Foreword to Matthew Janda's Applications of No Limit Hold-Em

Todays poker is not your grandfathers game. Games have become unimaginably aggressive,

and the level of play by both amateurs and pros has risen dramatically. Today, aggressive betting and

bluffing have become the norm, and plays that were once considered state of the art are common

knowledge. It's argued that the cause of this remarkable transition in both approach and skill level has

been the influx of thousands of online pros competing in tough games over the internet. Increasingly

though, the online/live distinction doesn't hold up today, pros are grouped more usefully by their

poker methodology than by their preferred field of play. The old guard are exploitative players, always

trying to gather enough information on their opponents to stay one step ahead. Increasingly, the highest

limits of online play have been dominated by game theory optimal (GTO, or optimal, for short) players

who dont much care what their opponent does and seek to play a strategy designed in the long run to

beat any other strategy in the long run.

I started my serious poker career in the spring of 2008 firmly on the exploitative side of the

fence. Since then, Ive traversed to the other side and become a champion of GTO play both as player

and teacher, all while competing in the highest-stakes games. In 2012 I was lucky enough to be the

biggest winner in online poker cash games, taking home about $4 million. (I try not to delude myself:

being a winner is primarily skill, being the biggest winner requires a lot of luck.) While I was a

winning pro before 2012, I attribute much of my extraordinary success in the past year to my work on

optimal poker.

For our purposes, an optimal player seeks to find the optimal strategy, which is the strategy

such that any deviation from it breaks even or loses against our opponents best counterstrategy. For

any game, there exists at least one optimal strategy. As a GTO poker pro, my time and effort go to

getting as close to the optimal strategy as possible. Each step along this journeyis called a near-

optimal strategy.1

1For more on this, please read The Mathematics of Poker, by Bill Chen and Jerrod Ankenmann. I guarantee that doing so
 As a poker player I have to prioritize the practical over the theoretical at all times. In other

words, no matter how interesting this game theory stuff may be, I have to ask, How is this going to

make me money? A frequent criticism of GTO play in the poker community is that it isnt particularly

profitable, more specifically that GTO play may be useful in minimizing losses against excellent

players,and it fails to win significantly against weaker players. A version of this argument is made by

David Sklansky in his classic Theory of Poker:

Game theory cannot replace sound judgment. It should only be used when you think your

opponent's judgment is as good as or better than yours or when you simply dont know your

opponent. Furthermore, game theory can be used accurately to bluff or call a possible bluff

only in a situation where the bettor obviously either has the best hand or is bluffing.2 (189)

The argument will become clearer through exampleusing a simple game were all familiar

with: Rock, Paper, Scissors (RPS). A simple thought experiment should allow you to find the optimal

strategy for RPS in just a few minutes. Imagine that before each throw, you had to write down on a slip

of paper the frequency with which you would throw out rock, paper, or scissorsand then hand this

slip of paper to your opponent. For example, rock half the time, paper half the time, and scissors never.

Since your opponent now knows your strategy is to never play scissors, hell never play rock, and of

his remaining choices paper is superior since it always breaks even or wins, while rock breaks even or

loses. More generally, anytime our opponent knows that our frequencies are out of balance, we make it

easy for him to pick a specific throw that will beat us in the long run.

Consequently, the optimal strategy for RPS must make all of our frequencies equal in order to

will deepen your understanding of Applications.

2After corresponding with David Sklansky, I was informed that I had misinterpreted his argument and that he meant the quoted passage
to only apply to heads up draw games on the river when the card removal effects were minor, as well as to apply to abstract games (such
as the toy games in books like Mathematics of Poker. However, David said that this passage has been frequently misinterpreted and he
consented to have me use the passage here in order to clear up the misunderstanding of his text.
defend against an opponent who knows our strategytherefore, playing rock, paper and scissors one

third each is the optimal strategy. A funny feature of RPSs optimal strategy is that any strategy played

against it will have an expected value (EV) of 0. Even the most exploitable strategies for example,

always rockbreak even against the optimal strategy.3 If the optimal strategy in poker is like the

optimal strategy in RPS and breaks even against all, or many, of our opponents counterstrategies, then,

it can be argued, game theory should never replace our judgment. We play poker to win, and any sound

poker strategy should aim to give us an expectation in excess of the rake.

Lets think about one more simple game: tic-tac-toe (TTT). TTT is a game of complete

information, which means we can see all of our opponents past moves. Any competent TTT player

knows that games between two good players will always end in a draw. But lets say we open with an

X in the center and our opponent responds mistakenly with an O in the middle:

Weve already won the game, and our opponent can only avoid a loss if we make a mistake. In

the language of optimal strategies, our opponent has played an exploitable strategy, and if we respond

with:

X O

3 Since the optimal strategy is rock, paper and scissors each one third of the time, and we play all rock, this means well
find ourselves against each throw one third of the time we play our rock. So our expectation is to break even against
rock one third of the time, beat scissors, one third of the time, andlose to paper one third of the time. The wins and losses
expect to cancel out and we break even. Also, feel free to try this by testing any other strategy against the optimal
strategy.
 X
X O
then were playing the optimal strategy. Had both TTT players played the optimal strategy, the game

would end in a draw, which is similar to how we saw the optimal strategy always break even in the

long run in RPS. But unlike RPS, when one player deviates from the optimal strategy in TTT, his

opponent will be able to secure a win. The technical term for a suboptimal strategy that always breaks

even or loses against the optimal strategy is a dominated strategy. My main project as an optimal

poker pro is to eliminate from my game as many dominated strategies as possible.

Chess is an example of a much more complicated game of complete information. Chess is

complicated enough that it has still not been perfectly solved but simple enough that top computers

almost always win against the best humans, and against average human players, the computer always

wins. For the computer, chess is a lot like tic-tac-toe when played against a novice who doesnt see that

his strategy is dominated. In a game as complicated as chess, the optimal strategy will always secure a

victory against even advanced suboptimal strategies.

