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Cool idea. I was a professional poker player off/on during my life and came of age during the Sklansky "Theory of Poker" days, which I was pleased to see on the

Cool idea. I was a professional poker player off/on during my life and came of age during the Sklansky "Theory of Poker" days, which I was pleased to see on the reading list. However, much/all of the reading recs and I imagine some of the theory taught (only skimmed the lectures) is considered very outdated nowadays in the semi-pro and professional scene. Today, much of poker theory is driven by analyzers that are supposed to implement a practice called "GTO" (game theory optimal). There have been a lot of interesting findings in the last ~5 years that have come from these that I would be surprised to see in a course like this. To bring someone from completely n00b level to "okay", this course is probably fine.

alexb_ 3y ago
> Today, much of poker theory is driven by analyzers that are supposed to implement a practice called "GTO" (game theory optimal). There have been a lot of interesting findings in the last ~5 years that have come from these that I would be surprised to see in a course like this. Where can one learn about these? Resources on fast moving areas like this is super hard to find if you're not "in the know" already.
- JohnMakin 3y ago
  IME mostly in poker forums like twoplustwo.com or reddit or behind training site paywalls, but there are also a lot of bad/minsinformed opinions out there
- jvans 3y ago
  A lot of it happens in closed discussions with pros who are running various simulations. Some of it is posted on training sites but a lot is not. The game these days is all about reverse engineering strategy principles from GTO simulation output. E.g. what general principle causes the solver output to say raise 30% in this spot vs raise 80%? If you come up with a coherent story, you can apply that thought process to new situations. It's a totally different game than it was a decade ago Here is one of the solvers if you are interested: https://piosolver.myshopify.com/ https://piosolver.myshopify.com/ Fwiw there is a significant amount of skill involved in choosing how to run simulations. I think they have some intro videos to help you
  - JohnMakin 3y ago
    > Fwiw there is a significant amount of skill involved in choosing how to run simulations and sometimes a pretty significant amount of memory - these applications use massive amounts of it
- qup 3y ago
  Just my advice, I would largely ignore the situation, and just take the overall advice that trickles down. For instance, one major advancement of the solvers was figuring out which part of your range to bluff with. There are advantages and disadvantages based on card removal--this is common knowledge now, but nobody had come up with it 15 years ago when I was a pro. Anyway, it's still not best to play like a robot in live low stakes games, which are probably what you're going to be playing. Exploit the shit out of your opponents. GTO has some good concepts that are easy to implement, but I'd work on studying your opponents and the mistakes they are making, and decide how to capitalize on those mistakes. If you are going to multi-table online, ignore everything I just said and become best friends with some solver software. Good luck.
  - waprin 3y ago
    The problem with this advice is that solvers are one of the best ways to understand how to "exploit the shit out of your opponents". Piosolver has several features that lets you emulate how your opponent plays, such as "node locking", that "lock" the game tree node to the strategy you suspect your opponent plays, and shows you how to maximally exploit it. Otherwise, what is your exploitation based on? Certainly some people have great instincts for the game, but it's just untrue that solvers can't help you exploit weaker players. For example, if you're on a given board and a given river and an opponent makes a big bet, if your opponent bluffs too much you should call, if they don't bluff enough you should fold. But the solver teaches you how often they should be bluffing and thus what "too much" or "not enough" even means. This is why I prefer the term "theory-based" to GTO, since the point of studying GTO is not to play GTO but to develop a better understanding of the underlying mechanics of the game.
    - qup 3y ago
      Before solvers people still implemented strategies, so I'm not sure what you mean when you ask what my exploitation is based on. I think GTO is a great way to think about the game. I don't think studying solvers is important to understand the game well, or GTO. When solvers provide an insight, it generally trickles out to the poker community and we all hear about it. It's much easier to digest traditional educational content than to futz around with a solver, and a much better use of time for a new player.
natdempk 3y ago
What would you recommend to bring someone from noob to semi-pro as quickly as possible?
- JohnMakin 3y ago
  There’s lots of training sites and a lot of opinions about the best one/way to do this, but I think doug polk’s website upswing poker caters to a broad range of skill levels and is the one I’d personally recommend (warning though the site itself is awfully designed). Nothing is really free out there I’m aware of unless you spend a lot of time discussing things in poker forums, which I wouldn’t personally recommend.
  - indigodaddy 3y ago
    The Raiseyouredge free course is a good basic/starter course to gain a beginning level competency of modern fundamental strategies of today’s tournament poker. Note that most of these types of courses/sites do mainly focus on tournament poker. Raiseyouredge has an excellent rep, especially in the online scene. https://www.raiseyouredge.com/tournament-masterclass-starter https://www.raiseyouredge.com/tournament-masterclass-starter
- kqr 3y ago
  I'm not semi-pro but I would expect spending hours with GTO solvers and other poker training software will play a large part in it. The idea is to get quick feedback on how well you are judging difficult situations. Some people also have to spend a lot of time working on emotional regulation to avoid throwing good money after bad.
  - milesvp 3y ago
    > emotional regulation to avoid throwing good money after bad I was once interested in going pro, and I landed on some advice that said to go to a poker house and fold every hand for 3 hours. Poker has very high variance, and you can easily have 3 hours of hand shuffled poker and not get a single playable hand. That was when I realized I didn’t have the emotional regulation to play properly, especially, since part of the exercise was to throw away the strongest starting hand even if you are dealt it during this exercise. Also, that was about the time I realized that poker is generally an extremely boring game, with the very occassional periods of high emotion. It did teach me a lot about going on tilt though, it’s very easy to throw away a lot of profit after a big loss.
antisthenes 3y ago
With a big caveat that GTO is only an optimal strategy against other players who are trying to play optimally. If you have a table full of clowns who are playing a range of strategies (ranging from being spiteful to just all-ining every hand, to barely knowing how to play poker), you will very quickly go broke with GTO, because you didn't adjust.
