Bright Ideas: Some Recommended Reading

Wanted today just to point to a few items over in the PokerNews Strategy section published this week that I think are especially interesting, for different reasons.

One is Bob Woolley’s lengthy response to the recently-revised Poker Tournament Directors Association rule book, titled “New Poker Tournament Rules You Need to Know.”

Bob (a.k.a. the Poker Grump) highlights 14 of the new additions/edits to rules for comment, serving both to inform readers of the rules and to give us something to think about when judging the changes as positive or otherwise. In most cases, Bob is in favor of what the Poker TDA has done, although there are a couple of exceptions. Check it out.

Another article I enjoyed was Nikolai Yakovenko’s discussion “Game Theory Optimal Solutions and Poker: A Few Thoughts.” It’s another long one, but well worth it if you’re at all interested in learning more about what “GTO” really is and what it has to do with poker.

Nikolai keeps it interesting throughout, and the discussion at the end about three-handed play between Daniel Negreanu, Dan Colman, and Christoph Vogelsang at the conclusion of the 2014 Big One for One Drop is enlightening, not to mention a helpful example with which to highlight some of the article’s main points.

Finally, I also liked Carlos Welch’s article from yesterday titled “Note to Self: If You’re Gonna Lose a Flip, At Least Lose It Right.” Carlos explores an interesting theory in that one, namely that since position is so important in poker, if you’re going to lose chips it is better to lose them to players on your right against whom you’ll have position and thus a better shot subsequently at getting those chips back.

Like the other two articles, there’s some genuinely original thought going on in Carlos’s article as he pursues this idea, the kind of thing that is sometimes hard to come by these days when it comes to poker strategy.

Indeed, for me all three of them feature actual “light bulb” moments. Check ’em out and see if they do for you, too.