Introduction to Poker Theory

The following content is provided under a Creative Commons license. Your support will help MIT opencourseware continue to offer high-quality educational resources for free. To make a donation or view additional materials from hundreds of MIT courses, visit MIT opencourseware at ocw.mit.edu. Welcome everyone to the analysis of the 50 theorem. s50 Poker, so this will be Monday Wednesday Friday from 3:30 to 5. I just got a room for a review session on Tuesday Thursday for anyone who needs to catch up a little . here from 4 to 70. I'm Kevin Desmond. I'm going to be the instructor Paul Mendes. The faculty advisor and this is worth three credits of three ages.

The aspect of the game. So this is what I did. I think this is really cool. So Progress Stars gave us our own private league just for MIT people in this course and my goal here is to separate the people who are fairly new from the people who are very competitive because I don't want to, I don't want someone to not do it. pass the course because it turns out they aren't that good at

poker

so I created this thing called the beginner league and these will be daily turbos which means they are quick tournaments and to get the game credit you can cash out.

You can win money in one of them or you can play in 10 of them, so those who are struggling can earn this game credit by playing 10 tournaments, which is roughly equivalent to a 10-hour commitment. Let's get more into the gameplay aspect, so PokerStars created this private league. For us, which is really cool as PokerStars is generally considered the most reputable online

poker

site, that's why we use them so they have two different types of games, so now they have real money games and with play money, um, if you're in the US you can't make real money that way, it used to be something that was a very gray area, it became and then there was a poker site that turned out to be legitimately, like a Ponzi scheme and as a result poker in America is now much more black and white, definitely not good for real money, however their play money scene is quite resilient and that is what we are taking advantage of here.

The PokerStars play money scene is divided into two different things they have as an audience. games that you can go and play for example, play chips against anyone in the world, which is great and you can do that Lane and I recommend you try it just to get used to the software, plus you can do games at home. which is what we're usually going to do, that's what they call their private leagues, so the private leagues at their home games have this showcase and as soon as you log in, you can notice that the MIT poker league Theory and analysis is already at the top, that's not just for us, it's for everyone, anyone in the world who logs into PokerStars and watches the local games, has the MIT League at the top, which I think is really cool, so to access this, I'm going to send Then I gave you guys more specific instructions, the access code of what you need, but to get there, what you need to do is log into PokerStars and click like " on this button, which is a little house to access the games at home. and then you want to join a game and what you do is put the club ID which is 557832, put the invitation code that everyone will have in stellar and then put your real name, preferably the one listed in the Of course, because actually I have to approve everyone who joins the league and I can't do that just based on someone's username and I guess you have to agree to some kind of terms and conditions so let's talk about hand histories so a lot of The analyzes will be based on handistries, which are just text files that PokerStars gives you to the extent that you indicate that you want to save them, so they are kind of a confusing mess of text.

Each line is just one thing that happens and you may or may not get used to reading it depending on how much you are going to look at it, but more importantly, you can use them in all the data analysis programs that we will use, in particular, like poker tracking runs. From that, you'll load thousands of hands into the poker tracker and it will do analysis for you as if it knows exactly what's going on based on that format that's generally considered universal and then in order to visualize. these hands, if you just read them, that's fine, but if you want to show them to other people, I recommend that we use something called universal hand history player, which is a free thing and what it does is just read the hands and play. them, it animates what happened as if you were really seeing it, so the deal with hand histories is that if you're a real money player, PokerStars dedicates hand history databases so that if you want, you can request all your hand histories on any It's time to play for money players, they allow you to capture your own hand histories if you want, but they definitely don't save them, so the reason I'm showing you this now and I'll mail it to you email later is if you lose. your hand history so you don't capture them in time, you'll never get them back, so make sure you capture the hand histories, because we're going to use that for a lot of the analysis that we do, okay, so I'm talking about the league and honestly, I think this league is going to be really great.

Usually the evolution of a player is like he is terrible at poker and then he starts to get good at playing against bad people and then when he really starts. When playing for real, they get crushed again because they're used to playing against other bad people, so this will really help you get used to playing against other people who are playing correctly, which is not something you can commonly learn just from um from I like it. playing with your friends, also, you can, they are playing in these online leagues, you can collect statistics that you could never get playing live and I think this is like that, that's why the live tournament scene is dominated by Pros online is because no live pro can get as many hands or analyze your game the way you can online, it's just not comparable, so this is true even if your only intention is to only play live.