In my experience poker is a lot like chess, and not very much at all like RPS. Optimal (or near-

optimal) poker will absolutely crush even relatively strong strategies played by intelligent humans,

because even professional players (myself included) employ many dominated strategies.

It turns out that some forms of poker are becoming much like chess. The simplest form of

poker, from a programming perspective, is heads-up limit hold em, and todays best bots routinely beat

world-class human players by a significant margin. More specifically, world-class heads-up limit hold

em pros typically win 1to 5 big blinds per hundred hands (bb/100) against somewhat weaker players,

and the best bots now beat the pros by about the same amount as the pros beat the games for. Its even

possible to calculate how much a bot would lose to an opponents best counterstrategy (although its

impossible to calculate the optimal strategy itself), and the best bots lose to that strategy by about twice
as much as they beat the pros!*4

But even if we play poker with the intention of exploiting our opponents, its often extremely

helpful to know near-optimal play in order to pick an approptiate exploitative strategy, especially if our

opponent is also a strong player . For example, say were playing someone who calls 40 percent of the

time after opening on the button and being 3bet by the big blind. If we have an idea of what the

optimal 3-bet calling percentage is, then this information can be used to encourage us to 3-bet more

aggressively for value (if shes calling too much) or bluff more aggressively (if shes folding too

much). In other words, we can use our best guess of what optimal play is to make adjustments to

exploit our opponents.

In addition,a near-optimal strategy in poker wins against just about any strategy an opponent is

likely to play. This means we can ignore our opponents strategy most of the time and still expect to

have a healthy winrate. If youre an online player who multi-tables, ignoring your opponents strategy

frees up a massive amount of attention.

At least for much of the poker-playing audience, GTO poker burst onto the scene via Chen and

Ankenmanns The Mathematics of Poker.5 But this text differs significantly in its approach from

Applications, not least because upon opening Mathematics, youll be confronted by equations on nearly

every page. More specifically, Mathematics uses toy games (usually simpler poker games that can be

solved) to illustrate theoretical concepts. The advantage of this is that it allows precise solutions for

simple games to be found; but it also leaves the interpretive process to the reader since the games do

4Im referencing the results of the heads-up limit hold em bots fielded by the University of Albertas Computer Poker Research Group.
Their 2007 bot, Polaris, lost by a small margin to two pros. In 2008, Polaris played against perhaps the five best heads-up limit hold em
specialists and won by a small margin. Polaris 2007 was maximally exploitable for around 26 bb/100, and 2008 was maximally
exploitable for around 23.5 bb/100. By 2011, the bot (now called Hyperborean) was only maximally exploitable for 10bb/100 and was
able to beat previous versions for around 2 bb/100. By the end of 2012 Hyperborean was maximally exploitable for only 3.7 bb/100,
although, interestingly, the 2012 bot did not win more from previous versions. Therefore, I conjecture that recent versions of the bot are
likely to beat top pros by about 2 bb/100, the same record as the 2008 version, which narrowly beat top heads-up limit hold em pros. My
thanks to Michael Johansen for this fascinating information.
5 However, three early books that addressed game theory and poker were Winning Poker Systems by Norman Zadeh in
1973, the original version of The Theory of Poker by David Sklansky in 1978; and Poker Strategy: Winning with Game
Theory by Nesmith Ankerny (spelling?) in 1982.
not reflect full-scale poker in many respects.

For anyone but the extremely dedicated and mathematically inclined, formulating a strategy for

full-scale poker on the basis of toy games is going to be next to impossible. Until now, the few

specialists familiar with these concepts have not made them publicly available. And to my knowledge,

Matthew Janda is one of the first to apply these difficult but important concepts consistently to a full-

scale poker game.

The analysis of preflop play in Applications highlights the breadth of Matthews approach.

Were we to search for a hard solution to six-handed preflop play, the problem would be intractable

there are just too many possibilities.6 So instead of going for certainty, this text makes a few

assumptions that seem reasonable and then consistently applies them around the six-handed poker

table. The result is a set of preflop guidelines strikingly similar to my own strategy which Ive arrived

at through playing hundreds of thousands of hands (over many years) at the highest stakes. For most

positions, the differences in my opening ranges and those argued for in Applications are not significant.

Where the differences are significant, Ive found Im either playing exploitatively, or in some cases Im

just making bad plays.

Matthew certainly has not solved the game; in fact, he wont even try to, because hes wise

enough to know that the attempt is currently impossible. Instead, Matt has taken various principles that

must necessarily apply to the full game and added to those principles some very smart assumptions that

allow him to erect a unified GTO framework for six-max no-limit hold em from preflop to river.

Armed with this framework and some software to aid him with the combinatorics, Matthew has been

able to construct a robust set of strategic guidelines for six-max no limit hold em which, if followed

thoughtfully, should yield a substantial winrate even against stiff opposition. My game has improved

6 Michael Johansen, of the University of Albertas Computer Poker Research group, informed me that heads-up limit hold
em has 10^14 decisions in the game, and heads-up limit hold em is the simplest form of poker played widely. Johansen
added, Naively computing a Nash equilibrium for the game would take over 10,000 terabytes of RAM, and with some
work, you can get it down to only requiring 523 terabytes of RAM. But thats still far more memory than anyone
(except maybe Google) has access to. Six-max no limit hold em is plenty bigger than heads-up limit hold em, putting
its precise solution out of reach at least for quite a while.
substantially due to my reading of Applications, and Im confident a close reading of it will help keep

you ahead of the curve in todays increasingly tough poker games.

Ben Sauce123 Sulsky