Poker has a history of attracting the brightest minds to develop strategies on how to optimize against various opponents and game types.
One of my favorites is actually David Sklanksy for what he really helped in terms of a logical and rigid way of approaching the game.
I was actually thinking back to the second blog post I made about the large raise sizes, and I realized that back in the days (before my time), this was actually a common strategy because people thought large raise sizes would give them better pot odds. And then there’s an argument of “should I raise larger in earlier position?” which some people still believe, until GTO showed that it’s sometimes better to raise smaller in earlier position. Remember also when “donk” betting was considered the hallmark of a fish? Anyways, the point is that a lot of these poker behaviors are based on heuristics that may or may not be true, and if enough people believe in it, despite contrary quantitative evidence, they will do it.
This is kind of like how penny stocks work – if enough people believe in something, they can (despite very terrible financial data) and will pump up the stock despite everything telling them they should not. And this made people quite rich.
So let’s do our best to navigate this chaos, and not get swept away by the variance.