Moving On
Effective March 1 I will no longer be making videos for PokerSavvy. I am very grateful to the site for the opportunity they gave me over a year ago, have enjoyed working with everyone here and am proud to have been part of a strong team of pros, but after serious consideration of other opportunities it is clear to me that it is time to move on. The main video series people have been asking about over the past few months is PLO Fundamentals. It has been on the shelf for a while, mostly because I have been very busy and theory videos are more work than live play videos, but I will be returning to it in my final days here. This blog announcement will be followed shortly by the release of Part 3 of that series, on PLO Combinatorics. Part 4: Equity and Part 5: Board Texture will also be released before I leave.
Together these five parts represent a tour of much of the key material in Volume 1: Theory Foundations of my book Advanced PLO Theory. There is also a free 50-page preview of Volume 1 (~270 pages total) at the bottom of my webpage, plotheory.com, which is also where you can go for further information on my book and future plans over the next few weeks. This is not the right forum to announce what I'll be doing next, but I have a few exciting projects planned for the rest of 2010.
Tom
Happy New Year
Happy New Year everyone! It's been quite a while since I've written a blog or made a video. I'm not great at posting blog entries anyway but even if I did want to give a day-to-day on my life for the past few months it'd be extremely monotonous, just grinding out writing, playing some, and doing the standard social stuff that old (almost 30!) married people do. Had some success both at PLO and mixed games in the past three months, not much volume though. Did have one fun, expensive weekend in Vegas in early December - lost money at poker, table games, sports betting (****ing Nebraska-Texas game was brutal, had Nebraska straight-up), Pure, and a few other places I can't quite remember. Did holidays with the family and now I'm heading to PCA for a couple weeks.
I've been incredibly busy trying to finish my book, Advanced PLO Theory ($2500, see plotheory.com for details). Originally I wanted to release it in September but to the dismay of all the people who have already purchased it I am still working and expect to finally be done by the end of January. I am releasing the final version of Volume 1 in the next day or two and have released three chapters from Volume 2 (all via e-book) but still have some serious work to do before the final product is done. Volume 1: Theory Foundations is ~300 pages, is very math/detail intensive, and includes a lot of raw data. It includes material on combinatorics, equity, board texture categories, expected value calculations, and game theory.
Volume 2: 6-max Strategy is ~400 pages and is intended to be a comprehensive guide to using the material in Volume 1 to construct strategies for all of the common scenarios. The meat of Volume 2 is the four-chapter sequence from 9-12, each of which covers one street. The Preflop chapter includes 100+ starting hand categories and category-by-category, position-by-position recommendations for preflop actions. Chapter 10: Flop Theory covers c-betting frequencies, floating ranges, stack-off ranges, etc. over ~20 situation classes (e.g. "heads-up, OOP as preflop raiser, SPR = 9-12") and several board texture categories introduced in Chapters 2 and 8. Chapter 11: Turn Theory includes analysis of all of the common turn scenarios structured by board texture shifts, which means that each section covers some combination of flop texture + turn card (such as "wet boards where the turn pairs"). Chapter12: River Theory covers a structured approach to analyzing all the information gathered on earlier streets along with several hand-reading and game-theory case studies.
Overall, I'm very pleased with the sales so far, especially given the delays and lack of reviews to this point. There are a few respected mid-high NLHE and PLO players who have bought it including a couple who received a slight discount in exchange for promising to write a review, so once I finally get the full product out there should be reviews on most of the major training sites. I also am planning to release a 60-70 page free preview version sometime in January which should help people on the fence get a better idea of what it is and why it might be worth the cost. Volume 3: Other PLO Variants (HU/full-ring/mtt/cap/etc.) and Volume 4: Additional Topics (HoldemManager/Transitioning from NLHE/Variance and Bankroll Management/etc) are also planned and I am looking into the possibility of working with a coauthor or two for a second edition (all four volumes + extra commentary/dialogue) to be released in June-July.
On the videofront, I am committed to making a video a week for Pokersavvy for the next two months. I plan to put out Parts 3 and 4 of the PLO Theory Fundamentals series, as well as making videos on a few different forms of PLO (Full-ring, ante games, cap games, headsup, and concluding the plo mtt series begun a couple months ago).
Could add some things about my goals for 2010 and thoughts on the Isildur spectacle (which turned me into a railbird for the first time in years) but for now I'll sign off and get back to work. Will try to make a post after the PCA - looking forward to some sun and an awesome schedule of side events.