Poker Players

This is a pretty good introductory book for the low-limit hold'em player, but I would not advise anyone to use the strategies in this book for pot limit or no limit hold'em, nor would it be advisable to play at, say, a 15&30 table with some of these strategies. In particular, Warren's notion (p. 70) that AQ unsuited is a better hand in the early seats than JT suited is mistaken. AQu is a good hand, but it doesn't play well when it gets raised preflop, as can happen in an early seat. Most players I think would rather have JT suited since you can either get away from it fairly easily or play it confidently and sometimes win a large pot. AQ unsuited too often has to pay off to AK or KK. AQ is a tough hand to play as Doyle Brunson has said many times. Warren's list of the top 40 hands "Based on Earning Power" on page 195 can also be quibbled with. First of all he doesn't explain how he came up with the "earning power" of the hands. I think we would all dearly love to know that! I know of no authority including David Sklansky who has come out and explained how "earning power" might be reliably figured. In truth, there is no easy formula, as Sklansky explained many years ago in his ground-breaking Hold'em Poker (1976). It is easy enough to figure or "Monte Carlo" which hands will win in a showdown against x number of players, and many people have done that. But to suggest (as Warren does) that, for example, AQ unsuited (he calls it "mixed") has more earning power than 99 is not only debatable but suspect. The same could be said even more strongly about his listing K8 suited before Q9 suited. K8 suited is the sort of hand that can be played with confidence only when the ace of the your suit is on the board. If you flop a king you have a horrible kicker, and if you flop an eight you don't have much of a pair and you have second kicker. And you can't make a straight using your two cards. Sklansky, for example has Q9 suited two whole groups above K8 suited. I think Sklansky is right. Warren must like kings since he has K7 suited above pocket sevens, which again is very wrong according to most authorities including Sklansky. I could continue to quibble with other bits of Warren's advice, but instead I want to zero in on a couple of things he says that reveal his limitations as a poker authority. On page 67 he writes that "... [AK unsuited] is sometimes more valuable to me than a pair of Aces in the pocket." He "explains" (further up the page): "Let's say you win 100 total bets with each hand. With AA you lose 40 bets to other hands for a net win of 60 bets. With AKu...you win the same 100 bets as with AA but because you don't make anything on the flop you throw it away and you lose only 30 bets...for a net win of 70 bets." This implies that AK unsuited is a stronger hand than AA, which is absurd. Notice the fallacy in the assumption that both hands ("Let's say...") win 100 bets. As nearly every hold'em player knows, AA wins many more bets that AK suited or unsuited. Most revealing, however is this from page 87: "Cards can and do run in cycles. The theory of large numbers says so. If you experience a period where [when] it seems like nothing but the low cards are winning the pots, then it is a perfectly legitimate strategy change to start playing low cards." This is a variant on the hoary "gambler's fallacy," in which it is imagined that somehow the cards (or the dice or the roulette wheel, etc.) or any independent event has a memory. What the theory of large number says about independent events is that whatever happened in the past has no effect on the future--except where something is rigged or (e.g.) there is some kind of mechanical defect, like an unbalanced roulette wheel or loaded dice. If you start playing low cards in hold'em all you will do is increase the probability that you will lose money. Warren adds that playing low cards for a while would be good "so that you don't get a reputation as strictly a high card player." This is okay advice, but he adds that "The trick is knowing when the cycle ends and low cards should not be played anymore." Let me give that an exclamation mark! That is like saying the trick is knowing when the run of black at roulette ends or knowing when to quit. Ah, if ONLY we knew such things we would know the future!