- highfrequency 3y ago
  This is wrong. If a strategy is actually GTO, then it is unexploitable. Meaning that if you’re playing GTO poker against a super loose player, you may not be maximally exploiting them, but you should certainly not be losing money (in expectation). See Nash Equilibrium
  - skulk 3y ago
    This is also wrong. Unexploitable strategies can still be -EV. This video does a good job of breaking it down: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HfuXD0YADIM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HfuXD0YADIM
    - highfrequency 3y ago
      Video sets up a situation where GTO player is bluffcatcher vs nuts or bluff. He has negative EV with those cards in that spot, not negative EV marginally. If a GTO player has negative EV in heads up poker, he is not playing GTO.
  - antisthenes 3y ago
    No, this isn't wrong. You don't understand multi-player poker and I see this meme repeated on many poker forums. It's possible for GTO to be worse than other strategies, based on suboptimal strategies of other players at the table.
    - yunwal 3y ago
      You’re not disagreeing with the parent. They admitted GTO does not maximally exploit suboptimal strategies in their comment.
resters 3y ago
This is a pretty strong claim to make without evidence.
- slkdjfalzkdfj 3y ago
  Nah, I think GP is spot on. I took a quick look at some of the materials and I would say that they're pretty outdated as far as current understanding of the game goes. It's more in line with how people talked about & thought about the game in the boom era (the 00s) or possibly even earlier, to be honest. If I were teaching poker in a university setting I would generally work with a bunch of toy games to teach concepts of polarization, MDF, indifference, and so on. Those are the fundamentals of poker theory in the modern environment. I'll give you a concrete example. In lecture five at 15m he starts talking about donk betting, which is when you lead out with a bet on a street into the aggressor from the previous street instead of checking to them to let them bet (for example, you're the big blind, you call a raise from the button preflop, and then when the flop comes you bet directly yourself instead of checking). He mentions that this is unusual, which is true, because normally you would just check and let the person with the betting lead bet into you if you have a good hand, and so the donk bet is typically weak--but then he goes on to say that advanced players may exploit this perception by donk betting with a strong hand knowing you will interpret it as weak, and then you can exploit that line of thinking, etc. A more modern view of donk betting is this: the "betting lead" is not anything inherent to the game but just an artifact of the range of hands each person has. Typically when you call preflop from the big blind, you'll have a wider range of hands than the person raising preflop, because they can't raise too wide profitably due to players left to act after them, and you get to both close the action & also get better pot odds on your call from the big blind. Not only do you have a wider range of hands, then, but you also lack the strongest hands (AA, KK etc) because you would have reraised (3bet) them preflop. So overall, on most flops, the preflop raiser will have a stronger range of hands and can thus be expected to "take the lead" betting. But! There are some flops that can neutralize or even reverse this range advantage. The flop 654 rainbow is now better for the big blind than for an early position (EP) raiser, because the big blind will have many straights, sets, two pairs, and pair+draw hands in their range, while the EP player will generally not have these hands. The EP's big pairs (AA, KK etc) are less strong, and some of their other strong hands preflop like AK or AQs have totally whiffed too. As a consequence, it is correct for the big blind to have a donk betting strategy in this situation--the way the two ranges interact, the big blind is now incentivized to put money into the pot directly, and in fact, if the big blind does not have a donk betting strategy on this flop, the EP player should respond by virtually never betting themselves. The big blind is incentivized to bet frequently with a small sizing and put pressure on EP's overcards; if you have, say, 86s, and you can get a hand like QJo to fold, that's a pretty decent result on the flop, because QJo has six outs to improve to a better pair. Anyway, sorry that this example was probably hard to follow if you don't play poker, but it's probably illustrative of some of the ways in which poker theory has evolved over the years--more focus on the specifics of range vs range interactions. There are many more complicated and intricate examples on turns and rivers that solvers are very good at finding but may or may not be obvious to humans. source: semi-professional online cash game player
mettamage 3y ago
Is it still possible to become a semi pro? I'm out of a job and if I can make $25 per hour with 500 hours of practice, I'll take my chances. The job market is horrible and when I'm salaried, I'm not making much more anyway (Europe). If anyone would want to mentor me, shoot me an email. I'd love to pay it forward down the line :)
- neio 3y ago
  It's possible, but not for most people, and it's far from easy. As others have pointed out on this post, game selection is your best path to success. If you can find games with reasonable stakes that tend to have a fair number of weak players (relative to you), you might profit nicely over time. But finding such games is easier said than done. Making $25 an hour on average isn't just hard, for the overwhelming majority of players it's impossible, and for the group for whom it is possible, it will take a lot of time, and a lot of hard work to get to that point. And even when you get to the point where you can make that kind of money, variance will still kick your ass from time to time, and it can completely drain you emotionally. If you do want to try, I suggest you learn how to play the game, find some games (either online or live) and see how you do. Keep track of your results. Reflect on your play. Be honest about why you're winning and why you're losing. I think poker is best played for fun, and if you manage to learn and play well enough to the point where you're consistently making money, that's a bonus, and perhaps an opportunity to take it to another level.
  - mettamage 3y ago
    Is it harder than learning how to program? I've played poker a bit and learned being tight aggressive (just some basic strategy, the most "advanced" concepts I learned were polarizing hand ranges, implied odds and having a poker tracker in your games and what all those things meant).
    - neio 3y ago
      I'm assuming you mean learning how to program as a profession, but it's a difficult question to answer. It relies on so many factors, both in terms of the "market" you're in, as well as who you are as a person. Based on the average person that tries to become a professional programmer vs the average person that tries to become a professional poker player, I'd say it's considerably more realistic to become a professional programmer. But again, if you want to find out just play the game and see how you do. Find stakes you can beat and try to move up.