The rest of your life doing this type of analysis would give you the opportunity to learn at a much faster pace and learn things that you would never see live, so every week we will have a major tournament that is basically going to be the same structure maybe a little slower than the ones we do daily, except that they will have real prizes, so Acuña is giving us for his first tournament Beats headphones and Apple TV, speakers and many gift cards, and then for his second tournament they are giving us all those things plus an iPad Air and an iPad Mini but we are not done yet because this class focuses on playing live we are going to finish the class with the live tournament sponsored by octaver on the 31st, which is the day after the last day of the class, so after the League is over and after you guys are good at poker, you will have a chance to play against each other in a live tournament where your prize pool is all Akuna. prizes plus a PlayStation 4 plus an iPad plus a Kindle and plus a GoPro.

I want this to reflect what kind of things an online multi-table tournament player would do, as it normally works, during the week and basically every day. There are an even number of tournaments that will be held every day at peak time and these pros will just work them, get used to the structure and that's where they like to work. your teeth and then on the weekends, that's when you get a lot of cash, a lot of money, a lot of the newer guys that only play poker on the weekends and those are more inventive, like idiosyncratic tournaments, but also the most high. value, that's why I'm producing a tournament structure like this, where most of your tournaments will be very similar to each other, but then the tournaments that really matter will be completely different.

Ellie is relatively different, and that's why I'm doing that. That'll give you an idea of ​​what these guys have to go through, so let's talk turbos. Turbos will allow you to focus on pre-flop decisions, which is the area where I think there is the most to learn among people who are new to this. Poker, basically all the value that you're losing in the tournament is because you make a mistake before the flop, like nobody does well live, because it's really hard to be able to feel comfortable doing what is generally considered. Well, we're going to spend a lot of time pre-flop, but these turbos encourage you to do that kind of thing because in live there's a lot of pre-flop and you're going to do that in online turbos.

Also, no one wants to spend six hours doing a tournament, so I'm making these turbos so you can get in and out in about 45 minutes and then you can start another tournament or you can be done with poker. For that night, you also have the opportunity to play as many tournaments as you want, since it is common for professionals to do something called multi-tabling, which consists of doing several similar tournaments at the same time, if you wish. What you can do for beginners, I'd probably recommend doing just one, but for regular League, do it if you want to do all four tournaments at the same time, moving forward as long as they overlap each other. a little bit, um, okay, so that's the end of the prize league, so the schedule is, uh, let's go over what I call basic strategy, which are like the basic axioms that we're going to use to, um, in order. to analyze the decision-making process in poker, then we will do a pre-flop analysis and we will do a lot of this because this is really where the added value will be. is doing this right.

I think the way we can approach this is a way that I recommend that you learn something complicated, so we're going to break this down into three different sections, like practicing fundamental concepts that are actually being implemented. those Concepts when you have 10 seconds to make a decision and then more advanced stuff, um well, regarding the Concepts, I'm going to call this the basic framework for decision making, it's like not being exploitable how you want to get to it. level when you sit down at a table, all the professionals in the room don't turn around and walk away.

I want to sit at that guy's table. You want to be a slightly winning player long before you become a big winning player so we can let you know the kinds of things we're learning. I'm going to label the sides with this to indicate that this is like a basic concept, learn this before we continue, the advanced stuff is once you've learned how to make things which is how to make pretty things it's pretty broad, we're going to learn like minor adjustments What we can do to get a lot of extra money, like how to work that extra like half a big blind per hour. outside of our opponents, so any real deviation from what we normally do, outside of the metagame, is always fun, as is anything unrelated to the melee decision-making process, such as table selection or fund management. or like deciding whether or not to play like that, it's really fun and that's going to be indicated by this Ace here, okay, so I'm going to label those sides for anything that's considered Advanced and things that you should only do when you get there. the concepts and then a lot of this class will focus on practice, which is how to actually implement these concepts on a day-to-day basis when you play, especially live.

We are not going to have all the information, we are not going to have calculators and we are not going to have as much time to make a decision, so how to apply them in real time? Establish general rules, discover what you can just ignore what you definitely have to do and then some of the psychological issues involved with playing live will be what I call practice, which will be indicated by that poker chip with a piano, anyway. So let's talk about what I'm bringing to the table here, so this course is going to be primarily from my perspective and, the decisions about who I am, I guess, what I'm going to teach. you're here and I like that the similar value decisions I'm making will come from what I consider the appropriate way for someone to play poker, so my experience is that I've been to online multi-table tournaments, not because that's the case. a great professional, but because I sat more than I played, I was definitely a person who didn't play all the tournaments like the um, I told you that the World Series of Poker has like 25 different tournaments, like 10 or Texas Hold'em and Then they have an Omaha tournament and a horse tournament which is a combination of five different games and what is common is that any professional who plays one plays them all.

