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KEVIN DESMOND: All right, everyone.

So welcome to 15.S50, Poker Theory and Analytics.

So this is going to be Monday, Wednesday, Friday

from 3:30 to 5:00.

I just got a room for a review session on Tuesday,

Thursday for anyone who needs to catch up a little bit.

The class is here, 4370.

I'm Kevin Desmond.

I'm going to be the instructor.

Paul Mende is the faculty advisor.

And this is worth three H credits.

The game play aspect-- so this is what I did.

And I think this is really cool.

So Poker Stars gave us our own private league for only MIT

people in this course.

And my goal here is to separate people

who are fairly new from people who are very competitive,

because I don't want someone not to pass the course because they

happen to be not that great at poker.

So I created this thing called the Beginners' League.

And these are going to be Daily Turbos.

Turbos means they're fast-ish tournaments.

And to get the game play credit, you can cash,

you can make money in one of them,

or you can play in 10 of them.

So those who are struggling can get this game play credit

by playing 10 tournaments, which is about a 10-hour commitment.

Let's go into the game play aspect more.

So Poker Stars created this private league for us,

which is really cool.

So Poker Stars is generally considered the most reputable

online poker site.

That's why we use them.

So they have two different types of games.

So they have real money and play money games.

Now if you're in the US, you can't do real money.

It used to be something that was very gray area.

And then there was one poker site which turned out

to be legitimately like a Ponzi scheme, and as a result,

now poker in the US is like much more black and white,

definitely not OK for real money.

However, their play money scene is pretty resilient,

and that's what we're taking advantage of here.

The Poker Stars play money scene is broken down

into two different things.

They have public games, where you can just go and play

for play chips against anyone in the world, which is cool.

And you can do that, and I recommend

you give it a shot just to get used to the software.

In addition, you could do home games,

which is what we're generally going to be doing.

That's what they call their private leagues.

So in the private leagues, in their home games,

they have this showcase.

And you might notice as soon as you log in

that the MIT League, Poker Theory and Analytics,

is already at the top.

That's not just for us.

That's for everyone.

Anyone in the world who logs into Poker Stars

and looks at home games has the MIT League

at the top, which I think is really cool.

So to access this, I'll send a more specific instructions

later.

I gave you guys just the passcode of what you need.

But to actually get there, what you need to do

is, you log into Poker Stars.

You go to this button, which is a little house,

to access home games.

And then you want to join a game.

And what you do is, you put the Club ID, which is 557832.

You put the invitation code, which you're all

going to have on Stellar.

And then you put your real name, preferably the one that's

listed in the course, because I actually

have to approve everyone that joins the league,

and I can't do it just based on someone's screen name.

And I guess you have to agree to some sort of terms

and conditions.

So let's talk about hand history.

So a lot of analytics are going to be based off

of hand histories, which are just text files that Poker

Stars gives you to the extent that you indicate that you want

to save them down.

So these are kind of jumbled messes of text.

Each line just shows one thing that happens.

And you might get used to reading it,

or might not, depending on how much

you're going to scrutinize it.

But more importantly, you can use

these in all the data analytic programs

that we're going to use.

In particular, Poker Tracker runs off of that.

You'll load just thousands of hands into Poker Tracker,

and it'll do analytics for you.

It knows exactly what's going on based on that format, which is

generally considered universal.

And then for the sake of visualizing these hands--

if you just read it, that's fine.

But then if you want to show other people,

I'm recommending we use something called the Universal

Hand History Replayer, which is something that's free.

And what it does, it just reads the hands, and it plays them.

It animates what happened as if you were seeing it for real.

So the deal with hand histories is,

if you're a real money player, Poker Stars dedicates databases

of hand histories so that, if you want,

you can request all your hand histories at any time.

For play money players, they let you capture your own hand

histories if you want, but they definitely don't save them.

So the reason I'm showing you this now,

and I'm going to email it out to you later,

is if you lose your hand histories,

so you don't capture them in time,

you'll never get them back.

