Poker Book Review – Killer Poker By The Numbers by Tony Guerrera

So, you’ve played a lot of poker, know your starting hands, know how to read a flop, and know how to read your villains, but you want to kick your higher game up event. How do you do it? If you listen to what Tony Guerrera has to say, you learn the tools to deeply analyze your game. Killer Poker by the Numbers provides those tools. If you are diligent, you will learn how to calculate probability, construct hand analysis charts, learn about compact distributions, and you’ll spend a lot of time poker stoving.

The heart of the book is Guerrera’s “Hand Distribution Model,” (HDM) which he describes as a more generalized case of Harrington’s “Structured Hand Analysis” from the Harrington On Hold’em series. This book is the most serious student of the game, and will likely find their eyes glazing over. However, there’s a bonus for the recreational player too, which I’ll describe below 예스카지노.

It is easy to read, and the totally misses you, the action gets checked around, and you make a continuation bet. How profitable is that play? We all have hunches, but Guerrera demonstrated mathematics, concluding that a 2/3 pot is not profitable against a higher number. Already, in the first few pages, Guerrera was demonstrating all his calculations, laying out his assumptions, assigning them probabilities, and empowering the reader to go through the exact same steps, not simply take it on faith. Very exciting stuff!

After giving us a taste from a very commonly felt dilemma, it goes on to describe the tools on the belt: modified poker charts (courtesy of Mike Caro) and interval notation (to compactly describe a poker hands) are the tools to organize information. The tools to do the basic elements of probability theory: permutations, combinations, and complements. Don’t be frightened, though, because with a little grit, a pencil, and a pad of paper, you can effectively wield these techniques.

With these weapons, you ‘re then ready for the real engine of the book (in my view) – the Hand Distribution Model (HDM). Using Guerrera’s elegant notational system, you can compact your villagers’ use of analytical purposes. As a little taste, suppose you suspect your villain plays any pocket pair. In HDM, this looks like [AA, 22]. If he plays any pocket pair and all goes down to Ace-ten, then it’s [AA, 22] || [AK, AT]. The notation is very elegant. But why is it important? Well, just from looking at that set, you can determine it (once you have seen it), that your villain plays 142 of our possible 1326 starting hands. Thus, you can expect to be about 11% of pots before the flop. Also, if you hit the flop, you can expect to have improved 70 of his 142 hands. If he comes betting out on the flop, there’s about a 50% chance that you’re up against a pair of aces with a decent kicker, and about 5% of the time you’re up against a set of aces.

As Guerrera points out, your distribution of hands may be incorrect for a certain opponent, but by thinking about a range of starting requirements, you should avoid the trap of putting your opponent on the first hand, which is a lazy and perilous approach to post-flop play. Also, if you find your villain actually about 15% of preflop pots, then you probably need to have your hand distribution. Thus, thinking carefully about the probabilities improves your reads! Poker psychology meets poker mathematics, a very satisfying outcome to out of Guerrera’s examples and word problems.

Guerrera then devotes several chapters to exploring the common cases of pre and post flop and what probability has to say about rational lines of play. An entire chapter is dedicated to playing pairs and the next to drawing hands. These are broken down into the possibilites and probabilities once the flop hits, and the implications for play. What are the odds of hitting your set? What about improving to a full house or quads if your villas hits a straight or a flush? The drawing of the common conundrums hands chapter explores, starting with a great explanation for poker, which will probably lead to ruin over the long haul. Basically, your odds of flopping that weird two-pair or miracle boat are so low that you can get enough pot odds or implied odds to justify event filling up in the small blind under most circumstances. Plus, for every ten orbits where you fold the small blind, you’ve saved yourself five big bets, and it’s saved as spendable as a bet won.

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