[AaronBrown]

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The strategy of poker is to try and estimate as closely as possible to 'perfect play' (ie if we played with our cards face up). But we make many FTOP 'mistakes' because we can never be 100% sure of our hand.

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This is a reasonable theory, but it's not Sklansky's theory. The FOTP doesn't say you make money by playing perfectly, it says you make money by inducing your opponents to play less than perfectly. Since poker is zero sum, what matters is the difference in performance between you and your opponents.

In your example at the river, the FTOP doesn't help much. Your opponent doesn't care what you have, he either has a flush or he doesn't. You're not going to convince him to fold his flush with a raise, you're not going to fool him into calling with a bust. That doesn't make the theorem wrong, it just says you can't get anything extra out of this situation. Just compute the pot odds and call. As you say, you get what you get.

But go back to the flop. Your opponents should fold any hand not composed exclusively of 8's and 2's, which they are unlikely to have and less likely to have called pre-flop with. So you want to get them to call or raise.

I'm not saying that means you check, you have to weigh the risk of giving them a free card; and you also have to consider this in relation to all the other hands you're going to play tonight. But the FTOP says to think about how your opponents perceive your hand, and how they are likely to react to your actions; rather than trying to guess what they have to make your play more perfect.

I think the FTOP helps a lot of good cardplayers make the leap to poker. It emphasizes what makes poker different from other games. But it's not a magic formula that makes bad players into winners. And you can certainly play good poker in many other ways.