but do exploit your specific opponents tendency. These days that doesn’t work beyond micros (or small stakes at a brick and mortar casino.) Solvers, both the software and theory/knowledge have evolved so quickly in the last few years that the game has radically shifted toward simply playing an unexploitable GTO strategy better than your opponents.
- iknowSFR 4y agoFascinating. I haven’t played or thought about poker in 15 years. Can you elaborate more on the current strategy of poker? A real example would be helpful.
- orwin 4y agoPeople use rng generators to take decisions nowadays. Impossible to really exploit.
- RivieraKid 4y agoUsing randomization doesn't mean you're anywhere close to being unexploitable.
- zucker42 4y agoA large idea in modern poker theory is playing the Nash equilibrium strategy. A Nash equilibrium is where no player can improve their expected result by unilaterally changing their strategy, and two player games provably have the property that if you play any Nash equilibrium strategy, you expected value will always be greater than or equal to your EV when your opponent also plays an equilibrium strategy. The application of this is that at any given point during a hand you and your opponent have a "range" of hands (the term in the technical solver literature is an information set) that it would make sense for you to have from your opponents perspective. A range is a probalistic weighting of hands. Every action changes a players range, and for example if a player bluffs too much you can exploit that by calling with a bigger range against them. So poker becomes a game of, rather than figuring out what your opponent has, instead establishing a baseline strategy that can't be exploited no matter what your opponent does and then adjusting that to optimally exploit your opponent. That's the basic framework. Another book recommendations is "Modern Poker Theory".
- RivieraKid 4y agoAt every decision point, you know what your range is and what your opponent range is. Then you choose one or two bet/raise sizes based on the board and the ranges. Then you split your range into categories: value bet, call, bluff, fold. And then you look at your hole cards and play based on its category. Of course, this is very hard to do in your head so, in practice, players rely on various principles and heuristics based on what the solver does in various situations. Here's a pro explaining his thought process: https://www.partypoker.com/blog/en/its-the-same-game-but-it-isnt.html https://www.partypoker.com/blog/en/its-the-same-game-but-it-...
- kuboble 4y agoYou can search youtube for things like "hand analysis with piosolver"
- eof 4y agoI can only tell you my perspective as an ex poker pro who has not studied with solvers. But the basic idea is that you put in a range of starting hands for yourself and the opponent, and possible bet sizes, and the solver will brute force a play that approximates Nash equilibrium. The output of the solver will be something like “45% of the time bet. 55% check.” Or “95% fold. 5% raise X” The general loop as I understand it is inputting tricky/common situations running the solver and basically memorizing it.
- throwaway98797 4y agothis may be true online people in live games are impatient degens, money will always be there with a basic strategy add in a bit a leveling and you can print source: i’m a degen whose loses all the time
- csa 4y ago> These days that doesn’t work beyond micros (or small stakes at a brick and mortar casino.) I would like to introduce you to Hustler Casino Live. I assume that most of the games they steam are not B&M small stakes. There is plenty of room for exploitative play at higher stakes if you game select well. This is especially true if one has figured out the home game scene (where the best games are, imho). Online on competitive sites, folks still make have relatively large gaps in their game up to nl100. On online agent apps… lol, gto is not a thing except at 5/10 and higher (sometimes). I will add that all of this is a discussion about nlhe. There is a push to get away from solver-based games online because they are largely bad for the ecology. Casuals get fleeced rapidly, even by folks who implement a “gto” strategy poorly. Just having a good starting hand strategy/chart is usually a huge advantage alone. The following are some ways that this is happening, and I think that these are the future of poker: - plo - more blinds/antes (3 blinds, big blind ante, short deck antes, etc.) - bomb pots - double board - deep stack (most solver work is for 100bb or less) - mixed games Plo bomb pots are typically very much loved wherever they are played, and double board adds an extra element of skill. It lets causal gamblers gamble and get action (see every flop!), but there is a huge skill element that is not in solver territory yet. Any poker scene for which a gto strategy can reasonably be implemented will rapidly wither to a small pecking order of pros. I hope folks in the poker playing community, especially pros and serious casuals, can embrace games where gto theory is not the baseline. It’s healthy for the poker ecology by keeping casuals involved and engaged.
- lambda 4y ago> Casuals get fleeced rapidly It's funny how the meta-game works here. Fleecing the casuals is, of course, the way the pros make money; so it's basically the point of the game. But I can see how fleecing the casuals slowly is probably a better long-term strategy, that will ultimately extract more money from them, than doing it quickly, draining their bankroll, which may stop them from playing or get them to play less consistently.
