The Mathematics of poker by Bill Chen & some dude...

[fabrice dhamma]

This is the most interesting book I had on the subject

[WiltOnTilt]

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"if you want to reach a wide audience"


I never got the impression they wanted to reach a wide audience.

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poor assumption on my part. i thought they wanted to sell books.

[clowntable]

I consider it to be the best poker book I own (I got 30ish, mainly NL)

[Jzo19]

great book ,ive probably learned more about poker in this book than most other books on holdem but i still got many many reads b4 i grasp most of the concepts ..

[johnnyrocket]

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I just started reading this book. I consider myself above average at "poker math" -- specifically EV calc type stuff. I graduated with a comp sci degree so i'm not too foreign to formal math...

I think it's hilarious how many greek symbols and equations they have in first section marked "Basics". I'm understanding the book so far, although I had to re-read a few pages when i got momentarily lost, but I can't imagine how joe-average poker player could possibly understand the concepts starting off in the "Basics" section.

They should have done a better job dumbing it down and/or removing many of the equations/greek symbols/math lingo until at least later in the book. I know being math guys they feel the need to build the "foundation" of ideas so they can build on it later, but if you want to reach a wide audience it's simply not a good strategy to keep people interested. I have one friend who tried to read this book and threw it out 2 chapters in because of all the graphs/equations/and "foreign letters" that people w/o a math background don't understand.

That said I'm looking forward to reading the rest of the book for myself so I can translate it to others.

WoT

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i am in engineering and u said the book is mostly statistics, i cant really think how u expect to not have any of this notation, this is used in almost any statistical calculation

[johnnyrocket]

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exp(2*(300^2)*(1.13333^2/1.5^4)) = 15.929


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Thanks again senor Jerrod.
I understand phi now thanks. And to give a little something back to 2+2 community to calculate the phi of a value in Excel use NORMSDIST function.

I'm still baffled though in at least one spot. I worked out that exp(2.768141347) = 15.929, but the figure in brackets here appears to be equal to 45668.86716, the exp(45668.867169) is massive of course. Am I reading the equation wrong or missing out on a bracket somewhere? [img]/images/graemlins/confused.gif[/img]

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he may have taken the natural log and u worded this a little weird? i dont have a calc in front of me but natural log is the inverse of exp so it would be much smaller, i'll try it on a calc later if i find mine