Episode 71: Ed Miller on Poker’s 1%

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Ed Miller, whose first first appearance on the show set a new bar for Thinking Poker Podcast strategy content, is back to talk about his new book, Poker’s 1%. Ed and the guys talk about why so many players struggle to think in terms of ranges and frequencies and address some common misunderstandings, plus Ed fields questions from the Twitterverse.

0:30 hello and welcome; nittin’ ain’t easy
17:27 a message from carlos welch
19:09 ed miller on poker’s 1%

38 thoughts on “Episode 71: Ed Miller on Poker’s 1%”

  1. Forming an LLC seems very capitalistic for a couple of wanna-be vegans. Congrats on what you’ve done and what is yet to come.

    Given the way the top 1% is viewed as a derogatory term in popular culture, I half-expected Ed to advocate taxing them and offering a minimum, “living” wage to the other 99% of poker players. Instead, it seems like he has produced an exciting book. I’m up through page 61, but in talking with others who have read further, I have high expectations. Personally, the work it will take to implement his system is daunting. I may not get through it. And I think a similar laziness is behind much of the criticism he mentioned (and Andrew noted on his writing). Complexity hurts. We’re best suited to use shortcuts around this complexity. However, that creates other problems. Just Google behavioral finance. I enjoyed the interview and I look forward to the rest of Ed’s book.

    And we’ve crossed the species barrier, as my dog was eager to know more about Ed’s dogs when I listenedd on my laptop speaker.

  2. So what is the “thinkingpokerpodcast” view on 8+1bbj rake at 1/2?

    Seriously onetime can “someone” (I use this in like someone being anyone on the internet with some knowledge) give a straight answer on such a basic question.

    I do know a lot of pros who “invade” Montreal for the tourney’s refuse to play the cash games here because the rake is too high.

    I understand that if you live in Vegas then taking about the price of the “rake” is meaningless because the rake is so reasonable but for people in other parts of the world it seems like a very reasonable topic of discussion.

    • Guarantee we complain about rake a lot more than your average poker podcast. Have you listened to our Mike McDonald interview? Sorry we haven’t discussed the specifics of a venue neither of us has ever played or even been asked about until this very moment. To give you a short answer now: that’s pretty damn high, but not unbeatably high. FWIW the $1 BBJ isn’t actually rake as long as all of it is eventually returned to players in one form or another.

    • Hey eric, I’m actually headed up to Montreal later this year, any recommendations on casinos up there? Dont know anything about it. Thnx in advance.

      • I appreciate the thoughts on rake. I do find it frustrating how little info there is about it in general. Like what percentage of players can make 20$ an hour at 9$ rake i.e. what are the limits of the game. I know when I play with 9$ rake it feels like you can see the money being sucked off the table. Like 9$ at 30+ hands an hour is like 270$ (sure not every hand is raked) but still that is like one buy in an hour. And on a funnier note I think Phil Ivey thinks “Craps” is beatable. 🙂

        For Raphael.
        The place to play in Montreal these days is called Playgroundpoker.(The casino is everyone’s 2nd option well except maybe for people without a car)
        A bit of a pain getting there. Take the metro(subway)to angrignon Metro and then cab it the first time (Like 15-20$, just say straight over mercier bridge, it is on the right). You can theoretically bus once you know where it is.
        type in playground into twoplustwo

        • Usually not every hand is raked, it’s generally a % of the pot with a cap, so like 10% with an $8 cap would mean that if pots get bigger than $80 no more rake is taken. That’s still quite a lot for a 1/2 game. This can vary a bit on details like whether rake is taken if there’s no flop, whether uncalled bets are raked, etc. Generally the basic structure is posted somewhere next to the dealer, on the table.

          Again, the $1 BBJ drop is not rake. It’s more like a forced 0-EV wager. Well, roughly 0, you probably have a slightly better chance of hitting it in small stakes games because more hands go to showdown.

          • I would love 8+1bbj rake at 1/2.
            The only low stakes game locally (Auckland) is a 1/3 game with max $300 buy in and 10% cap. :*(
            It nearly just in bad in Melbourne and Sydney.

  3. Loved the episode.

    Ed is the man. He elaborated on his “sometimes” answer concerning c-betting with hands that seem strong enough to bet on multiple streets, but not strong enough to face a check raise and turn barrel.

    Generally, be more apt to check call hands like top pair top kicker, when you are OOP and/or facing multiple opponents or even just one good tricky guy.

    These are bad events that should somewhat deter you from your plan.

    If you’re dining on Tommy Angelo’s bread and butter, then full steam ahead. If you see one or two red flags, then slow down a bit.