- csa 4y ago> But I can see how fleecing the casuals slowly is probably a better long-term strategy, that will ultimately extract more money from them, than doing it quickly, draining their bankroll, which may stop them from playing or get them to play less consistently. This is exactly correct. This is why it’s difficult to build and sustain a plo8/nlo8 ecology online or live. The good players just clean out the casuals so quickly and relatively risk free via freerolling. It largely only exists in a sustainable way in mixed rotations. I was an online plo8 player who had to switch to plo to increase my game selection. It got to a point that I knew all of the other players at the table, and they were not giving up much in terms of ev (although most of them had exploitable gaps in their games).
- Denzel 4y agoMost of what you say is accurate however it’s worth understanding that GTO really only applies in specific situations. E.g., heads up (2 players) play. GTO is unable to produce an unexploitable strategy against 2+ players. Additionally, as a matter of practical application, less of theory, GTO suffers in ultra deep stacked heads up play where effective stacks are > 500 BB deep. NL Hold ‘Em has progressed a lot but it’s far from solved.
- albedoa 4y agoYeah, I've come to start smacking my lips when my opponents start parroting "GTO" and related jargon. Their understanding of it is more dangerous to them than it is to me. It's a continuation of what we saw in the 2000s: entire sections of the book store dedicated to poker, selling confidence to millions of new players who misapply their concepts. There is still a lot of money to be made in micro- and small-stakes NLHE.
- bionsystem 4y agoIn my opinion the most valuable book that is still relevant from pre-19 is Mathematics of Poker. But proper poker study should come from playing around with solvers, ideally with somebody who can guide you through not making the most common mistakes.
- lupire 4y agoThe MIT course videos are quite poor. The slides are often not shown, and order of information presented is a confusing jumble that talks about advanced things before explaining basics.
- dghughes 4y agoIf we use Betteridge's law of headlines then it's no. I'm all in.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- reillyse 4y agoIt’s funny that the two examples used to illustrate his play (the 10 2) stories are examples of him making extremely bad reads on his opponent and bad beating them. I can only assume that’s him massaging the narrative a bit to help him win in the future, cause it isn’t great poker playing.
- Aisen8010 4y agoI guess he's profiting from the opponents overthinking and tripping themselves.
- Raidion 4y agoI think inspiring a bunch of amateurs to make plays with mostly garbage is a great example of a +EV play. Additionally with two pair heads up you need to get it in, the stuff about making reads gives amateur players the license to go nuts because they feel like it, again +EV. Dolly knew the odds better than almost anyone for a very long time, objectively we've learned a lot about poker in the last few years, and it's not fair to judge his play vs today's standards.
- majormajor 4y agoI haven't played a lot in a while, but my first thought is what you say in the second line: you're the big stack, you're heads up at the end of a tournament, you want to keep pressure on your opponent, and then once you even hit something like two-pair, seems like you want to make them have even less if they fold, or get a good shot at ending the game if they call all-in. Is this outdated in general? From the talk below about GTO-and-heads-up is the assumption that it'd be dangerous now to assume anyone who's still in at that point doesn't have something better than you?
- vikingerik 4y agoWhat's outdated is the idea that you can get any advantage from the times you have two pair compared to the times your opponent does. Situations like this are akin to an "I cut, you choose" situation. Hypothetically, you want to size your bet such that all possible responses lead to the same expected negative EV for the opponent and positive for you, with a layer of fuzziness so that your bet size doesn't always give away what you hold. That's what is meant by non-exploitable game strategy. Doyle's original advantage was knowing that bet sizing and fuzziness more precisely than anyone else, from a combination of intuition and calculation, and also in reading the opponent's propensity to inaccurately calculate and take advantage of that too. What's changed in the last few years is that now everyone and their bots know the proper calculations as Doyle always did - and they're also good at reading your bet sizing to correctly guess that you have the two pair. Your description is still right for a single situation: with a stack advantage, yes you want to apply pressure. What's changed is the aggregation over many such situations, where your opponents have two pair just as often and play it just as well as you do.
- russeldunbar 4y ago... He kind of is.
- data4lyfe 4y agoThe man is an absolute legend. And the most awesome thing about poker is that you can play until the end of your days if you can stomach the swings.
- 2-718-281-828 4y agounlike chess or go where you have to stop at some age - good point!
- alasdair_ 4y ago
- Rebelgecko 4y agoYeah, it's sad to see champions giving up chess in their 30s but I can also see the desire to leave on a high note, before you've declined, and also spend your life on other things- you've already shown you're the best so why invest all that time and effort into keeping your title? There's definitely diminishing returns.
