Balancing Bluffs vs Balancing Strategy

[David Sklansky]

Now that the Mathematics of Poker is out there, it becomes necessary to distinguish between the concepts I write about and the concepts in that book. The blurb that is often used about me "greatest poker theoretician" or something like that, has always been slightly in error. Theory has been defined as the opposite of practice. But to be more precise it is necessary to change the word theory to general principles. An irrelevant fine point up to now.

Put another way, much of my stuff concerns advice of a general nature. What factors should you consider before you make your decision? It was less likely to recommend specific plays. However most of that advice did focus on exploiting other peoples mistakes. It did not go into detail about playing in such a way as to avoid being exploited yourself. I advocated mixing up your play a bit against tough players and mixing up your bluffs against most players, but there was no emphasis on "balancing" all your plays in one grand overall strategy. Bluffs maybe, but not anything else.

In other words if a certain hand figured to do better by playing it one way rather than another, I wanted you to realize that. And to play it that way unless decisons were close and/or your opponnents are tough.

In theory however the above approach could conceivably be wrong. It might be better to play a hand differently almost every time from the way it should be played if it was the last hand of your life. For the sake of future hands. The Mathematics of Poker assumes you are taking this approach. And just like using Game Theory to bluff and call bluffs, using Game Theory to balance an overall strategy, practically guarantees a long term win. My experience tells me that the vast majority of games will be beaten for a greater amount if this approach is shelved for my more exploitive approach but time will tell.

All comments welcome.

[mikechops]

In your opinion, how close can the best pros play to optimally (in a game theory sense)? Put another way, when they play each other, what percentage of their game is based on "Don't be a sucker" as opposed to exploiting perceived leaks in each other's games? Does this vary between different games? E.g. is limit HE played closer to optimally than say Omaha PLO at the highest level?

These are vague questions, since nobody knows what an unexploitable strategy is for any form of poker. But I'd love to hear your informed speculation anyway.

[elrudo]

Are you saying your books have possibly taught us a suboptimal/wrong way of playing poker?

[David Sklansky]

[ QUOTE ]
Are you saying your books have possibly taught us a suboptimal/wrong way of playing poker?

[/ QUOTE ]

Yep. As long as you are playing 200-400 or higher.

[SplawnDarts]

This reminds me of a topic that came up in Thoery a week or so ago.

Let's ignore the difficulty of creating a game-theoric type perfect strategy, and just assume you've got one. The question is when you use it vs. other exploitive sub-optimal strategies. I believe that an elegant solution to that very problem, on numerous levels, is represented in the Iocaine Powder Roshambo bot. http://ofb.net/~egnor/iocaine.html

It's got both a game-theoretic strategy (random play) and exploitive ones (history matching & frequency analysis). It then has two levels of meta-strategy to select between them. I'll let you read the details. I believe a similar meta-strategy could be adopted in poker. I don't know, however, the degree to which a player could mentally do the score keeping necessary to actually implement it.

Might be more of a feel thing to really make it happen. But at least knowing what you're trying to approximate could be valuable.

[Jerrod Ankenman]

[ QUOTE ]
Now that the Mathematics of Poker is out there, it becomes necessary to distinguish between the concepts I write about and the concepts in that book. The blurb that is often used about me "greatest poker theoretician" or something like that, has always been slightly in error. Theory has been defined as the opposite of practice. But to be more precise it is necessary to change the word theory to general principles. An irrelevant fine point up to now.

Put another way, much of my stuff concerns advice of a general nature. What factors should you consider before you make your decision? It was less likely to recommend specific plays. However most of that advice did focus on exploiting other peoples mistakes. It did not go into detail about playing in such a way as to avoid being exploited yourself. I advocated mixing up your play a bit against tough players and mixing up your bluffs against most players, but there was no emphasis on "balancing" all your plays in one grand overall strategy. Bluffs maybe, but not anything else.

In other words if

[Jerrod Ankenman]

[ QUOTE ]
Now that the Mathematics of Poker is out there, it becomes necessary to distinguish between the concepts I write about and the concepts in that book. The blurb that is often used about me "greatest poker theoretician" or something like that, has always been slightly in error. Theory has been defined as the opposite of practice. But to be more precise it is necessary to change the word theory to general principles. An irrelevant fine point up to now.

