WINNING POKER

Mastering Texas Holdem, like mastering any competitive activity, would require three kinds of knowledge: factual (Chapter 4), tactical (Chapter 5), and strategic (Chapter 6). Factual knowledge would include the vocabulary, basic concepts, and sought-after goals that would define the activity. Without the facts, you couldn’t make sense of the game. A golfer should know the difference between an iron, a wood, and a putter, and why all three would be in a gold bag. Facts would be learned by committing them to memory. Tactics would be the various actions taken to achieve the goals.

Tactical knowledge would be acquired through practice. You would play the game and, through experience, gradually obtain the skills that would be necessary for success. Golfers would learn to swing their clubs and read the greens by repetitive practice. Strategic knowledge would be obtained after the facts have been memorized and the tactical skills were acquired. Poker Strategy would be to learn to see the game in a broad context.

Once you were to possess strategic knowledge, your actions would no longer be a direct response to individual events, but would be considered in the context of a broad purposeful plan. Only after you would have reached the level of strategic thinking could you truly master a game. Great golfers wouldn’t play individual holes. They would think about the course as a whole.

While Sid has used golf as an example, any activities that were to involve performances would require these three kinds of knowledge. Musicians would have the factual knowledge of how to play their instrument, and the strategic knowledge of how to interpret the music. The facts, tactics, and strategies should be learned in order. It would not be possible to shortcut the learning process by skipping ahead to strategy without learning facts and tactics, nor would it be possible to learn music, golf, or poker from reading alone.

You would have to play. This section of the book will present the facts, tactics, and strategies of Texas Holdem poker. The underlying theme would be that you win at poker by having to make better decisions than your opponents have made because over time, cards (and hence situations) would be equally distributed. Poker decisions would be based on five factors: your cards, your position, the number of opponents, the cost, and how your opponents were playing. The factual basic for each decision factor would be presented first. How these facts would enter into tactical play would then be discussed.

Strategy would be learning to give some factors more weight than others, depending on the game conditions. To play strategy, you would have to learn to analyze the reasons and motivations for a poker game. In essence, poker has been a social game. The competition for money would take place within a social context that would have to be understood before a correct strategy could be formulated.

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