alexb_ 3y ago

> Today, much of poker theory is driven by analyzers that are supposed to implement a practice called "GTO" (game theory optimal). There have been a lot of interesting findings in the last ~5 years that have come from these that I would be surprised to see in a course like this. Where can one learn about these? Resources on fast moving areas like this is super hard to find if you're not "in the know" already.

JohnMakin 3y ago
IME mostly in poker forums like twoplustwo.com or reddit or behind training site paywalls, but there are also a lot of bad/minsinformed opinions out there
jvans 3y ago
A lot of it happens in closed discussions with pros who are running various simulations. Some of it is posted on training sites but a lot is not. The game these days is all about reverse engineering strategy principles from GTO simulation output. E.g. what general principle causes the solver output to say raise 30% in this spot vs raise 80%? If you come up with a coherent story, you can apply that thought process to new situations. It's a totally different game than it was a decade ago Here is one of the solvers if you are interested: https://piosolver.myshopify.com/ https://piosolver.myshopify.com/ Fwiw there is a significant amount of skill involved in choosing how to run simulations. I think they have some intro videos to help you
- JohnMakin 3y ago
  > Fwiw there is a significant amount of skill involved in choosing how to run simulations and sometimes a pretty significant amount of memory - these applications use massive amounts of it
qup 3y ago
Just my advice, I would largely ignore the situation, and just take the overall advice that trickles down. For instance, one major advancement of the solvers was figuring out which part of your range to bluff with. There are advantages and disadvantages based on card removal--this is common knowledge now, but nobody had come up with it 15 years ago when I was a pro. Anyway, it's still not best to play like a robot in live low stakes games, which are probably what you're going to be playing. Exploit the shit out of your opponents. GTO has some good concepts that are easy to implement, but I'd work on studying your opponents and the mistakes they are making, and decide how to capitalize on those mistakes. If you are going to multi-table online, ignore everything I just said and become best friends with some solver software. Good luck.
- waprin 3y ago
  The problem with this advice is that solvers are one of the best ways to understand how to "exploit the shit out of your opponents". Piosolver has several features that lets you emulate how your opponent plays, such as "node locking", that "lock" the game tree node to the strategy you suspect your opponent plays, and shows you how to maximally exploit it. Otherwise, what is your exploitation based on? Certainly some people have great instincts for the game, but it's just untrue that solvers can't help you exploit weaker players. For example, if you're on a given board and a given river and an opponent makes a big bet, if your opponent bluffs too much you should call, if they don't bluff enough you should fold. But the solver teaches you how often they should be bluffing and thus what "too much" or "not enough" even means. This is why I prefer the term "theory-based" to GTO, since the point of studying GTO is not to play GTO but to develop a better understanding of the underlying mechanics of the game.
  - qup 3y ago
    Before solvers people still implemented strategies, so I'm not sure what you mean when you ask what my exploitation is based on. I think GTO is a great way to think about the game. I don't think studying solvers is important to understand the game well, or GTO. When solvers provide an insight, it generally trickles out to the poker community and we all hear about it. It's much easier to digest traditional educational content than to futz around with a solver, and a much better use of time for a new player.