    This also explains why PokerSnowie is so check happy. It ALWAYS plays against good tricky opponents.

    In most real games, just bet fold good marginal hands as a default because that raise is rarely a bluff.

  4. Man would I not have acquitted myself well in that last longer situation.

    Checking people off a list as they bust is pretty lol. I feel like you need a salty attorney on retainer for situations such as this.

  5. I loved Carlos’ advert for TPE, and the interview with Ed wasn’t as “salty” as I expected. He’s pretty much convinced me to buy the new book, as I’m really interested in becoming more balanced/unexploitable. It was kind of useful to know Ed wasn’t wearing pyjamas, but I suppose he does so about a third of the time, in order to balance his clothing ranges. (Making naked bluffs too often can’t be GTO!)

    Thanks for another great nitcast. Good luck with the veganism experiment. 🙂

  6. I didn’t think the interview was salty at all, and really enjoyed the discussion. I would also like to express my appreciation for Ed’s characterizing a poker strategy as “crazy pants”. Throw in some Carlos and a barking dog and you have a great podcast. The only thing I’d add to the non-dairy milk alternative discussion is that unsweetened cashew milk is the nizzles.

  7. In cases of the last longer chop or negotiation to pay the organizer, I have a semi-serious suggestion. Instead of trying to explain why you won’t participate, try suggesting you will go along as long as X-person takes responsibility for the taxes. Legally, the winner must report this income, but I cannot imagine many ever do. So put it to those pushing for a chop or tip to take written responsibility for reporting the income. This way, you put them in the position of saying ‘no’ and killing the deal instead of you.

    • That’s a good idea. It occurred to me that I could have offered to be bought out as well. Like, tell the short stack guy if he gives me $1500 (was going to be $3000 for each of us) I’ll do it. That (in theory, but probably not in practice) puts the cheapskate onus on him and makes it seem like he’s trying to get a huge equity bump for nothing, which of course he is.

  8. Just got Ed’s book yesterday, and I’ve read about half of it. When Mathematics of Poker came out, I was of the mind that it wasn’t the book that was going to revolutionize poker, but that it was going to inspire the book that did. We may have found that book. If a search fro the GTO strategy becomes the basis of play for most players, the game will never be the same.

    That said, the main question I have is why a GTO strategy search should be our goal while living in a world where most players are playing an exploitable strategy. It’s true that the GTO route will give you an unbeatable and, in theory, non-read-dependent strategy, but won’t we still win more in many, many cases by using an exploitable strategy.

    I understand Ferguson’s argument that “if you are going to deviate from GTO, you need to start by knowing what GTO is.” But Ed seems to be making a stronger claim — that the GTO strategy search is inherently better than a exploitative strategy. That might be true in the long run, and it may be true now if you take into consideration the costs of having to do the reads, etc. But I don’t think it’s totally true across the board in the contemporary poker world. Am I wrong?

    m

    • Nice post, I agree with pretty much all of it. With regard to Ed’s project specifically, I took it to be more like “If you’re struggling in a game you think you should be crushing, do this sort of analysis and you’ll find leaks you didn’t know you had.” He does say it’s OK (which in this context I take to mean desirable) to “break the rules” if your opponent breaks them first. Simple example: if you’re check-raised by a nit, and you’re confident he’s a nit, you don’t need to defend 70% of your betting range.

      Thing is, there are probably situations where you’re folding 70% of your betting range and not realizing it and therefore not doing it with this sort of generalization. Your opponents don’t have to be deliberately exploiting that to end up profiting from it.

      • I’d add that studying GTO play is helpful in another way as well. A lot of what we’re doing at a live table is trying to identify the specific types of mistakes that our opponents are making. Ed Miller phrases this well in another book, where he suggests identifying whether our opponent is generally making “folding mistakes” or “calling mistakes.” Thinking about the game in terms of ranges and frequencies is tremendously helpful when trying to categorize our villains in this manner — even if you yourself never once try to play GTO in a lower-stakes live game.

        • Yes, that seems quite right. I’m totally on board with the idea that studying GTO strategy can give you a deeper understand of the game and has many applications even if you don’t intend to try to achieve a GTO strategy.

          But there’s a tension in Ed’s book that I don’t think is saved by that fact. The GTO strategy, by definition, is a unilateral strategy that requires no observation of opponents. Any deviation from it, based on an opponent observation, inherently becomes a reads-based strategy. So when Ed says things (quite correctly) like “don’t bother 3-barrelling a nit 70% after he calls the turn,” that is explicitly turning away from the GTO strategy and toward a reads-strategy. Now, I think that’s the right thing to do. But it (somewhat) undercuts the fundamental point of the book, which is that you can throw the reads and everything else out the window and just get your frequencies perfect and play like a human PokerSnowie. If all this sums to something like “you should deviate from GTO when an exploitative strategy is obviously better, but before you do that you need to understand the GTO strategy,” I’m totally cool with that. We’ve never had a book lay out the GTO strategy and how to arrive it at so clearly and concisely. But we shouldn’t pretend that the GTO strategy is the EV maximizing one right now.

