Action Dan's mind games

[antisocialgrace]

Is anyone else fed up with Harrington using real-play hands to illustrate strategic concepts, the results of which often completely contradict the play he recommends?

I see it time and again in his books and it's driving me a little mad! I feel like he's playing mind games with me. Sometimes I even wonder if his books aren't a form of convoluted subterfuge to dupe the unsuspecting.

He'll go through the particulars of a hand, break down the likelihood of different hands the opponent might be holding according to his play, calculate the pot odds relative to the probability of each hand then let you know whether to call or fold based on his deductive reasoning.

Seems logical enough and worth the price of the book.

The problem is his deductive reasoning is frequently faulty according to the way the hands played out. The calculations he gets into are complicated enough, the fact he uses exhibits that don't exactly prove the unimpeachable integrity of his convoluted theorems seems to illustrate nothing more than the folly of out-thinking oneself.

eg. he will give an opponent a 15% probability of holding a certain hand (last I checked that means he's wagering 85% against it) then low and behold comes showdown and 15% becomes 100% and you realize your first instinct was right on. All Action Dan has managed to do is make you second guess your first intuition by illustrating how you might go way out of your way to arrive at the wrong destination.

It's a little bit confusing really.

[TheFoxNL]

lol yeah i found it strange when i first saw those hands aswell
saying: you should do this
and then shows the result where you loose

however this actually shows that you cannot predict the exact hand of your opponent at least not 100% shure

thats why you will see the result of loosing sometimes
thats because he shows how to play those difficult situations and what would be the best play in the long run

because ive read those hands and all of those indeed give great odds and the chances of winning isnt always 100%

but thats the issue here
if he would only discuss monster hands where your shure you got the best hand then it wouldnt be a very good book
because anybody can win with a monster

Dan just shows how you SHOULD respond in difficult situations where your not shure you have the best hand
and those actions might not win it at that point
but they will be good in the long run
and make you a better player
because you would be making "the right play"

the fact that you loose in those situations just shows that poker is poker and even tho your making the right call or raise its not always the right one to win that hand

[LuckyLloyd]

Those examples just ram home the fact that you can only make the best decisions possible based on the incomplete information to hand; and if your thought processes leading to your decisions are well - ordered and complex - the results shouldn't really matter.

Results based thinking is bad.

[antisocialgrace]

I hear you and I get that. The thing is a lot of these weren't borderline decisions and it's not like he made slight errors, many were huge miscalculations.

It's very frustrating to discover errors in your own thought process--such as not making the deduction that a huge over bet on a completely uncoordinated junk flop might well mean your opponent doesn't have a very strong hand since a good player would obviously want to get some value for his invulnerable monster--only to find out later after a long-winded speculative analysis he did in fact showdown the set you put him on before Action Dan talked you out of it!!

[HitmanHaydon]

[ QUOTE ]





the unimpeachable integrity of his convoluted theorems seems to illustrate nothing more than the folly of out-thinking oneself.



[/ QUOTE ]


I belive your misplaced anger towards Harrington is due
to the fact that you seem to have been born 150 years too late. [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

[antisocialgrace]

closer to 200.

[fuzz66]

there are a plenty of excellent chess books out there,all of wich will give you the exact correct move in any given situation. maybe you should try it?

[fuzz66]

its the thought process and logic behind these plays thats important. result orientated thinking doesnt work in poker.

[antisocialgrace]

Again I do understand that. I'm simply saying he uses some dubious exhibits to illustrate the way he puts someone on a hand and figures the EV and often doesn't bother with any post-analysis when he's egregiously wrong--I don't mean slightly wrong I mean way the hell off the reservation wrong.

After awhile it gets to be a little tiresome to be toyed with that way.

[Sherman]

[ QUOTE ]
Again I do understand that. I'm simply saying he uses some dubious exhibits to illustrate the way he puts someone on a hand and figures the EV and often doesn't bother with any post-analysis when he's egregiously wrong--I don't mean slightly wrong I mean way the hell off the reservation wrong.

After awhile it gets to be a little tiresome to be toyed with that way.

[/ QUOTE ]

I think people could address the specific example you speak of better than generalities.