Cool idea. I was a professional poker player off/on during my life and came of age during the Sklansky "Theory of Poker" days, which I was pleased to see on the reading list. However, much/all of the reading recs and I imagine some of the theory taught (only skimmed the lectures) is considered very outdated nowadays in the semi-pro and professional scene.
Today, much of poker theory is driven by analyzers that are supposed to implement a practice called "GTO" (game theory optimal). There have been a lot of interesting findings in the last ~5 years that have come from these that I would be surprised to see in a course like this.
To bring someone from completely n00b level to "okay", this course is probably fine.
With a big caveat that GTO is only an optimal strategy against other players who are trying to play optimally.
If you have a table full of clowns who are playing a range of strategies (ranging from being spiteful to just all-ining every hand, to barely knowing how to play poker), you will very quickly go broke with GTO, because you didn't adjust.
This is wrong. If a strategy is actually GTO, then it is unexploitable. Meaning that if you’re playing GTO poker against a super loose player, you may not be maximally exploiting them, but you should certainly not be losing money (in expectation). See Nash Equilibrium
I’m going to answer a different (maybe more helpful) question than the one you asked:
Q: As a noob, what’s the quickest way to become better than breakeven, then better than breakeven including the rake/seat charge?
A: Find a way to play against the worst players you can find, or at least players worse than you. There are likely some tough games near you; avoid those. They might be some soft games; play in those.
Game selection and exploiting opponent weaknesses can easily turn a player with a grasp of the basics into a winning player.
If you mean at the live casino, for low stakes (2/5 or lower), you only need one tip: find a starting hand chart from any strategy site, book, platform, whatever. Follow the chart. It will be very tight out of position and loosen up in position. Do not deviate. If you follow it, you will be the tightest player at almost any table.
You should now be a winning player. Most decisions will be easy. Any post-flop improvements will start to mint money.
Other players will note how tight you are and still give you action. They cannot help themselves.
I was a pro player for a number of years, just to give context to this advice. Start with playing very tightly, be instantly profitable, and add skills from there. And please, please, please, don't talk about poker strategy at the poker table.
I'm not semi-pro but I would expect spending hours with GTO solvers and other poker training software will play a large part in it. The idea is to get quick feedback on how well you are judging difficult situations.
Some people also have to spend a lot of time working on emotional regulation to avoid throwing good money after bad.
You need to be good at deciding which cards to hold and which cards to throw away. You need to know when to get out of a game, and when you should really go out running. Also never count your money while you are playing. You will have time later. But to be realistic the most that you can hope to is to die while you are sleeping.
There’s lots of training sites and a lot of opinions about the best one/way to do this, but I think doug polk’s website upswing poker caters to a broad range of skill levels and is the one I’d personally recommend (warning though the site itself is awfully designed). Nothing is really free out there I’m aware of unless you spend a lot of time discussing things in poker forums, which I wouldn’t personally recommend.
I have a friend who's self-studied up to a pretty good hourly rate within ~2 years. The main thing he does is tons and tons of time studying solver outputs.
noob to "semi pro" isn't the jump you are looking for. To get to a level even remotely close to 'semi pro' would require thousands of hours of playtime.
you just need to grasp the basics.
Phil Gordon's Little Green Book and The Theory of Poker (Sklansky) are common recommendations.
I do own "How to Decided" but haven't read it yet. I will say that "Bets" and "Quit" are both easy reads and are high on value and low on noise. That is, even if you have play poker you'll get something out of both.
I'm currently full-time on a project dedicated to helping people understand how to apply solver strategy to win at live games. I generally avoid the term GTO in favor of "theory-based" since GTO usually refers to equilibrium strategy, and generally you want to study equilibrium but diverge to exploit your opponents.
You can check out my project which includes a preflop trainer at:
I also have a lot of strategy articles that explore how to use solvers to understand live cash games, and I also just started posting Youtube videos that do solver walkthroughs of high-stakes LA cash games.
I'm also doing some unique things like spaced-repetition which none of my competitors do, unfortunately very few pro poker players have heard the term so it's not a selling point to them but HN crowd tends to have heard of it.
