[JaredL]

[ QUOTE ]
If you want to attack the terminology, fine.

Just don't state that the strategy is not optimal, when according to the careful definitions offered by the authors, it is.

The complaint is not that the strategy is not what the authors explain it be -- the complaint is that the terminology is confusing.

I am not done yet, but so far, the book does not purport to offer a strategy for HE that a robot could play (btw -- if this is what you want, Blair Rodman has a pretty good system in Kill Phil, and Blair told me that Sanford Wong looked it over on the math front and gave it his blessing, using inputs from Blair and Lee as to what kind of hands people tend to call all-ins with).

I have found that the Chen-Ankeman book is extremely helpful in examining the mathematics behind some of the conventional wisdom surrounding the game of Hold Em.

[/ QUOTE ]

I agree with all of this.

In the books/publications thread I made an argument that their terminology isn't standard and that it makes less sense than the standard terminology (to which Bill replied that it is standard among some computer scientists and other researchers working on 2-person, zero-sum games). I have made that argument, and as far as I'm concerned it could end there in terms of me discussing it with the authors.

The issue I had was with your post. More specifically, "Similarly, you have retards on this forum that confuse "optimal" with "best" (although Daniel Negreanu made the same mistake on the Circuit internet show where Bill C. was interviewed)." Calling people retards because they use optimal in a way that most likely more than 90% of game theorists do doesn't seem appropriate to me. Similarly, while I don't know the quote from Daniel, I strongly suspect that he didn't make any mistake at all.

Once again I wish to reiterate that I too have thoroughly enjoyed the book, and it does a good job of what you say - examining the math behind conventional wisdom (which can be wrong in some cases).