natdempk 3y ago

What would you recommend to bring someone from noob to semi-pro as quickly as possible?

JohnMakin 3y ago
There’s lots of training sites and a lot of opinions about the best one/way to do this, but I think doug polk’s website upswing poker caters to a broad range of skill levels and is the one I’d personally recommend (warning though the site itself is awfully designed). Nothing is really free out there I’m aware of unless you spend a lot of time discussing things in poker forums, which I wouldn’t personally recommend.
- indigodaddy 3y ago
  The Raiseyouredge free course is a good basic/starter course to gain a beginning level competency of modern fundamental strategies of today’s tournament poker. Note that most of these types of courses/sites do mainly focus on tournament poker. Raiseyouredge has an excellent rep, especially in the online scene. https://www.raiseyouredge.com/tournament-masterclass-starter https://www.raiseyouredge.com/tournament-masterclass-starter
kqr 3y ago
I'm not semi-pro but I would expect spending hours with GTO solvers and other poker training software will play a large part in it. The idea is to get quick feedback on how well you are judging difficult situations. Some people also have to spend a lot of time working on emotional regulation to avoid throwing good money after bad.
- milesvp 3y ago
  > emotional regulation to avoid throwing good money after bad I was once interested in going pro, and I landed on some advice that said to go to a poker house and fold every hand for 3 hours. Poker has very high variance, and you can easily have 3 hours of hand shuffled poker and not get a single playable hand. That was when I realized I didn’t have the emotional regulation to play properly, especially, since part of the exercise was to throw away the strongest starting hand even if you are dealt it during this exercise. Also, that was about the time I realized that poker is generally an extremely boring game, with the very occassional periods of high emotion. It did teach me a lot about going on tilt though, it’s very easy to throw away a lot of profit after a big loss.

antisthenes 3y ago

With a big caveat that GTO is only an optimal strategy against other players who are trying to play optimally. If you have a table full of clowns who are playing a range of strategies (ranging from being spiteful to just all-ining every hand, to barely knowing how to play poker), you will very quickly go broke with GTO, because you didn't adjust.

highfrequency 3y ago
This is wrong. If a strategy is actually GTO, then it is unexploitable. Meaning that if you’re playing GTO poker against a super loose player, you may not be maximally exploiting them, but you should certainly not be losing money (in expectation). See Nash Equilibrium
- skulk 3y ago
  This is also wrong. Unexploitable strategies can still be -EV. This video does a good job of breaking it down: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HfuXD0YADIM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HfuXD0YADIM
  - highfrequency 3y ago
    Video sets up a situation where GTO player is bluffcatcher vs nuts or bluff. He has negative EV with those cards in that spot, not negative EV marginally. If a GTO player has negative EV in heads up poker, he is not playing GTO.
- antisthenes 3y ago
  No, this isn't wrong. You don't understand multi-player poker and I see this meme repeated on many poker forums. It's possible for GTO to be worse than other strategies, based on suboptimal strategies of other players at the table.
  - yunwal 3y ago
    You’re not disagreeing with the parent. They admitted GTO does not maximally exploit suboptimal strategies in their comment.

resters 3y ago

This is a pretty strong claim to make without evidence.