In terms of where to start, I'd recommend where the game starts, which is preflop, and incidentally where my product starts, which is a preflop trainer that helps you study equilbrium-based preflop charts using spaced-repetition. It's currently about 90% free with only one set of charts paywalled (BB defend).
I'm actively developing both postflop content and a native mobile app, though the current app is a responsive web app that should work well on your phone.
I also have a Discord with a lot of professional live players that I've attracted via my content marketing and I'm happy to answer followup strategy questions there.
Some good books I'd recommend that are more modern:
Modern Poker Theory by Michael Acevedo
Play Optimal Poker by Andrew Brokos
Grinder's Manual by Peter Clarke (pre-solver but basically the most exhaustive guide to every concept pre-solver)
I went to Vegas for a weekend, won the Wynn classic, and final tabled their main event the following night. Poker is simple, just be the best player at all the tables. How to get there, bankroll management.
> Today, much of poker theory is driven by analyzers that are supposed to implement a practice called "GTO" (game theory optimal). There have been a lot of interesting findings in the last ~5 years that have come from these that I would be surprised to see in a course like this.
Where can one learn about these? Resources on fast moving areas like this is super hard to find if you're not "in the know" already.
A lot of it happens in closed discussions with pros who are running various simulations. Some of it is posted on training sites but a lot is not.
The game these days is all about reverse engineering strategy principles from GTO simulation output. E.g. what general principle causes the solver output to say raise 30% in this spot vs raise 80%? If you come up with a coherent story, you can apply that thought process to new situations. It's a totally different game than it was a decade ago
Just my advice, I would largely ignore the situation, and just take the overall advice that trickles down. For instance, one major advancement of the solvers was figuring out which part of your range to bluff with. There are advantages and disadvantages based on card removal--this is common knowledge now, but nobody had come up with it 15 years ago when I was a pro.
Anyway, it's still not best to play like a robot in live low stakes games, which are probably what you're going to be playing. Exploit the shit out of your opponents. GTO has some good concepts that are easy to implement, but I'd work on studying your opponents and the mistakes they are making, and decide how to capitalize on those mistakes.
If you are going to multi-table online, ignore everything I just said and become best friends with some solver software.
IME mostly in poker forums like twoplustwo.com or reddit or behind training site paywalls, but there are also a lot of bad/minsinformed opinions out there
Is it still possible to become a semi pro? I'm out of a job and if I can make $25 per hour with 500 hours of practice, I'll take my chances. The job market is horrible and when I'm salaried, I'm not making much more anyway (Europe). If anyone would want to mentor me, shoot me an email. I'd love to pay it forward down the line :)
It's possible, but not for most people, and it's far from easy. As others have pointed out on this post, game selection is your best path to success. If you can find games with reasonable stakes that tend to have a fair number of weak players (relative to you), you might profit nicely over time. But finding such games is easier said than done.
Making $25 an hour on average isn't just hard, for the overwhelming majority of players it's impossible, and for the group for whom it is possible, it will take a lot of time, and a lot of hard work to get to that point. And even when you get to the point where you can make that kind of money, variance will still kick your ass from time to time, and it can completely drain you emotionally.
If you do want to try, I suggest you learn how to play the game, find some games (either online or live) and see how you do. Keep track of your results. Reflect on your play. Be honest about why you're winning and why you're losing.
I think poker is best played for fun, and if you manage to learn and play well enough to the point where you're consistently making money, that's a bonus, and perhaps an opportunity to take it to another level.
Nah, I think GP is spot on. I took a quick look at some of the materials and I would say that they're pretty outdated as far as current understanding of the game goes. It's more in line with how people talked about & thought about the game in the boom era (the 00s) or possibly even earlier, to be honest.
If I were teaching poker in a university setting I would generally work with a bunch of toy games to teach concepts of polarization, MDF, indifference, and so on. Those are the fundamentals of poker theory in the modern environment.
