I hate Ed Miller

[Blarg]

Yeah, to me Ed's book is mostly about thinking more often and using the edge of being a thinking player as much as you possibly can. Every edge, every out, every chance you can apply a clear understanding of the odds, you do it and push every advantage and push it hard. You kind of make yourself like a casino, risking a fortune on tons of chances all the time, but as long as you have the odds, well, that's the way it's done. That's how you build mega-hotels and bribe senators and governors. Add some strategy on top, much of it easily derivable from the numbers and a relatively straightforward application of logic anyway, as the icing on the low-limit cake, and you're good. But that never means you take chances that aren't reasoned and that don't fall in line with the math.

When you move up, strategy becomes more important, but simply playing the numbers suffices an awful lot against the low limit players. The numbers never stop mattering, your strategy adapts, and you never stop thinking no matter how trivial or exalted the level or the players.

That's my take on it anyway. Aggressive, sure, but not sloppily at all. Situations and the math involved dictate aggressiveness more than Ed's word does. And situations, the math, and Ed's take on things often have a nice correspondence, as well they should since he's a 2+2 author now, yet people point to Ed as a wacko haphazardly without seeing that sometimes it's just plain math and logic and that's the end of it, and it's not about Ed at all.

I could see why Ed's book wasn't as radical as some thought fairly early, but now I'm trying to be sure I catch that it may be more subtle than I thought. His advice is so situational, and his whole approach is situational more than concrete. Adopting and experimenting with Ed's ideas is more like working off principles than codified techniques, and is analogous to martial arts to me. You might learn a million techniques and still be a poor fighter, and learn one principle and be a great one. Ed's book seems to talk about core understandings that everything flows out from. Because of that many of his ideas are applicable in any level of game and against players of any intelligence and skill. Once you've got the skeleton of the thing, filling out the rest is trivial.

Ed, that sneaky s.o.b., GOT it. Now I'm gonna see if I can get it.