The author sounds like a losing poker player. If my calling frequency is based entirely on pot odds, a good opponent would just start bluffing me out of every pot by increasing their bet size to a point where I can’t profitably call.
Annie Duke has cashed 39 times at the WSOP and has won at least four million dollars at tournaments alone.
Any good poker player would understand that the example was simplified for a non-playing audience. It’s so obvious it didn’t need to be stated.
This is most certainly not true, because it doesn't subtract the cost of all the entry fees, to the tournaments she cashed and the dozens or hundreds she didn't.
"alone" implies she has won additional money in non-tournament play, when there is no evidence she is a winning cash player.
Finally, there is a LOT more to the Annie Duke story. Morally, ethically, business-wise. A winner? A little research goes a long way.
It is fairly standard in the poker world to discuss total winnings in tournaments rather than net winnings.
When discussing net winnings, it’s usually discussed using an ROI measure (e.g., 30% roi over their past 100 MTTs between $1000 and $5000) rather than just dollars, since the biggest winners in dollars are almost all winners of super high roller tourneys like the Big One for One Drop.
Furthermore, live MTT results in general are often skewed due to the unmatched (?) softness of the $10k wsop main event for a field that size.
With regards to Annie Duke in particular, I never considered her a “good” pro poker player. That said, she was pretty good at fleecing amateurs, and she was able to play a tight game when she was outclassed.
But this is an article aimed at the general public.
This statistic is almost certainly not counting tournament buy-ins. It doesn't represent net profit. If you want to evaluate somebody's performance as a poker player, you want to look at net profit (among other things). Literally every poker player will have some wins, so if you only count the wins without counting losses, it will sound impressive but not actually mean anything.
You'll also become predictable if you only overbet when bluffing. If you try to deal with that by making all your bets larger, then you lose out on value from your strong hands because I can now profitably fold some hands that I would have had to call you down with otherwise.
Put another way: you can't exploit someone who makes decisions based on pot odds just by changing your bet size, because changing your bet size changes the pot odds.
Hold 'em, at least, still ain't fully solved.
Well, yes, but the point is that a fully GTO non-exploitable strategy is not solved for Hold'em. At least not outside of limit (and kinda no-limit) heads up play.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1805.08195.pdf
(There is also an argument that Libratus actually just approaches Nash equilibrium and isn't fully there, since there are 1e+160 decision points in a heads up no-limit game, but compared to human players the difference is probably meaningless. )
The closest we have seen for larger games is Pluribus - https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aay2400 - but the researchers there aren't even attempting to say they have solved 6max, just that they could be less exploitable than some of the best in the world. It is not particularly useful for online play because it does not try to counter variance or manage bankroll, and in further results it began to lose quite heavily as the pros adapted to it, losing 700BB over the 10k hands.
By no means am I saying GTO-based strategy is ineffective - I'd probably be wasting my DTO subscription if I did think so ;) - but we're only part of the way there and the missing bits mean that you can't play perfectly unexploitable poker.
People try this.
> …by increasing their bet size to a point where I can’t profitably call.
A good poker player will adjust your expected range based on your sizing and frequency of bets/raises, and they will adjust their calling/raising ranges accordingly.
Most poker games, especially big bet games are played against a range/distribution of hands, not a specific hand.
I'll also point out that constructing ranges and thinking in terms of ranges/ hand distributions is a relatively new development in poker. I mean, the very good players were subconsciously doing it all along, but it's only been written down and analyzed in the last 10 years or so.
I agree with you overall points.
For historical reference for folks who are interested in the poker boom of the 00s but were not there, it’s more like 20 years, if not more.
The book Let There Be Range was published in 2008.
High stakes players were discussing the issues covered in that book amongst ourselves (live and online) with quite a bit of sophistication for several years before that.
All that said, and supporting the point made above, advanced computational support for ranges (esp. via “solvers”) didn’t really start becoming a thing until the early 2010s.
An additional comment that I copied from another reply:
With regards to Annie Duke in particular, I never considered her a “good” pro poker player. That said, she was pretty good at fleecing amateurs, and she was able to play a tight game when she was outclassed.