I'll give you a concrete example. In lecture five at 15m he starts talking about donk betting, which is when you lead out with a bet on a street into the aggressor from the previous street instead of checking to them to let them bet (for example, you're the big blind, you call a raise from the button preflop, and then when the flop comes you bet directly yourself instead of checking). He mentions that this is unusual, which is true, because normally you would just check and let the person with the betting lead bet into you if you have a good hand, and so the donk bet is typically weak--but then he goes on to say that advanced players may exploit this perception by donk betting with a strong hand knowing you will interpret it as weak, and then you can exploit that line of thinking, etc.
A more modern view of donk betting is this: the "betting lead" is not anything inherent to the game but just an artifact of the range of hands each person has. Typically when you call preflop from the big blind, you'll have a wider range of hands than the person raising preflop, because they can't raise too wide profitably due to players left to act after them, and you get to both close the action & also get better pot odds on your call from the big blind. Not only do you have a wider range of hands, then, but you also lack the strongest hands (AA, KK etc) because you would have reraised (3bet) them preflop. So overall, on most flops, the preflop raiser will have a stronger range of hands and can thus be expected to "take the lead" betting.
But! There are some flops that can neutralize or even reverse this range advantage. The flop 654 rainbow is now better for the big blind than for an early position (EP) raiser, because the big blind will have many straights, sets, two pairs, and pair+draw hands in their range, while the EP player will generally not have these hands. The EP's big pairs (AA, KK etc) are less strong, and some of their other strong hands preflop like AK or AQs have totally whiffed too.
As a consequence, it is correct for the big blind to have a donk betting strategy in this situation--the way the two ranges interact, the big blind is now incentivized to put money into the pot directly, and in fact, if the big blind does not have a donk betting strategy on this flop, the EP player should respond by virtually never betting themselves. The big blind is incentivized to bet frequently with a small sizing and put pressure on EP's overcards; if you have, say, 86s, and you can get a hand like QJo to fold, that's a pretty decent result on the flop, because QJo has six outs to improve to a better pair.
Anyway, sorry that this example was probably hard to follow if you don't play poker, but it's probably illustrative of some of the ways in which poker theory has evolved over the years--more focus on the specifics of range vs range interactions. There are many more complicated and intricate examples on turns and rivers that solvers are very good at finding but may or may not be obvious to humans.
If you're interested in the intersection of Poker and CS I'm building `rs-poker` a rust library for all things poker. The newest version 3.0.0 is nearing completion and it will include an arena where poker agents can compete in holdem simulations. We already include hand range parsing, hand iteration, 5 and 7 card hand evaluation, ICM calculcations, and mote carlo game simulations.
FWIW, although it's closed source and pre-alpha, I've written a poker server (and proof-of-concept client) in Rust. A few people gather together at 5:05pm Pacific and play a tournament a day at https://craftpoker.com The outdated Players' Manual is at https://ctm.github.io/docs/players_manual/friends.html
It's free, no ads, we don't sell (or even collect for the most part) your information, etc.
Back in the day I did some work on fast hand evaluators in C and wrote in Objective-C the first software to deal multi-table poker tournaments (on IRC) on the internet.
That's super cool thanks for sharing. I've been focusing on a single game or smaller. I haven't even thought of tournament play yet doing that multi-player is quite the challenge.
I stopped being interested in poker when I realized that by far the best strategy is simply to play with the worst players you can find. Everything else pales in comparison to simply playing with new players.
I understand that these are people who are willingly coming to play the game and putting up their money but I just don’t feel comfortable intentionally seeking them out to take it from them.
Pretty sure that means I’m simply not cut out to play the game but the theory is definitely interesting.
Avi Rubin also a pretty well known computer security researcher, a pretty big name in voting security, and the founder of ISE (Independent Security Experts).
big name in the JHU CS community (small as that is relative to all else)!
Also of note, at JHU, an "intersession course" is a kind of mini-semester taking place late december-early january (hence intersession, between fall and spring). you may take one or take a break as you please. if you take the course, usually they are cute and interesting as we see here, and count for 1 credit.
I'm not even familiar with the rules but I wonder: If AI can win in Chess and Go should it not win in Poker too? And when you have online poker, it should be possible to ask the AI on your laptop to play it for you? Is that what online Poker players do?