So make sure you're actually capturing hand histories,

because we're going to be using that for a lot of the analysis

we do.

OK, so let's talk about the league.

And honestly, I think this league

is going to be really cool.

Usually the evolution of a player

is they're terrible at poker, and then they

start becoming good at playing against bad people.

And then when they actually start playing for real,

they get crushed again because they're

used to playing against other bad people.

So this will actually hopefully get

you used to playing against other people who

are playing correctly, which is not something you can commonly

learn just from playing around with your friends.

In addition through playing in these online leagues,

you can collect stats that you could never

get from playing live.

And I think this is why the live tournament scene is

dominated by online pros.

It's because no live pro can get as many hands

or analyze their play in the way that you can do online.

It's not even comparable.

So this is given-- even if your whole intention is to only play

live the entire rest your life, doing this type of analytics

would give you a chance to learn at a much faster rate

and learn things that you would never see live.

So every week we're going to have a major tournament, which

is basically going to be the same structure, maybe

a little bit slower, than the ones we do daily,

except they're going to have real prizes.

So Akuna is giving us, for their first tournament,

Beats headphones.

And Apple TV, Bose speakers and a lot of gift cards.

And then for their second tournament,

they're giving us all of those things

plus an iPad Air and an iPad Mini.

But we're not done yet.

Because this class is focused on playing live,

we're going to end the class with a live tournament

sponsored by Optiver on the 31st, which

is the day after the last day of the class.

So after the league's over, and after you

guys are good at poker, you'll have an opportunity

to play each other in a live tournament, where their prize

pool is all of the Akuna prizes, plus a PlayStation

4, plus an iPad, plus a Kindle, and plus a GoPro.

I want this to reflect the type of things

an online, multi-table tournament player would do.

How it normally works is, during the week, and basically

every single day, there is a uniform amount

of tournaments that will just run every single day

at the top of the hour.

And these pros will just grind those out.

They'll get used to the structure.

And that's where they'll kind of grind their teeth.

And then on the weekends, that's when

you get a lot of the square money, a lot of the newer guys

who only play poker on the weekend.

And those are more gimmicky, idiosyncratic tournaments,

but also the highest value.

So that's why I'm producing the tournament structure like this,

where the bulk of your tournaments

will be very similar to each other.

But then the tournaments that really matter

will be completely different, at least relatively different.

So that's why I'm doing that.

That'll make you get a feel for what

these guys have to go through.

So let's talk about turbos.

Turbos let you focus on pre-flop decisions, which

are the area where I think there is the most

to learn among people who are new at poker.

Basically, all of your value that you're

losing in tournament is from screwing up pre-flop.

No one gets that right live because it's really difficult

to be able to feel comfortable doing what's generally

considered right.

And we're going to spend a lot of time on pre-flop.

But these turbos encourage you to do that sort of thing,

because live is a lot of pre-flop,

and you're going to be doing that in the turbos online, too.

In addition, no one wants to spend

six hours doing a tournament.

So I'm making these turbos so you can

be in and out in 45 minutes.

And then you boot up another tournament,

or you can be done with poker for that night.

In addition, you have the opportunity--

you can play as many tournaments as you want.

It's common for pros to do something called multi-tabling

which is they'll do multiple tournaments at the same time.

For the beginners, I'd probably recommend you just do one.

But for the regular league, have at that.

you want to do like all four tournaments at the same time,

go ahead, to the extent that they overlap

with each other a little bit.

OK.

So that's the end with the prize league.

So the schedule is, we're going to go through what

I'm calling basic strategy, which

are the basic axioms that we're going to be using in order

to analyze the decision making process in poker.

Then we're going to be doing pre-flop analysis.

And we're going to be doing a lot of this, because this

is really where the value add is going to be,

is getting this right.

I think the way that we can tackle

this thing is kind of a way I recommend that you

learn anything complicated.

So we're going to break this down

into three different sections.

Fundamental concept, practice, which are actually implementing

those concepts when you have 10 seconds to make a decision,

and then more advanced stuff.