I find it ridiculous for someone who is really interested in doing something like that. any type of money or career playing poker, so I'm definitely someone who likes, uh, who prefers to identify value and likes to monetize it, anyway, that's the perspective that I'm going to teach this course from, I like Roi, as if it were a Great, as the efficiency metric. I'm going to give some cons, soGenerally, as if you are trying to maximize your ROI to the point where it is below some kind of schedule that you set yourself, because one of the ways to supplement the ROI is by lowering the bets, since generally the lowest bets are games easier, you should have a higher win rate, but that win rate is multiplied by a much lower number, so you will generally move around in bets until you want to have a good ROI, but hopefully above what you If you consider your lowest amount, you can feel comfortable earning on top of it. focus on live tournaments because who knows what's going to happen online, while I think live tournaments are very social, they're very public, everyone knows who wins the live tournaments, so I'm going to teach in such a way which focuses on these types of values, okay, let's move on to some of the concepts and tools that we're going to learn, so we finish learning about who we really are.

What I'm going to do during this class, so let's learn a little bit about poker. The first thing we are going to do is use Poker Tracker for a long time, so I will email exactly how to install this. Poker Tracker has donated. 115 license your product to us and then our next lesson on Wednesday is going to be releasing Joel, teaching us how to use this and how to do it through some of the analysis, okay, another thing that I like to use is a universal player and Lo What this thing does is simply display hand histories, so you'll give it a hand history and a text file that animates it.

It probably does other things, but it's free and this has been around for a while. I'm not even sure if. It's already supported, but it's something I'm used to, so here's what it looks like, you just give it a hand and then it plays what you might have seen if you had actually played that hand, so let's move on to a concept. so stack size, this may seem pretty simple, but we need to make sure we're talking about the same thing when we look at this, so your stack size is the value of the chips in front of you, so it's pretty normal , but we have this thing called effective stack size, which is what we'll typically talk about when we refer to stack, which is the minimum of your stack or the next largest stack after you, and the way to think about this is the number. of chips you could lose on this hand, that's your relevant stack size and how you make decisions will depend on your effective stack much more than anything else, so an example of this would be to say you're in a let's say you're in a heads up situation where you're the hero here in the small blind the big blind has 300 chips and you have some math chips with queens so if you have it if you have 1500 chips and it also says the blinds are like uh or 10 20. you have like 50 times the combined blinds here, so this is quite a different hand than Aces, why say you raise with queens? and then he raises you, okay, so you raised to 60.

He raises you to 200, you raise to 600 and he pushes to 1500. Like your Queens probably aren't that good anymore. As if it matters how many chips you have here. However, if you have 300 chips, you compete with queens and then he pushes you, you can't fold, like you also have aces and that makes your hands, like the way you play, materially different, which is why the size of the token matters in general when you like it. the stack is low, you are playing these two basically identical hands, you are saying that you are only playing in this range, however, when we talk about effective stack, it is the same, even if you have 1500 and he has 300.

If you raise he's going to push you no longer have the opportunity to do that back and forth so you might as well have 300 uh with respect to your decision making here so that's why we're looking at the effective stack because really. It matters who has the fewest chips because that determines when the action will end, so I really like this definition, the most chips you can lose in the hand, is a lot more I think. It's simpler to think of this as a minimal formula, um, okay, and we're almost always talking about effective stack, let's talk about Dan Harrington, so Dan Harrington is, um, he's a player whose style I really like, um, his nickname is action, Dan, which um, the consensus is that he just turned himself in because he is considered Mr.

Fundamental, like an aggressive ABC player, so this style of play, this temperament, uh, aggressive is something that is used to characterize basic play styles, so let's take a quick look. Go over what they are, so there are two different axes here. Here is how often you bet, where a bet means you are raising the bets, so you bet or raise and then this is how often you call, or you call a lot or Don't call a lot, you can get a good idea of ​​the type of person someone is because of the box they fill out, so these have names, so someone who is very aggressive you would just refer to them as label, which is like what Dan Harrington is.

Like you, you bet when you have good hands and fold when you have bad hands. Another possible winning strategy is an aggressive and relaxed delay in which you certainly bet when you have good hands, but you will see many cards before giving up. on one hand like you're definitely willing to pay a lot, um, these strict passives aren't pronounceable words, so the community usually came up with different words to describe them, so a strict passive person is weak like someone that you can completely run over it because they fold when they have a bad hand, they check when they have a good hand, like they're like I guess it would be called like rocks like you, you'll never have to worry about taking a big loss. night against these guys, so someone who is tight passive is generally considered to play suboptimally and then loose passive people are described through this icon that I can't remember what it comes from.

I think it might be from an older version of like Poker Tracker or um. maybe it was like in party poker or something, but everyone loved seeing this icon that you could tag people with because a passive and relaxed person is a paying machine, that's what it means and it means that when you have a hand, they will pay. In all your bets, you will extract value from them, but when they have a hand, they are okay with letting you look at your jaws to make a decision on whether, like on the river, you have a hand or not like them.

