The year-ending edition of the Zoo. Suitably, I talk with The Back Room standby Jason Burge, author of the JamBasket series of videos. We go over his year in poker, and hit some highlights of the greater poker scene as well. (Apparently I already forgot about Phil Galfond: hey, but what have you done for me lately?) Our piece de resistance for this podcast is, however, Mindblowing Poker, a new book by an English professional player. In it, “Professor Poker” reveals his personal poker philosophy and propounds a way forward for the game at a time when its future is consistently doubted. Is he right or wrong? Is that even the question? We break it down and even get some queries directly answered by the otherwise anonymous author.
As mentioned in the podcast, the Poker Zoo community is kicking off a series of deepstack, low-stakes games in Las Vegas soon. To find out more and get a seat at the table, contact me through any channel, including my gmail address, persuadeo@. We need players to get this off the ground!
Classic HSP review mentioned is here.
Mindblowing Poker review starts at 29:00.
Q & A correspondence with the Professor on Mindblowing Poker:
The public wants, in spite of your wishes, a little more detail on your life in poker: what stakes, what sites, how would you describe your pool, any known crushers/poseurs you play against? Give us something.
Firstly, thanks very much for inviting me to take part in this podcast – appreciate it’s strange not to have me there speaking! As you’re aware – I’m very keen to keep my identity under wraps. Let me give a bit of an introduction. A big part of my philosophy is about keeping moving, staying elusive, allowing you to move around and play in a misleading way and move on before the pool will catch on and exploit you. I appreciate that those committed to the pursuit of perfection and GTO aren’t concerned by such players, but in practice I find this a much superior way to extract profits from poker if you can learn about others quicker than they can learn about you, which is my skill. I’m concerned that as we arrive at situations where everyone at the table is playing a near perfect strategy (over the spots they commonly see), then they will eventually all expect to lose to the house. Therefore I move around a lot, finding the ‘low hanging fruit’ first, but this is increasingly hard to find. What I propose players do next is to ‘shake the trees’ rather than spending time plotting how to get the fruit from higher up in the tree.
To answer your question then – I have played an incredibly varied set of games since c.2007. I built a bankroll on Pokerstars and 888. Once I had a significant bankroll, I became a live player – I’ve been at WSOPs, WPTs and EPTs and have had strong results there. I’ve cut this down over the last couple of years (partly because I like playing at home online, partly because of Covid).
I’d describe myself as a maths nerd but someone who has made a conscious effort to see the bigger picture. You have some very clever people in poker, who love game theory. But the irony for me, is that they can’t see the theory of the bigger game they exist in. They all have an incentive to refine a GTO strategy, but once all players have refined it, the game will die as nobody can win.
In terms of who I am, I’ve had Vanessa Selbst, Charl
Published on 4 years, 11 months ago
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