Sean Poker

Poker ebooks have gained quite a bit of popularity in the last few months; several authors and well-known players from the poker community have announced or have already published their work. It turns out that the format has enabled skilled players to share a part of their knowledge while cutting down on the time and efforts required to bring out a traditional publication, and what used to be seen as a laborious and not-so profitable task now appears to be a good way to offer advanced material to the intended public.

If ebooks have been around for some time now, with a few notable ones, Let There Be Range has certainly been instrumental in the sudden burst of interest.

First, you probably know one of its coauthors, Cole “CTS” South — a young and highly successful high-stakes player, who made several great videos for the CardRunners training site. His aggressive style has earned him a solid reputation, and it is safe to say that almost everyone who knows the guy would be extremely eager to read a poker book with its name on the cover. SlowHabit, his coauthor, is also a successful player and an experienced coach.

When these two decided to write a book, it was clear something special would come out of it — something way more advanced than the average level of the current literature. It was hoped that they would truly share their insight, and if they did so it was pretty obvious that their work would be fairly exclusive.

The book came out in late 2008, and it cost a whopping $1,850 back then (it sells for $974 as of this writing). This came as a shock to most small stakes players, who often don’t have that much as a bankroll, and even higher stakes players were intrigued. It brought on some stir and controversy in many forums, as some people argued about how they find it too expensive while some other replied that it all depends on what’s in the book. Fair enough.

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The autopilot mode is defined as a set of rules that apply to frequent, similar situations. When there is nothing special to take into consideration, it does the job with minimal attention, saving your time and efforts for more demanding tasks.

In poker, a lot of situations can be grouped into categories that arise more or less frequently, depending on their characteristics. Consequently, it is natural to make some generalizations and define a few default actions for each of these categories.

With time, you’ll generally refine your faithful autopilot, adding more rules, redefining some actions and incorporating new concepts as you learn them; you 3bet this range, you cbet these flops, you barrel these turns etc. At some point, you will eventually obtain a small system that can play entire hands by itself.

This system has generally been well thought and carefully crafted, so that it works reasonably well in most circumstances. Many times, it will be solid enough to extract value from weaker players effortlessly. As a result, you’ll begin to rely on it more and more, especially if you multitable.

This tendency is not confined to poker; casual chess players often enjoy “opening systems” (like the Colle or the King’s Indian Attack) that let them unroll the same moves against most opponent’s responses. Naturally, if they face extreme counter-measures — good or bad –, they’ll deviate from their favorite opening, but 90% of the time they’ll stick to it. They understand it, they know it, they are used to it, it is their kung-fu style.

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We know that a gapless rundown is the type of hand that hit flops very well, but it is harder to come with precise numbers given the lack of tools such as Flopzilla for Omaha. I tried to enumerate these flops in a spreadsheet and calculate the odds of each flop, and here are the results.

The left column lists the different flops, with our hand (5-6-7-8) on the top. A line with “3 4″ means a 3-4-x flop. In order to avoid counting some flops several times, we excluded some cards, which are represented by a dot. Thus, for our 3-4-x flop, we excluded deuces, and fives to nines; they’ll be accounted for later.

The odds of each flops are broken down into four parts: all flops (paired board included), flops giving us trips if paired, flops with no pair, and flops without three cards of the same suit. Note that the 5-5-x type of boards exclude the trips that were already counted above (for the “no pair” column, it would count them all, then). That’s why the sum of the “only trips” and “no pair” are identical, modulo rounding. We see that our rundown hits a draw or trips/full house on about 30% of flops. If we exclude 3flush flops, it is 28%. The second total line excludes OESD.

Now let’s count the flopped straights (that were previously excluded): It is about 5% of flops, or 3% if we only count nut straights.

When we sum it all, we found that our hand hits 36% of flops, and 33% if we exclude 3flush boards. The second total line excludes OESD and non-nut straights.

5678 hits a draw or better on 33% of flops,
and 50% if adding pair+kickers.

Finally, 23% of flops give us a pair+kickers, and 16% if we exclude ace-high boards (in case we’re against aces, notably). That makes for a 50% grand total if we add these flops. That’s how well the gapless rundown flop!

Nb.: I double-checked the numbers, but errors frequently creep in for these kinds of analyses — feel free to ask or point them out.