Caro Article

I'm so glad you opened my eyes to neuticles. It's my new favorite word. I actually call people neuticles now.

Personally, I love playing against players who have no idea about the math. They may suck out on me from time to time, but over the long run it's +EV for me!

But, I think Caro is being disengenuous. From what others have said (since I'm playing micro limits and NLHE MTT), I'd have to say as the limits increase, almost everyone has an intuitive grasp of the math involved and playing the player (or psychology as Caro puts it) becomes much more important. I think there was loads of this type of info in Theory of Poker.

edit: I'll also be honest and admit I can never finish any book by Caro. I do have his book of tells on my shelf, but havent read it yet. I've tried to read two others and put them down rather quickly. So maybe I'm biased.

Perhaps writing style has a lot to do with whether or not he means what he says or simply overemphasising his point. I have a hard time believing that someone like Caro doesn't think odds/math matter.

I like some of Caro's material and his cheesy marketing strategy, it's amusing. He should know that the psychological vs. math factor in poker is weighted more on one particular side depending on the situation. That's why poker is so hard, you have to figure out the right mix of concepts to use.

Yet another reason most of these poker magazines are bad, I suppose. [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

[Shandrax]

I never know if I should take Caro verbally or look for a deeper meaning behind his words.

Sure, if two players play a mathematical game to perfection they can't beat each other. Another factor has to decide and that's either the cards on a given day or psychology over the long run. If you see it like that, then he could be right. On the other side, every deviation from perfect math should show a loss over time, so he could be wrong.
Maybe he was simply talking about no-limit, where you can set up an opponent by making countless bad plays over the night to trick him to lose all his money in one hand. Sure it takes a fool to fall for that, but that's what psychology is all about - using intellectual dominance to manipulate someone.

If his comment can be interpreted as an insult or a personal attack on David and Mason, I don't know. Actually I wouldn't take it that serious. Caro likes to display himself as some sort of mad genius. Just book stuff like that under madness and you should be fine.

Furthermore I doubt that statements like this will hurt 2+2 sales. Caro is too much of a freak to appeal to the more analytical type of reader and those are the folks who buy 2+2 books after all. Just watch the Caro poker video and you can see what his target audience looks like. It's the type of guy who finds Hellmuth too complicated to read.

[Ed Miller]

[ QUOTE ]
If his comment can be interpreted as an insult or a personal attack on David and Mason, I don't know.

[/ QUOTE ]

I read the whole article today in Borders. There's really no question that he's talking about David and Mason.

[sunek]

Mad or not he has some good points in his book of poker tells. But this book should be used as a supplement to books like SSH, HOH 1+2, TOP etc

sunek

[David Sklansky]

I wonder if he is stupid enough to include Hi Lo, Lowball, Multi tabling small games online, and preflop all in decision making.

[skp]

As the following post made by Tom Weideman at RGP several years ago shows, there is no such thing as "math poker" vs. people poker". It's all math based.

Tom's wonderful post starts here:

I'll say it one more time: Unless you know how to "use a math formula to determine whether or not to call", you are in no position to to claim that acting in another fashion is better. Hint: the "people poker" you speak of
is a method of gathering numbers to plug into the s00per seekrit math formula, but the formula is ALWAYS there. These skills are not mutually exclusive of each other.

I'm experiencing deja vu, as I've had a similar discussion with Badger some time ago. Maybe I should just give up and let people go on believing there are two distinct ways to play poker. Sigh, let me try one last time with a
simple example of a different game:

Let's say I offer you 4-to-1 odds on a $1 bet that you can't guess the number I am thinking about between 1 and 10 (I'll write it on a sheet of paper if you don't trust me). Here are the two schools of thought that we have to choose from:

I. Math egghead - "Hmm, I have only a 1-in-10 chance of guessing right, so my ev in this case is:

ev = 0.1*(+$4) + 0.9*(-$1) = -$0.50.

I stand to lose 50 cents on this bet, so I will decline."

II. People player - "Well, I remember one time when Tom was talking to someone I overheard him say that in these situations he ALWAYS picks one of the endpoints, because guessers never seem to guess the endpoint. This
means I'm 50-50 to guess right if I guess either 1 or 10, and with him offering 4-to-1, this is a good spot, and I will accept."

Sound about right? WELL, THIS IS FALLACIOUS DICHOTOMIZING. (Is this verb really a word, Geary? Never mind, too many letters for you to know, heh.)

What I mean is, one is not given a choice between these two options and told to select one. Though it is hidden the way I wrote it above, there is a mathematical formula in option II, just as there is in option I. The ONLY
difference between these two options is the information gathered. The information in the second case leads to the following ev calculation:

ev = 0.5*(+$4) + 0.5*(-$1) = +$1.50

The ev is positive, so you play the game. If you look at the two ev equations, you'll see that the only changes are the 0.9 became 0.5, and the 0.1 became 0.5, and this changed the sign of the ev, and therefore changed
the decision made. What changed these two little numbers? The INFORMATION you gathered with your "people skills".

So you see, the game is ultimately mathematical, because the only thing that matters in your decision making is which choice provides the greater ev, and this requires a calculation in the end. But the numbers plugged into the
calculation can be altered by using your people skills, so using that as a method of gathering information, followed by the math calculation is what makes you a good player. This all becomes interesting (to me) to discuss when someone THINKS they are making the correct decision based on the information they have, but in fact they lack the math skills to determine which decision really is proper.

Oh, and btw, this is all part-and-parcel of what is known as "exploitive play". This means that you are a better information gatherer than the other players, and you are able to use this and the math that underlies it to make
better decisions. But there is another type of play, known as "optimal", defined by playing game-theoretically correct, in which you can ignore all of this information gathering and just play purely mathematically. If
anyone was capable of doing this, they would beat every game in existence, no matter how good the opponents are at "people poker". [The current World Champion of Poker Chris Ferguson is actually one of the world's leading
experts on this subject (as applied to poker). I don't mean to imply that he knows all the game theoretically correct decisions to make at every turn, but he can approximate them, and if he feels an opponent can be exploited, he certainly shifts into that method, as it provides more ev.]

So please, let's hear no more nonsense about how we have to choose between "math poker" and "people poker".

Tom Weideman

Thanks for the repost skp. I had never seen it put that way before.

[SoftcoreRevolt]

And here I thought no one paid any attention to what Mike Caro writes anymore.