I’ve finally finished reviewing John Beauprez’s PLO QuickPro Manual, though I feel I’ve only begun reading it. It’s an extremely dense and thorough book, which is what you deserve for shelling out $297 though not always what the authors of expensive poker books deliver. If you’re willing to invest the time and effort, this book contains the knowledge to turn you into a sophisticated pot-limit omaha player. You can read my full review for more details.
Also don’t forget that John will be the guest on this week’s podcast, so you’ll get to hear more about the book and the man behind it soon.
Did you conduct the interview with Beauprez yet? If not, then I’ll send some “audience questions” your way.
In particular: I’ve read the free chapter that was made available on this blog. I think it’s fascinating, and very insightful, but I have some specific issues with it. For example, I feel it’s a little too:
1. anecdotal
2. non-systematic and sometimes self-contradictory
Here are some details:
1. anecdotal: the hand examples are nice, and insightful, but I feel some of them don’t have enough solid reasoning behind them, and just show hands that are cool because something worked that one time. One jarring example is the hand where hero flops the nut flush on a T52 monotone flop against an overly-aggressive villain: hero decides to min-donk the flop and call a raise, then donk a weird amount of around one third pot on the turn and call a minraise, and then check the river and call villain’s shove.
The author explains that he was trying to take a creative line to make the overly-aggressive villain spazz, and that the point of showing this hand is to encourage the reader to not be afraid to take creative lines. I respect that, and there are certainly places for psychology-dependent moves. But I can’t help thinking there’s some cherry-picking going on here: the author shows one of the times this approach worked for him, but for all we know, for each time where we stack villain this way, there could have been ten times where this failed to extract any value. After all, even an overly-aggressive villain might get suspicious when an otherwise-solid hero starts taking weird fishy-looking lines.
There are other examples of this kind of hands. I just feel like we’re getting to see the hands where certain moves worked, but not the ones where they failed. This is aggravated by the fact that the author includes almost no hands where hero makes a mistake, or where our moves fail. If the author wants to give an example for a creative spazz-inducing line, I suspect he could have found one that doesn’t rely this much on villain being a spewtard.
2. non-systematic and self-contradictory: it’s clear that the author is trying to make his arguments systematic, similar to the extremely-systematic approach in BalugaWhale’s book “Easy Game”. (It seems to me that the author is upfront about taking inspiration from “Easy Game”.) I appreciate the attempt, and I think it is successful to some extent, but I feel the author didn’t quite make it all the way: his hand analysis seems way too post-hoc and affected by confirmation bias; it seems like he chooses his line by experience and intuition, and then finds the theoretical arguments that support it, while ignoring most or all the theoretical arguments that go against it. A more systematic approach would give arguments first, and then explain for each example why some arguments are more important than others.
One particular example is the issue of choosing between floating and raising. The author spends a lot of time talking about this decision, and gives various rules of thumb for when to prefer one over the other, but when the time comes to give hand examples, he doesn’t seem to obey his own rules of thumb, nor does he discuss why he doesn’t obey them. For example, the author states that we should tend to raise on static boards, and to float on dynamic boards, because on static boards villains will tend to barrel us more and we are somewhat capping our range by flatting, while on dynamic boards villains barrel less, and we get to represent various draws when they come on later streets. I don’t necessarily agree with this rule of thumb, and I suspect that the author doesn’t agree with it as well: he tends to ignore his own rule of thumb in many of the hand examples, and doesn’t really discuss why he ignores it. He tends to discuss this rule of thumb when he obeys it, but not when he ignores it.
I should stress that these problems are not across the board: many of the examples are not anecdotal, and much of the discussion is systematic. But these issues exist in an extent that make it hard for me to completely absorb this chapter, and to understand the author’s ideas as a complete theory rather than a bunch of isolated ideas.
Just wanted to say:
(1) Sorry! The interview’s already been done.
(2) This is a remarkably thoughtful and cogent comment.
With luck John will be hanging around this blog this week; hopefully we find a way to get this in front of him. I imagine he’ll have a good response.
Hey eldodo42 –
Thanks for checking out the free sample. I appreciate your thorough response, and I’m glad you were able to glean some new information from the free chapter. The feedback you provided was taken very seriously, and truthfully, I appreciate you taking the time to objectively share your opinion with me.
I actually would agree with most of what you said. As you stated, my objective for the chapter (and the book overall) was to teach readers how to think their way through a PLO hand, using board texture characteristics and player tendencies as a guideline for choosing the optimal line. I would mostly agree that some of those hands were cherry-picked; you’re correct. Admittedly, most authors don’t want to show hands where they are getting owned or play badly, but truthfully they should (myself included). You’re right, it would be more educational that way.
With regards to being self-contradictory: I would agree with this as well. The trick with writing a poker book is that poker is clearly a game of incomplete information.. And there will always be grey areas, of course. There are general rules that apply (i.e. being aggressive is good and being passive is bad), but contradicting yourself is inevitable in a structure where there are a variety of options, many of which are just varying degrees of +EV. And for that I apologize, but I tried my best to emphasize the structure of good decision making while providing overall guidelines to profitable play.
Overall though, I can’t thank you enough for taking the time to read the free chapter and listen to the podcast. Only wish I received thorough feedback like this more often!
John