- alar44 4y agoIf you're talking about competitive players, they don't give up, they stop competing professionally and usually go on to teach. Competitive chess is a gruelling full time job.
- Rebelgecko 4y agoExactly. It's interesting to see how poker seems to differ.
- amalcon 4y agoWell, there's a lot more money in poker.
- YZF 4y ago
- saucymew 4y agoHighly recommend Doyle's "Poker Wisdom of a Champion" for a throwback look at the wild days of poker in the 60's. The story of the tennis match prop bet alone was worth it. Let the dog die!
- bionsystem 4y agoOther recommandation : - Doyle Brunson - My 50 most memorable hands (better to know the rules to appreciate it) - The Professor, the Banker and the Suicide King (great story about how Andy Beal challenged the best players at the time in ultra-high stakes games) - Barry Greenstein - Ace on the river (better to buy a paper edition because of the pictures, and ignore the strategy parts)
- vaidhy 4y agoThe comments here are so heavily jargon laden that I have no idea what I was reading.. gto, plo, nlo, then with numbers behind them, etc.. Is there a glossary to understand those terms?
- topicseed 4y agoOf course, there are many poker terminology and jargon lists — https://betandbeat.com/poker/terminology/ https://betandbeat.com/poker/terminology/ is one.
- alpark3 4y agohttps://www.wikiwand.com/en/Glossary_of_poker_terms https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Glossary_of_poker_terms helped for me. gto means game theory optimal, basically an attempt at a mathematically optimal way of playing poker. plo is pot limit omaha, nlo is no limit omaha. Both are variants of poker.
- stephendause 4y agoHere you go: https://www.twoplustwo.com/acronyms.php https://www.twoplustwo.com/acronyms.php I am not sure, but I think: GTO means game theoretic optimal PLO means pot limit Omaha NLO means no limit Omaha
- LordAtlas 4y agoYes, poker enthusiasts tend to use a ton of jargon from the game. There are plenty of glossaries but you need to have a basic understanding of the game to make sense of most of it. Like this: https://www.888poker.com/magazine/poker-terms https://www.888poker.com/magazine/poker-terms The terms you mentioned: GTO: Game Theory Optimal PLO: Pot Limit Omaha (different from NL - "No Limit" Texas Hold'em). "Pot Limit" means your max bet can only be as much money as is in the pot at the time. NLO: No Limit Omaha - That restriction on pot size is not there
- bionsystem 4y agoNL or PLO/PL with numbers means the amount of money you bring on the table, typically 100x the big blind. So NL200 means a games with blinds $1/$2 (blinds are the obligatory bets at the beginning of a game so that there is something to play for). On certain sites the same game would be named NL $1/$2, some players might refer to it as 1/2 NL (pronounce one-two NL), but it's the same NL200 (sometimes 200NL) game. In limit games (with fixed bets) you would usually give the amount of the blinds. And some games have more complicated betting structures, for example with antes, but let's not get into that.
- fierro 4y agolots of misinformation here about the current state of play with respect to GTO. If you're interested in understanding the principles of GTO and how amateurs currently leverage it check out the Finding Equilibrium youtube channel. Specifically, there's a series where this guy teaches his girlfriend to play poker by building heuristics that generally mimic solver advice. It's a cool way to see how solvers are changing the live poker game; from this relatively basic series you can extrapolate how professionals refine their strategies and heuristics to get very close to solver approval in the majority of situations.
- postalrat 4y agoI dont get it. Hand picking one hand of poker for an entire youtube video to prove your system is good reeks of snake oil.
- yomkippur 4y agothis must be why i see crazy shoves with seemingly turd hands on pokerstars but bad beats on there is roughly 4~5x greater than other places due to sheer volume of players. I don't know I never bothered learning all these things because it felt like it was taking the fun out of it so I mostly just play on feelings/intuition. After I stopped reading theories and books I started to improve massively although I never play on Pokerstars anymore.
- bumbledraven 4y ago> there's a series where this guy teaches his girlfriend to play poker by building heuristics that generally mimic solver advice Finding Equilibrium – The Ariel Chronicles https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pxt-S0nBwOQ&list=PLV0Rs5uYPfcv90bMgyBXiCKYYHp5KGbjb https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pxt-S0nBwOQ&list=PLV0Rs5uYPf...
- paulpauper 4y agoBesides the year in which he lost the $6 million, he says, he has never finished in the red. that's called tail risk. AIG made money every year except 2008. It still makes money.
- stevage 4y agoGreat article. The poem at the end is atrocious though.