Some family illnesses have kept me from updating as much as I would like to. I have tried to keep up with the forum a bit. I apologize to those who have been checking back on occasion and finding nothing new.

Speaking of which, there is Forum News. The forum has been reopened to new members. If you wish to join the forum (free), please send your name, e-mail address, and the user name you wish to have on the site to:

I-am-allin AT hotmail.com. It is written that way to fool most spam bots. Please replace the”AT” with a “@” before sending.

And thanks for joining our forum. Please contribute hands and thoughts. Also, Terry Borer, one of the authors of the new book Limit Hold’em: Winning Short-Handed Strategies is available on the forum to answer questions about things related to the content of the book.

One of the readers of my book comments that he discovered my book emphasized an exploitative strategy rather than an optimal one. He had just read Mathematics of Poker by Chen and Anekman, and had observed the difference.

I agree. I told him that in my opinion, if you find you must play optimally, you should find another game.

But lets move back a bit. I am not a great expert on poker math, (I do OK for easy stuff) so if I get something wrong, please let me know and I will publish corrections.

“Optimal” strategy is a mathematical construct designed to make you unexploitable. For example, you are calling along in a heads up pot with a straight draw. On the river, a flush card comes. If you never bluff at this, but only bet when you make your hand (if you were in fact calling witha flush draw instead of a straight draw), your opponent observant opponent can simply fold when you bet. If you bet every time a flush card comes whether you made anything of not, you will usually be bluffing too much for the size of the pot and an observant opponent can simply call every time and show a long term profit.

Somewhere in between, depending on a formula that factors in the pot size and your likelihood of making your hand, is an “optimal” number of bluffs. If you bluff at that frequency, you are indifferent to whether your opponent calls or folds. You will still make more money than if you either bet too often or not often enough.

While poker cannotb we solved mathematically, there are several situation where you can invoke “optimal play” and always make more money than if you do too much or too little and your opponent reads you.

This sounds like a pretty good deal, yet I am generally opposed to doing this. Why?

Because my opponents make errors, and I wish to exploit them. By doing so, I abandon optimal play to make plays which I hope in the long run will make extra money for me by taking advantage of my opponents errors. For example, let’s say that in the situation above, you are against an opponent who folds too easily on the river when you bet. You can still play optimally and not care, but if you instead bluff more often than optimal, you will make more money.

Of course, but bluffing more often than you should, you become yourself exploitable to an opponent who sees this and elects to call more often. Thus, you must always be aware of your image, and how each opponent plays, and adjust your play to the specific situation. This is hard work, and you will still get it wrong quite a bit.

The general idea is that you will get it right far more often than wrong, and thus make larger profits (and suffer larger swings). But you will have to know (guess) when to zig and when to zag. Optimal play eliminates all of the guesswork (or opponent reading depending on how you think of it). but at the cost of profit in my opinion.

In fact, if you find yourself in a game in which you opponent s are either so good or so unreadable that you must resort to optimal play to keep from making exploitable error s yourself, then I think you should go get into a better game where your opponents make exploitable errors.