Vegas & The Mathematics of Poker

I am heading out to the airport in a couple hours, can't wait. Should be a blast! I am looking forward to meeting a bunch of the bloggers I have played on line with many times. Hopefully I can hang on the WBPT POY as well. The final tournament is tomorrow at Caesars. Hopefully I can final table that thing and take it down!

I bought The Mathematics of Poker (MOP) to read on the flight. I had to order it direct from the publisher to get it this week. For those of you who don't know, Bill Chen and Jerrod Ankenamn have been working on this book for quite some time. It is definitely a different book than any poker book before it. For those of you interested in Game Theory it is a must.

One paragraph from the intro has really got me thinking. I will blog about this when I get back, but I wanted to put it up here now...

"It is reasonable to look at each poker decision as a two-part process of gathering information then synthesizing that information and choosing the right action. It is our contention that intuition has no place in the latter. Once we have a set of assumptions about the situation - how our opponent plays, what our cards are, pot size, etc., then finding the right action is a simple matter of calculating expectation for the various options and choosing the option that maximizes this."

I don't think anything I have read has thrown me for such a loop since the first time I was reading Sklansky. Its such a simple paragraph, but it says so much. Can you see how this could effect almost every decision at the tables? Poker is a game that no one has even come close to mastering yet. Without fully understanding the concept above, no one could ever even come close in my opinion.


I will definitely be posting more from the book and more on this topic in the coming weeks. I hope it isn't to boring and dry for some of you. It is pretty exciting shit to me, but I am a geek and I am ok with that.