          Don’t get me wrong, I think Poker’s 1% is a fantastic book, and I think it may do for GTO strategy searching what Harrington on Hold’em did for tournaments. But I’m not convinced that chasing a GTO strategy dominates — or even beats — a read-based strategy across the vast majority of poker games currently running in the world.

          matt

          • I really don’t read Ed as claiming that a frequency-based strategy dominates a good read-based strategy, quite the opposite in fact. I think that most of his audience consists of people struggling to implement a good reads-based strategy and often doing counter-productive things as a result. When he leans on the importance of frequencies, I think he’s trying to convince those people to stop trying to do so much soul-reading and shore up their fundamentals. In the process of doing the latter, they’ll probably end up improving on the former front as well.

      • Andrew: good point. I totally agree that the process Ed describes for getting your frequencies correct is a great way to find leaks in your own game.

  9. Great episode! I loved Ed’s sermonizing. And Carlos’ awesome promo.

    And I loved the insider joke, where Andrew tells how after he refused to chop the last-longer, he was not considering trustworthy enough to hold the money himself, and then Nate asks him “Did you checkraise also at some point in the tournament?”. I’m sure a lot of listeners didn’t get it.

    I also got a real interest in buying Ed’s book. The pricetag seems pretty steep, but I might just shell out the 60$.

  10. Thought provoking interview. It made me think of two things, one is an app called Cardrunners EV. Pretty much a visual representation of the range construction tree Ed is talking about in his book. And second is that when Doc Sands was asked in an interview what was the biggest eureka moment in his poker career he replied with, once you start thinking about your entire range in this spot vs opponents range in this spot rather than your current hand vs your opponents range, it becomes an easy game. It makes me start to think of poker as really just a game of betting ranges and frequencies and the cards are there to just settle “ties” where you have to show down. This is why I am of the opinion that Open Face Chinese is not poker but rather just another card game.

  11. I appreciate the discussion of negative events – I’m not sure if I would have fully understood what Ed was advocating without that.
    My theory is that for people who say they don’t need this to beat 1/2 or 2/5, and if they are telling the truth, then it is probably the case that they have learned to get all the negative (and positive) event situations correct. They would just make even more money if they learned how to apply these concepts to read-less scenarios.

  12. Hi guys,

    I love the poker stuff in your show. But i love the lifestyle stuff too. So as soon as you mentioned ‘Forks Over Knives’ I IMDB’d it, watched it online, and have refined my diet, which wasn’t too bad to start with but I’ve upped my intake of whole foods and plant based foods, cut down on dairy and red meat…I was heading that way, but watching that movie really opened my eyes. Thanks again.

    • Thanks for the kind note! I wouldn’t recommend imitating Andrew and me in every respect, but if we prompt you to (e.g.) go investigate diet stuff, I think that’s great. Thanks for listening.

  13. I knew it would be good when I saw Ed Miller’s name. When I heard the discussion of Forks Over Knives, and Andrew becoming more vegan, and Carlos on there as well, I was so glad I had tuned in. Good work, guys!

  14. Question for Andrew – at the time of this podcast you hadn’t actually read the book so now that you have were there a lot of really new concepts for you or were you thinking along these lines earlier…..I’ve noticed in your instructional work quite a few oblique and even direct references to frequencies in determining optimal betting and bluffing lines and even calling lines. The book does a lovely job of clearly defining ranges and tying that to optimal frequencies…providing a framework for unexploitable play but were you already monitoring your own frequencies?

    When I started working on my HU play I experimented with moving my button raising and c betting frequency WAY up beyond what I was comfortable based on a tip I picked up from a TV show with great results. It forces you to include hands that you’re not comfortable in playing but with great results. I think it will be way more complicated in full table play though

  15. Hey guys, how do you know if someone is a vegan?

    Don’t worry they’ll tell you.

    Haha jk guys great podcast.

  16. Another point that confused me was that a static board favours the player in position.For example if someone raised from the button and got a call from the blinds and the flop came 9 6 2 rainbow……I always thought that this board was more likely to have hit the blinds range since they are apt to have more random cards. Sometimes I assume that the button will raise with any broadway or suited cards so this flop not likely to have hit them at all

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