Introduction

Poker is an exciting and profitable game.  It's also extremely complicated.  The purpose of this book is to teach you the concepts that lie behind the game of poker, and how that leads to playing poker.  Poker cannot be taught as just a formula of how to play each situation, you cannot memorize what to do with various cards, because every situation is different.  The play depends on the stakes, the position, and the behavior of the other players at the time.  For beginners, we hope to teach you the game of poker, and how to play well enough to do well in average games.  For advanced players, we will teach you the fundamentals behind the game, and how to play in many different situations.  We do not assume that you are always in a structured Limit Hold'Em game against 9 other average opponents.  Rather, we describe how the decision changes for different bet size, for different numbers of people at the table, and for different types of opponents in the hand.  This will give you a huge advantage in unusual situations, and help you understand why certain plays are the right one.  We'll go over common mistakes, how to avoid them, and how to exploit them when your opponent makes them.

In order to play Poker well, you have to understand some mathematics.  We'll go through a tutorial on probability and combinations, and throughout the book we'll justify plays with mathematical analysis.  If you can't follow all the formulas, that's ok, you can still learn to play poker very well, but you'll have to practice more to develop the intuitive feel.  If you can do some very simple math in your head while playing, it will be a big advantage over people who can't.

To play Poker well is extremely difficult; it requires study, mathematics, experience, intuition for other people, good image and acting skills, and great courage.  Many novices want to read a simple prescription of how to play in various situations.  That's entirely impossible - there are just too many situations to describe in poker; even describing the board and hole cards and the way they came out is not enough - you have to describe the betting action, the types of players, the content (is it a tournament? how many chips does each person have?) and the recent history of how people are playing.  Instead, you need to learn a way to think about poker, so you will be able to figure out the right move in all these situations.

We will try to teach you a way to play poker based on Bayesian Estimation and Expected Value.  This sounds difficult, but it is actually very simple, it's just a way of thinking, and it gives you a solid clear way to think about poker.  There's no need to memorize a lot of special cases, you can always figure out what to do using these simple principles.  A lot of poker books go through various special "moves" you can make, like check-raising, slow-playing, check-calling on the river, semi-bluffing, reducing the field, etc.  These are concepts that it's good to be aware of, but there's no need to focus on them too much - they just come out automatically if you are using Bayes and EV.

In each section we'll also discuss applicable details about online poker.  Playing online is the best way to play poker, because it's convenient, you can play multiple tables, the hands come very fast, and there are a lot of bad players.  You can learn much faster and make a lot more money playing online, and in many ways it's actually safer than playing in a physical casino.