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Yes, this article is shockingly reductionist -- even downright incorrect -- to anyone who knows something about poker. Run back through the 2+2 archives, people

Yes, this article is shockingly reductionist -- even downright incorrect -- to anyone who knows something about poker. Run back through the 2+2 archives, people were analyzing plays based on hand distributions since the beginning. Sklansky's seminal text The Theory of Poker revolves around discussing distributions of hands -- how to guess at an opponent's distribution, how to mix up your own distribution to be harder to read, how to determine optimal (in the game theoretical sense) distributions. TOP was published in 1987. Galfond was 2 years old at that time. Galfond simply took a concept that already existed and popularized it. He was successful at popularizing because of his idol status in online poker circles, circles in which Sklansky is something of a pariah. An entire industry has popped up around taking already-existing technical concepts in poker strategy, dumbing them down, and relabelling them. See the rise of video coaching (cardrunners, deucescracked, et al) and more recently poker coaching (wherein people pay 3-figure hourly fees to have pros analyze their play) for examples. None of these strategy services offers anything new because the math and theory behind poker has not changed. The structure of the game is the same now as it was in the 80s, and the 50s, and 20s, and so on. The vast majority of modern strategy content is a restatement or application of the content from two canonical texts: the aforementioned Theory of Poker, and Chen's Mathematics of Poker. Even most coaches who charge the three-figure fees admit this. It's just that most people don't want to put in the gritty analysis work, hence the coaches stay in business.

mattmaroon 13y ago
Sklansky is a pariah because of every book he's written other than Theory of Poker. Many of them contain advice ranging from mediocre to atrocious. Also he's the kind of tool who says things like "Ken Jennings must be an idiot because he believes in God." Excepting some of the timeline issues though, the article is reasonable. Computer analysis radically changed how poker is played, largely by making it more aggressive. Read some books from guys like T.J. Cloutier written before everyone had Pokerstove. They brag about laying down QQ in spots where anyone with a Monte Carlo sim would know it was idiotic to do so. Most people (even among top professional poker players) can't understand all of Chen's book. Most good poker books go much lower level than ToP, which is useful too, as evidenced by the fact that every time Sklansky himself tries to he says something dumb. If the man who wrote ToP can't apply its concepts correctly, then there's value in other people trying to do so.
- obstacle1 13y ago
  >Sklansky is a pariah because of every book he's written other than Theory of Poker I was thinking specifically of his personal life and how it bled into the strategy forums. For example the whole Brandi debacle, and before that the Sue revelations (remember the pictures with the little girl and the birds?). Many people who read that stuff were so creeped out by it that they discounted Sklansky's strategy talents entirely. So forum people -- who were a sizeable portion, probably a majority, of strategy-conscious online players at the time -- became unlikely to find out that Sklansky wrote at length about 'ranges', creating a gap for someone like Galfond to fill.

mattmaroon 13y ago

Sklansky is a pariah because of every book he's written other than Theory of Poker. Many of them contain advice ranging from mediocre to atrocious. Also he's the kind of tool who says things like "Ken Jennings must be an idiot because he believes in God." Excepting some of the timeline issues though, the article is reasonable. Computer analysis radically changed how poker is played, largely by making it more aggressive. Read some books from guys like T.J. Cloutier written before everyone had Pokerstove. They brag about laying down QQ in spots where anyone with a Monte Carlo sim would know it was idiotic to do so. Most people (even among top professional poker players) can't understand all of Chen's book. Most good poker books go much lower level than ToP, which is useful too, as evidenced by the fact that every time Sklansky himself tries to he says something dumb. If the man who wrote ToP can't apply its concepts correctly, then there's value in other people trying to do so.

obstacle1 13y ago
>Sklansky is a pariah because of every book he's written other than Theory of Poker I was thinking specifically of his personal life and how it bled into the strategy forums. For example the whole Brandi debacle, and before that the Sue revelations (remember the pictures with the little girl and the birds?). Many people who read that stuff were so creeped out by it that they discounted Sklansky's strategy talents entirely. So forum people -- who were a sizeable portion, probably a majority, of strategy-conscious online players at the time -- became unlikely to find out that Sklansky wrote at length about 'ranges', creating a gap for someone like Galfond to fill.