There is virtually no way these guys are making money in poker like I think they would be in a realistic sample. There is no type of player who can fit into this quadrant and be good enough in any other metric to actually make money in poker. um so in general how we look at this is we would like to call this tag eye as solid ABC so that's how I recommend you play as um the tag players will like it as a quadrant that will be the The player laggard with bigger winners is someone who is very aggressive and plays a lot of hands, he could possibly be a very good winner, it depends on the type of game and then he likes his opponent and his ability to pick spots, but there are many big lag winners there are no a lot of big winners, um weak ones, and there's not a lot of calling machines, loose passive players that aren't big losers, so every time you see this it's a definition of someone who is a complete fish like a big donor to the game and your Your ability to recognize these types of things will help you find good games to play when you see someone doing these types of things.

Anyway, back to the action. Dan, so Dan Harrington is a pretty good poker player. He's been around the corner, won the main event in 1995 when there were like 300 people, has two World Series of Poker bracelets and, um, the One World Poker Tour title, but anyway, Harrington popularized This thing called the M ratio, which was invented by someone else, so the M ratio was invented by this guy, Paul McGrill, who is a backgammon theorist. Apparently one of the best backend players in the world, commentator for the wsob world series of backgammon and WSOP eight file tables anyway, so supposedly really really good at math even by MIT standards, but he made up this thing called The Emory Show, but it never took off until Harrington started doing it.

So Harrington's M ratio is your effective stack divided by the sum of the blinds and the ante, so you'll hear people talk like, oh, he had 10 big blinds or 15 big blinds or whatever to talk about his stack. of tokens, but that has a fundamental problem, it has many different problems, one is that it does not. Um, it doesn't tell the story, so the blinds, so the usual blind levels are like one, two or two, four, where the big blind is just double the small blind, so that's the assumption, but yeah you are in a blind level. that's like 1-3 and then like or three five the number of big blinds you have is not indicative of anything, it's not indicative of how many hands you can see or how much you care about winning a pot before the flop, so use the big blinds are bad, plus once you start having 50 or 100 blinds and you have about 25 empty ones like you have, you basically have half the stack you had before, realistically speaking, just to get the big blind no It doesn't matter counts Andy's aunts at all and that's a big problem referring to it like that, so using M seems to make a lot more sense, so what it basically is is the like percentage of your stack, which is the blinds. and the befores, so it's like how many rounds of poker can you survive if you just fold every hand. um, of course, you're not going to do that, although I think that's what he's actually referring to because he uses M to mean when you have to do a move that's generally not how I recommend you do it.

I think it's more important because it means how important the blinds are to your stack. So the only reason anyone plays a hand of poker is because someone wants to win. blinds like even if you like it even if you have kings you're like you can win the blinds like 99 of the time you'd just do that you really don't like it all the time you want someone to take you on you so the blinds are really driving the process of decision making at least the LDS pre-flop and like what percentage those blinds are of your stack matters a lot if they're like they're one percent of your stack if your m is a hundred, the blinds basically don't matter at all, since anything that happens after the blind will materially affect your decision or if your m is two and the blinds are half your stack, winning that seems really important, you should do what you want.

I can maximize your chances of winning that, so that's why m is a good ratio here and then also for tournaments it makes it a lot easier to talk about hands without having to worry about all the different similar parts of the life cycle. of the tournament, like if you have 1500 chips and it's 100, it's 50 100 lines, you can basically make the same decisions as if you had 10 times more chips at a level that is 10 times higher than the high blinds, it's not necessary like you can split your head and basically make the same decision, you don't need to worry about doing anything different as a result of having more chips, so the Harrington event invented or brought out a bunch of other things that no one even had much use for.

He invented this thing called The Q Ratio, which is the size of a stack divided by the average stack size in the tournament, so I guess you could use this to get an idea of ​​how far behind you are. In the tournament, if your Q is five, you don't need to be as aggressive, but if your Q is 0.2, you have a lot of catching up to do before you're really close to the money. I don't really make decisions based on that. I think the community doesn't like that they never realized anything. I never heard anyone use that, so it came with this thing called effective M, which is more, what makes sense, if you look at M from their perspective, the effective M is your M divided by um, you multiply it by how short is your table or how sparse your table is and gives you the equivalent of the number of 10-player tables.

You could survive, it just means that, let's say you have 10m, you could survive 10 rounds of blinds, but you have three people at your table, you can't survive for another six hours because you actually called the blinds on every other hand. that's what effective m is doing, it reduces your M proportionally, since he's looking at this from the perspective of when you need to start making moves, it makes sense that your M would be reduced if you're shorthanded, but I think in M from the perspective of how valuable it is in terms of blinds, so I don't really use it.

I don't know anyone who actually uses mu cash there, but he invented them and maybe over time they will benefit, so I think. this will be done for today thank you all for a good first conference thank you