Leading a Lab Seminar on Poker, Need Help (XPost Theory)

[Moozh]

Hey everyone,

I have a weekly seminar with my lab group (we focus on Complex Adaptive Systems), where every week we explore a new topic somewhat relavent to our group. For the Friday after next, I've voluteered to lead a discussion on Poker as a complex adaptive system.

The more I've played, the more I see the poker games as a continuously evolving system of strategies. Certain strategies are favored over others, but as those strategies become commonplace (as the winners remain and the losers drop out) other new strategies become available that beat the current 'hot way to play' (think rock/paper/scissors perhaps). This of course is just from my observations.

Anyway, most of the guys in my group haven't played poker, or at best know 5 card draw. I would like to focus on cash NL hold'em, so I feel I need to educate most of them. I could use some help picking out some reading materials for them. You can probably assume everyone is very solid mathematically.

My ideas so far:

Basic Rules
Pot Odds
Fundamental Theorem
Position
Aggressive/Passive and Loose/Tight
Shania
Trading Mistakes

I love the Trading Mistakes section in Ed's NL book. Shania also has an obvious reading that goes with it.

I could really use some help isolating a few pages or a chapter from some of the big books like TOP, SSH, and Ed's NL. Other links to forum posts or other books would be great too. Also, are there any other topics you guys think I need to include for my labbies to be able to contribute to this seminar? Or, feel free to respond if you want to talk about viewing poker as a complex adaptive system.

Thanks for the help.

[carnivalhobo]

how long do you have?

[schwza]

[ QUOTE ]
Hey everyone,

I have a weekly seminar with my lab group (we focus on Complex Adaptive Systems), where every week we explore a new topic somewhat relavent to our group. For the Friday after next, I've voluteered to lead a discussion on Poker as a complex adaptive system.

The more I've played, the more I see the poker games as a continuously evolving system of strategies. Certain strategies are favored over others, but as those strategies become commonplace (as the winners remain and the losers drop out) other new strategies become available that beat the current 'hot way to play' (think rock/paper/scissors perhaps). This of course is just from my observations.

Anyway, most of the guys in my group haven't played poker, or at best know 5 card draw. I would like to focus on cash NL hold'em, so I feel I need to educate most of them. I could use some help picking out some reading materials for them. You can probably assume everyone is very solid mathematically.

My ideas so far:

Basic Rules
Pot Odds
Fundamental Theorem
Position
Aggressive/Passive and Loose/Tight
Shania
Trading Mistakes

I love the Trading Mistakes section in Ed's NL book. Shania also has an obvious reading that goes with it.

I could really use some help isolating a few pages or a chapter from some of the big books like TOP, SSH, and Ed's NL. Other links to forum posts or other books would be great too. Also, are there any other topics you guys think I need to include for my labbies to be able to contribute to this seminar? Or, feel free to respond if you want to talk about viewing poker as a complex adaptive system.

Thanks for the help.

[/ QUOTE ]

you might be getting too ambitious. i'd be surprised if you could convey the idea of trading mistakes / shania. i also don't think pot odds would be interesting from the point of view of your audience.

[carnivalhobo]

agreed, unless this is a multi session course over several hours, i think you are biting off more than you can chew.

Teaching people the rules and basic starting hands and a general overview of postflop play will probably leave enough people scratching their heads.

[holyfield5]

noone will understand *sob* they NEVER understand!!!

[Moozh]

Hmm, perhaps I am being too ambitious. I want to get out some good links/photocopies of articles early next week so they have a few days to read them and digest the contents. The seminar itself is 2 hours, but by then everyone should have at least read the papers. If the papers are too much and we spend our seminar time just talking about basic poker strategy, so be it.

A few people in Theory suggested I drop the NL Cash requirement, which seems like a good idea since the basic concepts carry over to most games anyway.

[jtbrandon25]

Are you from the sante fe institute? im just guessing from your loc. with that math and logic background the first book id recommend would be Mathematics of Poker. The book goes into great detail explaining the theory of strategic games, which as you mentioned earlier, are complex adaptive systems. the book also touches on choosing optimal lines to take that cannot be exploited, even if your opponent knows your strategy. but ill leave it to you to filter what you deem important and appropriate. that seems like a really interesting seminar. as for other books, id have to pick NLHE;T&P articles. depending on the depth of the seminar, id think you could (and possibly should) condense NLHE to the intro of the book; manipulating the pot size and opponents, adjusting correctly to stack sizes, etc. those more broad "rules" of poker seem to lend themselves to talk of adaptive systems imho. good luck, and keep us informed of the progress and content.

jack

edited to say i like the NLHE cash example because of its complexity and popularity. just dont get caught up in the details of rules and situations. at its essence, it is an adaptive strategic game, whose solution depends on a massive number of known (pot size, stacks, your cards, board cards, etc.) and unknown (temperments, tells, hand ranges, etc) variables.

[Ralph Wiggum]

[ QUOTE ]
noone will understand *yay* they NEVER understand!!!

[/ QUOTE ]

[Av9114]

[ QUOTE ]
Hmm, perhaps I am being too ambitious. I want to get out some good links/photocopies of articles early next week so they have a few days to read them and digest the contents. The seminar itself is 2 hours, but by then everyone should have at least read the papers. If the papers are too much and we spend our seminar time just talking about basic poker strategy, so be it.

A few people in Theory suggested I drop the NL Cash requirement, which seems like a good idea since the basic concepts carry over to most games anyway.

[/ QUOTE ]

Way to ambitious, just think there are thousands of people here who talk about this stuff every day and still are no where near being able to describe it in a way that would be useful to you for this class. If you took your pick of 5 people from this board you would probably only be able to analyze at best one pre-flop type situation. I do agree that poker does fit the topic of the lab, but trying to learn something that is fairly complicated with something that is far more complicated is a bad idea. You might be able to do something very simple such as if someone is to tight then it makes sense to counter this by loosening up, but anything beyond this sort of super simplified over generalized type thing is not going to work. But if you did that you wouldnt really need to have them read that much actual poker literature.

[schwza]

yeah, there should be way less poker involved. you don't need to know too much. pick one example of a very specific situation that has evolved or could evolve in some way.

an example would be making a big push in some preflop situation with AK (e.g. a squeeze), then people assuming that you must have AK so they call with 55, so you push in that spot with KK sometimes, etc. that particular example is in sklanksy's nl book, i think. but the point is that you don't want to waste time talking about nl in general, talk about one particular case. like bet-3betting all-in on a draw board, how it's good to do it with sets sometimes, or something like that.