TOP: Fundamental Theorem discussion.

[mikechops]

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mikechops[ QUOTE ]
Poker comes down to putting people on a range of hands and playing optimally from there. You need to make correct estimates of the relative probability of your opponents' holding(s) and their likely reactions to your possible actions. Then you select the action that gives you the highest EV. That's fundamental.

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Assigning hand ranges and playing accordingly is a fundamental skill that a player uses to play good poker. But its not a fundamental way of describing what the ideal course of action is.

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Well I wouldn't want to argue semantics with anyone, but I would say that IS a fundamental way of describing the correct decision process for arriving at the ideal action. I think that paragraph says more clearly what we should be trying to do than the FTOP. The ideal action is the one that wins you most in the long run, not the one that happens to be right because you opponent happened to have a particular hand.

Another example. Heads up. AA vs KK. KK raises, AA calls trying to set trap. Flop comes AKx rainbow. Both players end up all-in. Did KK make a mistake? Of course not. If you posted this hand and said you folded KK, people would rightly call you an idiot. You had no way of knowing you were up against AA.

That is the whole point of poker. It is a game of imperfect information. So-called fundamental theorms that don't take this into account aren't fundamental in my book.


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Guess Sklansky was trying to be all sciency by trying to set out principles of poker. So it doesn't feel to poker players that this is what they are doing when they play poker. But I think that it is a reasonable way of describing what optimal play is.

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I disagree. Optimal play is making the best decisions we can with the information available to us. It isn't what we could have done, had we known for sure what the opponents cards were. If we start trying to do that, we may as well try to play as if we know what the turn and river cards are going to be ahead of time too.