The other answers here are fairly uninformed. AI has been reliably beating humans in NHLE since 2019 with just deep learning [1], modern solvers can play within a small epsilon of a nash equilibrium (a perfect strategy) and are effectively unbeatable.
Referencing a solver while playing (what people call real-time assistance or RTA) is definitely a problem in online poker and is always prohibited. Solvers however play in a fairly predictable way and poker sites can detect if people are using them, though I'd imagine imperfectly. Saying that 99% of online poker is vs AIs is a hilarious overstatement.
Makes me think the AI should know and learn to try to play more like humans, so it doesn't get detected. AI needs to make itself look more stupid than it really is, to win in this game. And perhaps that has been part of Poker always, not "revealing your cards".
But it feels to me a bit awkward that I can't use all the tools that could help me play a better game. But of course rules are rules. In Formula-1 you can only drive a specific type of car. But the car-machine still helps you move faster. The car has a cockpit and I assume it is much computer controlled.
AI is a problem, but unlike Chess and Go, Poker involves each player having information that is unknown to the other players, and actively misrepresenting it.
I've had a very long standing debate with friends about the nature of poker. I'm neither a statistician, game theorist, nor mathematician so I'm very open to being corrected.
My intuition having played recreationally is that the absolute optimal move in poker is relatively trivial to calculate compared to chess/go. That is to say, most experienced players would reach this threshold without too much training.
Obviously, what makes poker fun/interesting is that you are trying to guess the strategies of other players, based on your interpretation of their behaviour, and react accordingly.
If all that is true, then I would submit, that at any sufficiently high (i.e. non beginner) competitive level it probably comes down to luck, since I don't really believe that the second skill described is really learnable.
So when we say "John is the world poker champion for 10 years running and is obviously far better than any mid tier player" are we not saying, essentially, that John is a human polygraph machine. Why, then, is that absolutely astounding skill not being harnessed for something else?
100% possible. I'd ~bet~ that 99% of online poker cash games are adversarially against various forms of AI.
The future of online play will be catered more toward teaching, solving, and tracking hands, rather than playing competitively for profit. I recently started a side project in Rust to do just that, mainly for love of the game and desire to learn the language.
Hoping to release later this year and perhaps productize if it gains traction.
AI has been able to crush heads up (2 player) No Limit Hold Em for a while now and 6 player for a few years. In that time frame though, a lot of other games have gained popularity, and playing a mix of games in the same sessions. AI/solvers are also normally optimized at certain stack sizes (measured in poker as how many big blinds each player has) and do not do as well in very deep stacked games. The trend of playing more games, newer games, and playing deeper will probably continue to stay ahead of AI, and people that study it. I would not play low to mid stakes NLHE online at all on any side at this point personally, just too likely to run into someone using assistance that will crush you easily.
There's been a surge in discussion of online cheating in poker. some online poker players certainly use real time assistance. There's also bots grinding online too.
The prevalence is an open question, though. I imagine it's rather high since there's a huge incentive to cheat.
There have been effectively unbeatable 1v1 limit hold’em bots online for at least 15 years - this has been a problem for a long time. Poker popularity ebbs and flows, we seem to be in a bit of a “boom” period right now.
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Today, much of poker theory is driven by analyzers that are supposed to implement a practice called "GTO" (game theory optimal). There have been a lot of interesting findings in the last ~5 years that have come from these that I would be surprised to see in a course like this.
To bring someone from completely n00b level to "okay", this course is probably fine.
If you have a table full of clowns who are playing a range of strategies (ranging from being spiteful to just all-ining every hand, to barely knowing how to play poker), you will very quickly go broke with GTO, because you didn't adjust.
Q: As a noob, what’s the quickest way to become better than breakeven, then better than breakeven including the rake/seat charge?
A: Find a way to play against the worst players you can find, or at least players worse than you. There are likely some tough games near you; avoid those. They might be some soft games; play in those.
Game selection and exploiting opponent weaknesses can easily turn a player with a grasp of the basics into a winning player.
You should now be a winning player. Most decisions will be easy. Any post-flop improvements will start to mint money.
Other players will note how tight you are and still give you action. They cannot help themselves.
