Gaining A Title

[peterbirks]

It struck me, as I was pumping away on the cross-trainer, cursing my ever-ageing body and how it's now become a daily struggle simply to maintain stasis, that Flynn, Mehta and Miller (FMM) should not have called their book "Professional No Limit Hold'em". They should have called it "Stack Control in Pot Limit and No Limit poker games".

Then, instead of talking about TPTK hands and the like, they could have discussed "hands that get bad reverse implied odds", "hands that get not-so-bad reverse implied odds", "hands that make their money from implied odds", "fit or fold" hands, etc.

To be honest, I don't think anyone reading this book is going to need lessons on calculating pot odds. This book (the useful part) is all about stack control.

I like taking stuff from books and aplpying it to other areas (which is why I like the Stoxtrader book so much). While I was sitting there and thinking about the now famous Stack-to-pot ratio of 13 and how the "frequent" example that they gave cropped up about one time in many thousand in my NL games, it occurred to me that their writing was actually more likely to be of use in Pot Limit Omaha. Now, here the whole situation described, where you have the Omaha equivalent of TPTK or an overpair, and are OOP to the button, occurs much more frequently.

In other words, take the SPR chapters, ignore the hand examples and think in terms of general principles, and then transfer the argument to PLO, and you have a winner.

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I shall be making my Olympian apperance (once every four years) at the Gutshot on Saturday. Michael Rosen is over from New York and is missing live action now that the clubs in NYC have become harder to find. I rather fancied the Vic or the Empire, but Michael had already been to the Gutshot 9and so had I) and it's not a bad place to get to from Canary Wharf. I can't decide whether to play the tournament ofr the cash game, but I might actually play the cash game. That would be my first live cash game outside of Vegas since around 2001.

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Comments

The Intelligence of Fruit

[real-aardvark.livejournal.com]

Well, nowhere is a bad place to get to from Canary Wharf, is it? Apart, presumably, from the building next door. Or in my case, Bracknell. Which is why I stay in Reading.

There is a logic (indeed, several logics) to this, but it/they is/are too nauseating to explain.

Glad to see the old intellect is still burrowing away in search of a meaning and value that you know is there, even if the authors aren't quite sure where, and bury it in a footnote on page 250 in any case. May it make you money. Intellectual activity, aka the light-bulb over the head going off, rarely does, in my experience.

I think those of us who read books in a specialised subject -- poker being yours of choice, computer languages being mine -- rarely stop to ask themselves the obvious question. Which is, "Who are these people, and why are they writing this?" Rarely, as opposed to the Web equivalent. It truly is a completely different medium. People never read something on the Web and ask themselves, "Who are these people, and why are they writing this?" Thus the phenomenon that is Wikipedia.

Now, obviously, you know the authors of "Professional No-Limit Hold-em." Equally, I know the authors of any decent C++ book going. In either case, I doubt we're on the same social circuit as the authors: you may have met, and even conversed with the PNLHEs, just because poker is a more sociable activity.

However, and without bothering to look up the Amazon ratings, it has to be said that either specialism is rather limited in terms of its popular sweep. As a result, I think, and more than is usual, these people are writing "for themselves," and not for a popular audience. Or even, really, a professional audience. Possibly a small, somewhat closed, group.

It's this kind of book, I've found (and the same seems to apply to a huge range of academic works), that repay the time to read between the lines and to draw your own conclusions; which is never, of course, a bad thing.

What a satisfying thought at which to arrive at 11:00 pm. Now, if only I could introduce the family in the next-door flea-pit to understand that the latest Afghan poppy harvest is spectacularly good, and that Reading is therefore awash with deeply discounted heroin with which to get their whiny little kid to shut the fuck up for the first night in three days, then I would be a contented man.

Sorry, I was going to discuss the various types of fruitarian at some point, but I got distracted by the neighbours. Some other time, perhaps.