[WRX]

Bill and Jerrod, I hope that you're still monitoring this thread, even though it's been quiet recently.

I've had lots of thoughts and questions popping up in my mind since I started reading your book, but have waited to finish it before writing anything. It took me a LONG time to work through it all--but I think the patient approach has been rewarded a greater understanding of the game.

Taken as a whole, I believe the book is an impressive achievement, a real landmark in poker writing. You've looked at so many topics that any player who wants to be successful needs to think about--not just questions of how to mix value betting, bluffing, calling, and folding, although study of those questions form the heart of the book. Even though it offers few recipes for play, it's a book that any serious student of poker MUST tackle. And especially, all future authors who hope to write about poker at anything but a superficial level will have to understand these concepts. That's just obvious.

I do feel the need to mention one serious reservation--which is that the book suffers from way too many typos. The errata sheet you've put up only scratches the surface. I hope that for future editions, you'll bring in an editor to proofread the copy carefully. That's not an easy task for a work this technical.

While probably every chapter led to questions in my mind about practical application to playing poker, one topic seems especially important. In the final chapter, you revisit the question of the benefits of aspiring to optimal play, versus the benefits of exploitive play. This may be the easiest-reading chapter of the whole book, but it makes sense only with the background of all that has gone before. You make the vital point that while optimal strategies are elusive and difficult to ascertain (and don't even exist in any rigorous sense in multi-player games), not all suboptimal strategies give up the same value to superior opposition. A balanced strategy remains unexploitable, so that opponents' potential edge against that strategy is limited. You advance this as an argument for striving to play strategies that are at least balanced.

Furthermore, you show that in many circumstances, an optimal or near-optimal strategy gives the player an edge against non-optimal opposition. Obvious examples would be playing against opponents who put money in the pot with trash starting hands, or who call with near-hopeless hands on the end. On the other hand, there are certainly money-making opportunities for the player willing to put aside the quest for optimal play, and to exploit an opponent's unbalanced play.

These points and others raise what may be the most significant question facing a player who wants to find the best money-making opportunities. For the kinds of games commonly found today (habits and caliber of player), in public card rooms and on the Internet, where does the most money lie? Is it in playing fundamentally sound, "near-optimal" poker? Or is it in recognizing flaws in opponents' play, and altering one's own play to exploit those flaws?

Certainly the answer might differ greatly between games--for example, a game in which all players are experienced and reasonably observant, and capable of counter-exploitation, versus a game full of unskilled, casual gamblers.

Any thoughts on this topic would be welcome.