I was a pro player for a number of years, just to give context to this advice. Start with playing very tightly, be instantly profitable, and add skills from there. And please, please, please, don't talk about poker strategy at the poker table.
Some people also have to spend a lot of time working on emotional regulation to avoid throwing good money after bad.
you just need to grasp the basics.
Phil Gordon's Little Green Book and The Theory of Poker (Sklansky) are common recommendations.
"Thinking in Bets" and "Quit" by Annie Duke
https://www.annieduke.com/books/
I do own "How to Decided" but haven't read it yet. I will say that "Bets" and "Quit" are both easy reads and are high on value and low on noise. That is, even if you have play poker you'll get something out of both.
You can check out my project which includes a preflop trainer at:
https://www.livepokertheory.com
I also have a lot of strategy articles that explore how to use solvers to understand live cash games, and I also just started posting Youtube videos that do solver walkthroughs of high-stakes LA cash games.
I'm also doing some unique things like spaced-repetition which none of my competitors do, unfortunately very few pro poker players have heard the term so it's not a selling point to them but HN crowd tends to have heard of it.
In terms of where to start, I'd recommend where the game starts, which is preflop, and incidentally where my product starts, which is a preflop trainer that helps you study equilbrium-based preflop charts using spaced-repetition. It's currently about 90% free with only one set of charts paywalled (BB defend).
I'm actively developing both postflop content and a native mobile app, though the current app is a responsive web app that should work well on your phone.
I also have a Discord with a lot of professional live players that I've attracted via my content marketing and I'm happy to answer followup strategy questions there.
Some good books I'd recommend that are more modern:
Modern Poker Theory by Michael Acevedo
Play Optimal Poker by Andrew Brokos
Grinder's Manual by Peter Clarke (pre-solver but basically the most exhaustive guide to every concept pre-solver)
for Youtube channels, my own :
https://www.youtube.com/@livepokertheory
https://www.youtube.com/c/FindingEquilibrium (Finding Equilbrium, similar content analyzing live games with solvers)
I also recommend the Thinking Poker podcast by Brokos.
(btw, Hopkins Computer Science is also my alma mater so great to see this coming from them!)
Where can one learn about these? Resources on fast moving areas like this is super hard to find if you're not "in the know" already.
The game these days is all about reverse engineering strategy principles from GTO simulation output. E.g. what general principle causes the solver output to say raise 30% in this spot vs raise 80%? If you come up with a coherent story, you can apply that thought process to new situations. It's a totally different game than it was a decade ago
Here is one of the solvers if you are interested: https://piosolver.myshopify.com/
Fwiw there is a significant amount of skill involved in choosing how to run simulations. I think they have some intro videos to help you
Anyway, it's still not best to play like a robot in live low stakes games, which are probably what you're going to be playing. Exploit the shit out of your opponents. GTO has some good concepts that are easy to implement, but I'd work on studying your opponents and the mistakes they are making, and decide how to capitalize on those mistakes.
If you are going to multi-table online, ignore everything I just said and become best friends with some solver software.
Good luck.
Making $25 an hour on average isn't just hard, for the overwhelming majority of players it's impossible, and for the group for whom it is possible, it will take a lot of time, and a lot of hard work to get to that point. And even when you get to the point where you can make that kind of money, variance will still kick your ass from time to time, and it can completely drain you emotionally.
If you do want to try, I suggest you learn how to play the game, find some games (either online or live) and see how you do. Keep track of your results. Reflect on your play. Be honest about why you're winning and why you're losing.
I think poker is best played for fun, and if you manage to learn and play well enough to the point where you're consistently making money, that's a bonus, and perhaps an opportunity to take it to another level.
If I were teaching poker in a university setting I would generally work with a bunch of toy games to teach concepts of polarization, MDF, indifference, and so on. Those are the fundamentals of poker theory in the modern environment.
