Book review: Killer Poker by the Numbers

Yesterday while I had a bunch of down time with an inoperable computer, I took the opportunity to read one of my newest acquisitions, Tony Guerrera's Killer Poker by the Numbers.

I don't do many book reviews here. The two most prominent reasons for this are (1) I have a nasty habit of starting a lot more books than I finish, and generally I think it's unfair to write a critique of a book I haven't read all the way through (though there are exceptions, in which case I state explicitly that I'm reviewing just a particular portion), and (2) my slightly OCD-ish tendencies make me inclined to write reviews that are as long as the books. I want to list everything I like and dislike, agree and disagree with. That's too much work, so I often just don't even bother starting.

But in this instance, I don't have any trouble writing a generalized, summary review. I didn't hate this book, but I also didn't get anything out of it.

The basic idea is that he walks you through a bunch of poker situations of increasing complexity. With each one, he shows you how to estimate a range of hands that your opponent(s) might have, count the number of different card combinations that could make each of those possible hands, guess at an opponent's likely response to your decision to call or raise, figure out the various possible outcomes of the hand with their associated probabilities and the size of the resulting pot you will win or lose, then put all of those elements together mathematically to reach a conclusion about which move has the highest +EV.

But none of this is new to me. As far as I can tell, there isn't a single original concept here. Yeah, it's reasonably well presented, if you've never worked through this kind of complicated problem before. But once you've done it a few times, there's not much more to learn.

All such exercises have some value in just being able to do them in detail away from the table, with no time pressures. The practical problem comes in being able to translate the kind of theoretical exercise that might take an hour or two to work through into a useful shortcut that you might actually be able to employ in the 30 seconds or so that you typically have to make a poker decision in the real world. That is the gap that I had hoped this book would bridge, an impression that was bolstered by the descriptions of it I read on amazon.com. But it was not to be. I didn't finish the book feeling any better able to apply the math at the table than I was before starting it.

The problem, obviously, comes from the inability to put any decent estimate into what a particular opponent will do in reaction to a particular move that I make. For example, when I need to figure out the probability that a player will fold to a bluff or semi-bluff, I find that I am usually unable to do any better than "more than 50%" or "less than 50%." As Guerrera acknowledges, your overall computation can't be any more accurate than the least precise factor in the equation, so if you can do no better than a fairly wild guess at such a basic parameter as whether an opponent will fold to a bluff raise, it's pretty silly to spend a whole lot of time following an outcome tree to a series of all possible outcomes.

With most poker strategy books, a situation is described, and your options are explained, along with rough estimates of how opponents might react (with different approximate likelihoods assigned to different types of players), and the outcomes that one might expect. Well, KPBTN does the same, but just replaces guesses such as "usually" and "typically" and "often" with numerical estimates, then does EV estimations.

I'm just not convinced that the result is any better than the more traditional and generalized way of discussing hands. The inability to come up with anything more accurate than ballpark guesses of specific opponents' reactions makes the resulting math, well, not a sham, exactly, but not especially useful. When I read through the scenarios, I was able to pretty quickly come up with a list of possible lines of action to take and a gut sense of which ones I thought were most profitable. After Guerrera spends pages and pages slogging through the numbers, his conclusions tended to mirror what I had already decided would be the best approaches to the hand.

In short, for an experienced player who has played enough that pattern recognition is already acting as a shortcut substitute for an explicit, step-by-step, deductive process as to what an opponent has and is likely to do, KPBTN shouldn't be a step backward, but I also think it's unlikely to be much of a step forward. If you've never worked through the hard math of a poker problem decision tree, I think it's probably worth reading this book and forcing yourself through the calculations, because it makes you think explicitly about all of the possible outcomes and their relative likelihoods. That is undoubtedly good brain exercise. I'm just dubious that it will actually improve your decision-making process the next time you have a tough situation to analyze in the heat of battle over the green felt.

Maybe it just comes down to me being more of a "feel" player than a "math" player (which may also relate to why I do so much better live than online). I'm not intimidated by probability calculations (as I hope I've adequately demonstrated in previous posts). It's just that I'm not convinced that anything beyond fairly rudimentary pot-odds math is going to be of much practical help in most poker situations.

Almost two years ago, I wrote this post, in which I included mention of what Charlie Shoten tells himself when facing a poker decision: "I am calm, confident, and clear, and I wait for my best choice to appear after considering all of my choices and the consequences of each. When my best choice appears, I act." If you can do that, I don't think you need Guerrera's book, which basically just gives you the long way of getting to the same destination.

