Thanks for taking the time to write up all this commentary and share it!
seems like you know your stuff. specifically
> agree the word "immense" is misused there, and perhaps this phrase as a whole should be cut out since it's a bit misleading... i guess i was trying to express my naiveness back in the day, but i ended up showcasing that it persists to some extent to the present, which is why i appreciate the comment and opportunity to learn more from smart internet poker people!! :)
> rake is great point, and i was thinking about this quite a bit yesterday while playing these terribly low-capped buy-in games in LA at hollywood park haha ($100 max for $1-3 or $500 max for $5-5 and they like telling everyone to straddle so it's effectively 5-5-10, ugh... guess your short stack point comes in handy here too)
> honored you haven't written any further corrections so i assume the rest of my post wasn't horribly inaccurate, yay :p
I studied the game in some depth around a decade ago (maybe longer than that). Both practical strategy as counseled by experts, and also on a more formal, theoretical level. I have one physical book on the topic - The Mathematics of Poker by Bill Chen and Jerrod Ankenman - and can highly recommend it.
I wasn't really aiming to "correct" you but just give additional insight. It seems like you clearly recognize the impact that luck has in poker, and your points about mental discipline are well taken. (I'm bad at that, and I figure that's mainly why I never saw major success despite my understanding of the math.) It seemed like your intent was to offer fairly basic advice, and I don't see anything really wrong with it (except that in typical situations, a small pair like 44 is at least as playable as the weaker "hands with a value of 10 or higher, for both of your cards" like QTo; and a lot of the time a small suited Ace also has comparable value).
Of course, it would be better to distinguish between strategy in cash games and tournament play, since you mention trying your hand at both; but that's really not as important as the fundamental ideas you present (trying to be aggressive preflop to get heads-up; making sensible bet sizes; understanding how "short" a 15BB stack is with no-limit betting; making continuation bets as cheap bluffs in appropriate spots; not getting fancy against simple-minded opponents).
> low-capped buy-in games in LA at hollywood park haha ($100 max for $1-3)
Oof. Yeah, a shove-or-fold strategy is probably very viable there if people are opening speculative hands to like $12 or more. (And I imagine they will do that, because even if they have a basic understanding and aren't just there to gamble, they aren't going to understand how deep you have to be to make things like 98s profitable.) Of course, if you aren't comfortable repeatedly putting $100 at a time on a 60-40 proposition (plus getting a chunk raked away when you win) then you can't really play live poker for cash. (And I mean 60-40 at the time of betting, based on an expected range - not when the cards are turned up. Your opponents are allowed to have AA sometimes.)
Ha, this will surely keep us busy for a while, thanks very much for that link. Btw, I already played several of your proposed Minigames with my son (8yo), and he was instantly hooked. Nice change from the regular games he insists on playing every night before bedtime. I think both your books are really well thought out and structured. Very encouraging and helpful for amateurs like us. Thanks again!
Regarding the epub: turns out the layout of your pdfs is just fine to read on my e-reader's screen, so the epub definitely isn't crucial. I also quite like the books' clean and simple design.
Yay! Good luck, hope it works out! If the enthusiasm can be channeled, then that's great. The minigames should keep him from getting overwhelmed. But 5 can be hard sometimes, and if focus isn't there yet, just wait a bit and try at 6 :) Thanks for commenting, makes me smile!
Yes I intentionally buried the piece movement explanations after each minigame, trying to keep focus on the sequence of minigames and letting folks skip over the piece movements in case they already knew them a priori.
> agree the word "immense" is misused there, and perhaps this phrase as a whole should be cut out since it's a bit misleading... i guess i was trying to express my naiveness back in the day, but i ended up showcasing that it persists to some extent to the present, which is why i appreciate the comment and opportunity to learn more from smart internet poker people!! :)
> rake is great point, and i was thinking about this quite a bit yesterday while playing these terribly low-capped buy-in games in LA at hollywood park haha ($100 max for $1-3 or $500 max for $5-5 and they like telling everyone to straddle so it's effectively 5-5-10, ugh... guess your short stack point comes in handy here too)
> honored you haven't written any further corrections so i assume the rest of my post wasn't horribly inaccurate, yay :p