I'll give you a concrete example. In lecture five at 15m he starts talking about donk betting, which is when you lead out with a bet on a street into the aggressor from the previous street instead of checking to them to let them bet (for example, you're the big blind, you call a raise from the button preflop, and then when the flop comes you bet directly yourself instead of checking). He mentions that this is unusual, which is true, because normally you would just check and let the person with the betting lead bet into you if you have a good hand, and so the donk bet is typically weak--but then he goes on to say that advanced players may exploit this perception by donk betting with a strong hand knowing you will interpret it as weak, and then you can exploit that line of thinking, etc.
A more modern view of donk betting is this: the "betting lead" is not anything inherent to the game but just an artifact of the range of hands each person has. Typically when you call preflop from the big blind, you'll have a wider range of hands than the person raising preflop, because they can't raise too wide profitably due to players left to act after them, and you get to both close the action & also get better pot odds on your call from the big blind. Not only do you have a wider range of hands, then, but you also lack the strongest hands (AA, KK etc) because you would have reraised (3bet) them preflop. So overall, on most flops, the preflop raiser will have a stronger range of hands and can thus be expected to "take the lead" betting.
But! There are some flops that can neutralize or even reverse this range advantage. The flop 654 rainbow is now better for the big blind than for an early position (EP) raiser, because the big blind will have many straights, sets, two pairs, and pair+draw hands in their range, while the EP player will generally not have these hands. The EP's big pairs (AA, KK etc) are less strong, and some of their other strong hands preflop like AK or AQs have totally whiffed too.
As a consequence, it is correct for the big blind to have a donk betting strategy in this situation--the way the two ranges interact, the big blind is now incentivized to put money into the pot directly, and in fact, if the big blind does not have a donk betting strategy on this flop, the EP player should respond by virtually never betting themselves. The big blind is incentivized to bet frequently with a small sizing and put pressure on EP's overcards; if you have, say, 86s, and you can get a hand like QJo to fold, that's a pretty decent result on the flop, because QJo has six outs to improve to a better pair.
Anyway, sorry that this example was probably hard to follow if you don't play poker, but it's probably illustrative of some of the ways in which poker theory has evolved over the years--more focus on the specifics of range vs range interactions. There are many more complicated and intricate examples on turns and rivers that solvers are very good at finding but may or may not be obvious to humans.
source: semi-professional online cash game player
- https://github.com/elliottneilclark/rs-poker
- https://docs.rs/rs_poker/3.0.0-beta.7/rs_poker/index.html
Future Goals:
- Complete CFR bot
- Create training corpus of full ring to heads up play
- Train a model
It's free, no ads, we don't sell (or even collect for the most part) your information, etc.
Back in the day I did some work on fast hand evaluators in C and wrote in Objective-C the first software to deal multi-table poker tournaments (on IRC) on the internet.
I understand that these are people who are willingly coming to play the game and putting up their money but I just don’t feel comfortable intentionally seeking them out to take it from them.
Pretty sure that means I’m simply not cut out to play the game but the theory is definitely interesting.
It's typically older people who have "a system" and are trying to implement it, losing their savings in the process.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avi_Rubin
Also of note, at JHU, an "intersession course" is a kind of mini-semester taking place late december-early january (hence intersession, between fall and spring). you may take one or take a break as you please. if you take the course, usually they are cute and interesting as we see here, and count for 1 credit.
Referencing a solver while playing (what people call real-time assistance or RTA) is definitely a problem in online poker and is always prohibited. Solvers however play in a fairly predictable way and poker sites can detect if people are using them, though I'd imagine imperfectly. Saying that 99% of online poker is vs AIs is a hilarious overstatement.
[1] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aay2400
But it feels to me a bit awkward that I can't use all the tools that could help me play a better game. But of course rules are rules. In Formula-1 you can only drive a specific type of car. But the car-machine still helps you move faster. The car has a cockpit and I assume it is much computer controlled.
No we are not. Poker skills (even at a high level) go beyond live tells.
The future of online play will be catered more toward teaching, solving, and tracking hands, rather than playing competitively for profit. I recently started a side project in Rust to do just that, mainly for love of the game and desire to learn the language.
Hoping to release later this year and perhaps productize if it gains traction.
The prevalence is an open question, though. I imagine it's rather high since there's a huge incentive to cheat.
I'm trying to work on this myself in my spare time.
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