Bad call? No, it was a GREAT call!

So I'm at Mandalay Bay yesterday, and the guy on my left is a hyper-loose-aggressive type. I'd like to switch seats to get him on my right, but the opportunity hasn't arisen to do so yet. He and several others limp in. I find Big Slick in the big blind. It's a hard hand to play from out of position, but that's what you have to do sometimes. I put in my standard raise to $12. The loose-aggressive guy is the only one who calls.

The flop is all blanks. I put in my standard continuation bet, $20 (I think), which, as I predicted to myself, he insta-called. The turn is another rag. I bet again. He raises me all-in, for another $85. Now I have a tough decision. The straightforward analysis is that he figures me (correctly) for two big cards, which the board hasn't helped, and I therefore can't call a big raise. In other words, he doesn't need any real hand at all to make that move. It's one I've done successfully myself on any number of occasions--you're basically playing your opponent's hand (and the advantageous position of acting last) rather than your own.

There were no straights or flushes possible, and the board hadn't paired. I was highly confident that he didn't have much, but the obvious problem is that he could have hit just one pair somewhere, and that would be all he'd need to win a showdown, if I didn't get lucky and catch an ace or king on the river. I was certainly not going to call that big a raise on the hope of 6 outs, so I had to decide whether I thought he had hit a pair. His loose style meant that he could easily have called my pre-flop raise and my bet on the flop with small or medium suited connectors, or with something like a suited A-7, for instance.

The more I thought about it, the more I thought his demeanor was conveying that he had nothing. It was just the classic Mike Caro stuff of being a little too quick to fire that raise, and too forceful in how it slammed the chips in, etc.

I'm not afraid of losing $85, but it feels really silly to lose it on an all-in call with not even a pair, so this was not an easy call. But over the course of a minute or so of thinking, I decided that it was better than 50/50 that he had zippo. Combined with my possible outs on the river in case he had already hit a small pair, I thought it was worth acting on my read of him.

(Side note: I didn't find a lot to like in Charlie Shoten's book "No-Limit Life." But I do find very useful his "mantra": "I am calm, confident, and clear, and I wait for my best choice to appear after considering all of my choices and the consequences of each. When my best choice appears, I act." That is exactly what I was following in this moment. I had considered my choices and their consequences, and the right thing to do just kind of subconsciously emerged to the forefront, and I just needed to muster the courage to take the action that choice recommended. Thank you, Charlie Shoten!)

I called. The river was a 9. He turned over an 8-9, having caught one pair on the river. He had nothing before that. So I was right. I lost the pot, but was bursting with pride for having made the right decision. I showed my AK.

This isn't a bad-beat story. I'm not upset that he caught a lucky break. The story is about the aftermath. Both he and another player that wasn't in the hand started criticizing me for making the call. Between them, they said that it was a horrible call, a donkey move, etc. "You had nothing!" Not true--I had the best hand, you morons! I was way ahead when the money went in, which is all you can do to win in this crazy game. My read was dead-on accurate, and I had the guts to follow through with it.

The other player said, "You had no pot odds to make that call." Uh, excuse me, but aren't pot odds usually calculated for the player who is behind, to decide whether it's worth trying to catch a card to develop his hand into a winner? I already had the winning hand, so "pot odds" are irrelevant to the analysis of whether I made a good call or not. But thanks for revealing that you have no clue what you're talking about!

One other player chimed in with a cogent observation to the bluffer: "If your cards had been face-up, he obviously would have made the call, so he did the right thing." That's a Sklansky-esque analysis: if you made the play that you would have made if you had been looking at your opponent's down cards, you did the right thing. An excellent point.

I have no criticism of the other player's all-in raise here: it was a strong, aggressive move, made on a correct read (or at least I presume so) of my hand. In that situation, it has a high EV because it will usually force the weak but better hand to fold. But it's odd that a player good enough to recognize the value in that bluff couldn't also recognize that I made an even better play. If our roles in the hand had been reversed, I would have told him, "Good call--I just got lucky on you at the end there." But neither he nor the other guy could get past the simplistic conclusion that it's stupid to call a big raise with just ace-high.

OK, guys, you keep telling yourselves it was a bad move on my part. I'm done trying to educate you to the contrary. I'll just keep raking in the big pots the 87% of the time I win that situation.