Put another way, much of my stuff concerns advice of a general nature. What factors should you consider before you make your decision? It was less likely to recommend specific plays. However most of that advice did focus on exploiting other peoples mistakes. It did not go into detail about playing in such a way as to avoid being exploited yourself. I advocated mixing up your play a bit against tough players and mixing up your bluffs against most players, but there was no emphasis on "balancing" all your plays in one grand overall strategy. Bluffs maybe, but not anything else.

In other words if a certain hand figured to do better by playing it one way rather than another, I wanted you to realize that. And to play it that way unless decisons were close and/or your opponnents are tough.

In theory however the above approach could conceivably be wrong. It might be better to play a hand differently almost every time from the way it should be played if it was the last hand of your life. For the sake of future hands. The Mathematics of Poker assumes you are taking this approach. And just like using Game Theory to bluff and call bluffs, using Game Theory to balance an overall strategy, practically guarantees a long term win. My experience tells me that the vast majority of games will be beaten for a greater amount if this approach is shelved for my more exploitive approach but time will tell.

All comments welcome.

[/ QUOTE ]

(sorry i'm on a bad internet connection, so a couple of posts have been cut off mid-way)..

One obvious example of this is the "arms race" on the turn in high limit LH games online. What developed there was a tendency after the sequence rc; kbrc; b? on two-flushed boards for people to semi-bluff raise liberally on the turn (including all flush draws, straight draws, and other weaker draws such as small pair+gutshot and the like).

The exploitive response to this that I observed was for original bettors to three-bet liberally, including hands as weak as middle pair in this sequence, because the number of semi-bluffs was just far too high compared to the number of value raises (as these players wouldn't adjust their value raise thresholds to balance). Against a properly balanced strategy, three-betting this liberally is a disaster. This also shows a clear example of why, contrary to some players' assertions, playing optimally or in a balanced manner isn't about equalizing all your opponent's actions -- just the ones that are on the borders.

End the cycle of exploitation!

jerrod

[leaponthis]

[ QUOTE ]
The Mathematics of Poker assumes you are taking this approach. And just like using Game Theory to bluff and call bluffs, using Game Theory to balance an overall strategy, practically guarantees a long term win. My experience tells me that the vast majority of games will be beaten for a greater amount if this approach is shelved for my more exploitive approach but time will tell.


[/ QUOTE ]

Using Game theory to the extent that you suggest above seems to me to be an attempt at fine tuning a very good strategy to ensure optimal play against the very best opponents. The only reason that I can think of to employ such a mythical strategy at present would be if you were playing in the only game in town and everyone in it was an expert. Could be that the 4-8k game in Vegas is such a game but from the take I've been given on some of the players in this game it hardly seems necessary nor practicle to employ nitty, game theoretical perfect poker, if there is such a thing, to win. If there is such a thing as game theoretical optimal strategy in poker it would dispel a lot of the current beliefs about how to win at poker through the use of skills such as game selection, reading your opponent, etc.. I doubt that without mastering these types of skills one could use a math strategy that would win at the highest levels of poker or any level for that matter. Poker skills are necesary for expert play. Game theory is just another tool for the expert. Talent for implimenting these defined poker skills, and not game theory, is the deciding factor on which experts win in the long run, now and in the future.

Your problem is that you can't see past the formula. You and all other math types attack poker as a mathematicl exercise when in fact it's a social exercise. It's a good thing Mason co-authored your books. I believe that he gives more credit to the talent of the player than you do.

leaponthis

[Kimbell175113]

leaponthis,

You misunderstood the section you quoted. What do you think he meant by "more exploitive approach"? But half of what you said was wrong, anyway. The whole point of a game theoretic strategy is that it can't be a losing one, can't be exploited. That's it. The social stuff is part of exploitive play, which loops us back to the beginning of this paragraph.

[waffle]

[ QUOTE ]
leaponthis,

what you said was wrong.

[/ QUOTE ]