[gaming_mouse]

[ QUOTE ]

Have you taken a course in game theory?

[/ QUOTE ]

Yeah, I have, and I liked it. But, like I said, what you are already doing is the best way to improve your poker.

Two things to keep in mind. One is that game theory is concerned with optimal strategies, which assume a perfect opponent. Optimal strategies are defensive: they make it impossible for any player to beat you.

Playing poker against human beings, on the other hand, is about finding maximal strategies -- strategies that exploit your opponents' weaknesses. You want to protect yourself from exploitation too, of course, but unless you are playing against world class players your primary goal is exploitation.

Second, even if you wanted to play poker using optimal game theoretic strategy, you couldn't. The problem of finding Nash equalibria for a full ring game is, as the computer scientists like to say, "computationally intractable." By a long shot, too. Even the most powerful computers available are nowhere near being able to solve the game tree for a full ring game.

Having said all that, if you are really interested, there is an old, out of print book:

Poker strategy: Winning with game theory by Nesmith C Ankeny

which is supposed to be good.

gm