slkdjfalzkdfj 3y ago
Nah, I think GP is spot on. I took a quick look at some of the materials and I would say that they're pretty outdated as far as current understanding of the game goes. It's more in line with how people talked about & thought about the game in the boom era (the 00s) or possibly even earlier, to be honest. If I were teaching poker in a university setting I would generally work with a bunch of toy games to teach concepts of polarization, MDF, indifference, and so on. Those are the fundamentals of poker theory in the modern environment. I'll give you a concrete example. In lecture five at 15m he starts talking about donk betting, which is when you lead out with a bet on a street into the aggressor from the previous street instead of checking to them to let them bet (for example, you're the big blind, you call a raise from the button preflop, and then when the flop comes you bet directly yourself instead of checking). He mentions that this is unusual, which is true, because normally you would just check and let the person with the betting lead bet into you if you have a good hand, and so the donk bet is typically weak--but then he goes on to say that advanced players may exploit this perception by donk betting with a strong hand knowing you will interpret it as weak, and then you can exploit that line of thinking, etc. A more modern view of donk betting is this: the "betting lead" is not anything inherent to the game but just an artifact of the range of hands each person has. Typically when you call preflop from the big blind, you'll have a wider range of hands than the person raising preflop, because they can't raise too wide profitably due to players left to act after them, and you get to both close the action & also get better pot odds on your call from the big blind. Not only do you have a wider range of hands, then, but you also lack the strongest hands (AA, KK etc) because you would have reraised (3bet) them preflop. So overall, on most flops, the preflop raiser will have a stronger range of hands and can thus be expected to "take the lead" betting. But! There are some flops that can neutralize or even reverse this range advantage. The flop 654 rainbow is now better for the big blind than for an early position (EP) raiser, because the big blind will have many straights, sets, two pairs, and pair+draw hands in their range, while the EP player will generally not have these hands. The EP's big pairs (AA, KK etc) are less strong, and some of their other strong hands preflop like AK or AQs have totally whiffed too. As a consequence, it is correct for the big blind to have a donk betting strategy in this situation--the way the two ranges interact, the big blind is now incentivized to put money into the pot directly, and in fact, if the big blind does not have a donk betting strategy on this flop, the EP player should respond by virtually never betting themselves. The big blind is incentivized to bet frequently with a small sizing and put pressure on EP's overcards; if you have, say, 86s, and you can get a hand like QJo to fold, that's a pretty decent result on the flop, because QJo has six outs to improve to a better pair. Anyway, sorry that this example was probably hard to follow if you don't play poker, but it's probably illustrative of some of the ways in which poker theory has evolved over the years--more focus on the specifics of range vs range interactions. There are many more complicated and intricate examples on turns and rivers that solvers are very good at finding but may or may not be obvious to humans. source: semi-professional online cash game player

mettamage 3y ago

Is it still possible to become a semi pro? I'm out of a job and if I can make $25 per hour with 500 hours of practice, I'll take my chances. The job market is horrible and when I'm salaried, I'm not making much more anyway (Europe). If anyone would want to mentor me, shoot me an email. I'd love to pay it forward down the line :)

neio 3y ago
It's possible, but not for most people, and it's far from easy. As others have pointed out on this post, game selection is your best path to success. If you can find games with reasonable stakes that tend to have a fair number of weak players (relative to you), you might profit nicely over time. But finding such games is easier said than done. Making $25 an hour on average isn't just hard, for the overwhelming majority of players it's impossible, and for the group for whom it is possible, it will take a lot of time, and a lot of hard work to get to that point. And even when you get to the point where you can make that kind of money, variance will still kick your ass from time to time, and it can completely drain you emotionally. If you do want to try, I suggest you learn how to play the game, find some games (either online or live) and see how you do. Keep track of your results. Reflect on your play. Be honest about why you're winning and why you're losing. I think poker is best played for fun, and if you manage to learn and play well enough to the point where you're consistently making money, that's a bonus, and perhaps an opportunity to take it to another level.
- mettamage 3y ago
  Is it harder than learning how to program? I've played poker a bit and learned being tight aggressive (just some basic strategy, the most "advanced" concepts I learned were polarizing hand ranges, implied odds and having a poker tracker in your games and what all those things meant).
  - neio 3y ago
    I'm assuming you mean learning how to program as a profession, but it's a difficult question to answer. It relies on so many factors, both in terms of the "market" you're in, as well as who you are as a person. Based on the average person that tries to become a professional programmer vs the average person that tries to become a professional poker player, I'd say it's considerably more realistic to become a professional programmer. But again, if you want to find out just play the game and see how you do. Find stakes you can beat and try to move up.