More on Exploiting Regulars

OK, I still have not finished going through the exam questions.  Partly, I am really taking my time and writing some fairly detailed answers before checking Tri's.  Partly because I've continued to stay quite busy with work and family, and poker across the board has had to take a bit of a backseat.

However, I wanted to get a review up because if I understand correctly, the price of the book is going to double in the next few days when pre-order is done.  Bottom line, if you play 200NL or higher, I would recommend you get the book.

The first reason I would draw the line there is simply what the book costs in relation to a BI and also the alternative you would get if you were to purchase coaching.  But that's not the main reason. 

If you are playing 100NL or lower, you should just avoid good regs, which I think you can do pretty easily if you either datamine or play in the games regularly yourself.  There are not enough really good regs to warrant staying at a table with them without at least a couple of other soft spots.  And if you are in such a spot, you should avoid confrontations with the good reg and focus on the better spots.  Even when you play well against a good reg, you're going to be better off going against the other spots at the table.

Beyond that, even a good, thinking reg will probably not play or adjust in a way that will make the book exactly applicable.  In fact, I think it's borderline at 1/2, where even most of the better regs still don't value bet wide enough or make tough folds.  But it does get closer at 1/2, and even closer at 2/4.  There's probably a reason why all the examples are from a 3/6 game :).  That said, beginning at 1/2, I think there are times when you will have 2 or 3 regs on a table with one, maybe two, soft spots.  And one of those regs are bound to be decent.  Also, the games start to feature a little more aggression (some misplaced, but still aggression).  The context of the book starts to hit home there, some of the time.

There are a couple spots in the book where I think you could just follow a straightforward outline and make a unique play or two, but for the most part,  you shouldn't get this book expecting a quick read and magic results.  It will take some work to get the most out of it, and the most valuable parts of the book for me (and there were several) covered the sorts of things to evaluate before deciding on a given play.

I don't agree 100% with everything Tri says, but there's nothing that I wildly disagree with.  And even though it's a short book, there were multiple things that I hadn't considered in the light that Tri presented them before.  I did provide him several suggestions, some of which were addressed in an updated draft he sent, some of which were not.  I am about to provide him a few more.  I don't feel it's fair to comment on them because this is not a published draft, but if anyone would like me to comment on them after the book is in general publication, let me know (assuming I can get an update from Tri to see whether my feedback was addressed).  Feedback was more about flow of the book, formatting of the exam, and some extra bits I thought he could pretty easily add to round out some discussion -- it was not over anything I considered bad, though.