Re: Thoughts on PNL?
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It's BAD??? I disagree, I think PNL is the best NLH book that has been published. Not close here.
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*sigh*
I guess I'll be re-reading PNL soon -- too many good players have found at least SOMETHING that they like in it for me not to have missed something. I think I fell into the classic blunder that so many experienced 2+2'ers have done: I read a part that was jarringly incorrect for my games and I mostly stopped listening. Time to re-open my mind and try it again.
As soon as I finish re-reading Schoonmaker's Psychology of Poker. I promised myself I'd do that almost a year ago, and I've finally gotten around to it.
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The main theme of the book seems to be this whole Pot-to-Stack Ratio stuff. Yes, it's very nice and interesting and all, but stack decisions are such a small part of my typical game that I can't imagine building my strategy around them. Given that 99% of the time you are fighting for a smaller-than-all-in pot, shouldn't we be paying a great deal of attention to these other hands?
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THIS is a great point. Basically, they are all about the "big" pot, where most pots (not 99%, more like 70%) are small pots. And yes, those affect your earn incredibly. That said, constantly thinking about SPR is vital.
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OK; I trust that Matt, Sunny, and Ed will be tackling the small-pot stuff in Vol. 2, so I'll let that part of it go for now. As to the SPR stuff, it seems a bit stilted to me -- it looks like it's trying to quantify the "art" of poker. It's as if some art critic decided to "simplify" the process of judging art:
"What we do is we assign a score to brush technique from 0 to 10. Then we score the use of color from 0 to 10. Finally, we score the creativity from 0 to 20. Add these numbers and you have the overall painting quality, where 30+ is a high-quality painting and 35+ is a master work."
Does this description REALLY help us know good art when we see it? I find the SPR stuff equivalently vague but couched in equivalently mathematical ideas:
"SPR is the ratio of remaining stacks to the size of the pot on the flop. Now, determine how large a ratio of pot-to-remaining stacks could get into the pot while still making your postflop hand a favorite to win at showdown. This is the SPR you should aim for."
Did anybody else notice the vagueness in the middle? You've got 100 BB stacks, you're in the cutoff with QQ preflop and Isura is in the SB. How large should your PSR be to make sure that you're profitable at showdown if all the money goes into the middle and you've got an overpair? Do we really feel confident calculating this number with *ANY* degree of certainty? Even within a reasonable range? If we can't come up with a number for PSR then we can't make our estimates. Unfortunately, there's an even worse problem here: changing our PSR changes our target PSRs. When I make a huge raise, my opponent's calling range changes, both preflop and postflop. When I limp, it changes as well. By changing the PSR, my opponents become more aware of my hand and therefore they respond: I could always get a PSR of 2 with my 100 BB stacks by raising to 33 BBs preflop. Is that going to create a favorable all-in situation for my QQ? The act of manipulating the PSR changes the target PSR as well.
Also, some hands simply don't *work* with PSRs. If I've got JJ in the CO, this hand does not HAVE a "target PSR" with 100 BB stacks, because our most likely "good flop hand" is an overpair. There's no way to get 100 BBs into the middle with nothing but JJ unimproved and be a favorite against a typical opponent, regardless of the size of your PSR: if we limp we'll likely have the best hand preflop, but not if we're getting 30xPot into the middle postflop. Similarly, if we make a huge preflop raise, or we make or call a big three-bet, or we make or call a four-bet, we're either a coin-flip or a HUGE dog going into the flop, and we're definitely a huge dog if we get it all-in unimproved.
That does NOT mean that JJ is unplayable, but if it has *no* PSR, then how does this concept apply?
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OK, I get the point -- "if it's all going into the middle, you should have a plan." Fine. But why are we designing strategies around my betting double-pot on the flop, pot-and-a-half on the turn, and then pot on the river? Do any of us play against opponents who will let us do that on a regular basis? I have a hard enough time getting the live ones to pay off pot-on-the-flop, pot-on-the-turn, let alone a river bet as well. Are your opponents so dazzlingly stupid that they won't notice that you've changed your usual "3/4ths-pot flop, 1/2-pot turn" into "double-pot flop, pot-and-a-half turn"? Mine don't seem to be.
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Yeah, this is fair. I think sometimes you can't aim to put your stack in there, but you should aim to get the pot as big as possible. ie, pot pot pot. if your opponents ARE dumb enough though, by all means charge them.
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How does PSR help us if "getting it all in profitably" is IMPOSSIBLE regardless of our PSR? Are we saying that there are some hands that are inherently "small stack hands," and that any time we get all-in with them we've made a mistake? The PSR fails us with those hands? If so, why wasn't this mentioned in the book?
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reread the REM part, I liked that the best.
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I will. Thanks for the clarification, and I say that to everybody who has responded in this thread: I appreciate your comments.
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