Review of Percentage Hold’em
This book holds a nostalgic place in my heart as one of the first really solid products to come out of discussions held on the newsgroup {\tt rec.gambling.poker}, although at that time it was just {\tt rec.gambling}. Percentage Hold’em, subtitled “The Book of Numbers”, is a set of explanations around an enormous number of simulations of how various Hold’em two card starting hands play against other starting hands, in situations ranging from heads-up play to eleven player tables.
The computing power available to the author at the time the book was written was a tiny fraction (probably less than 1/100) of what’s available on the desktop of the average reader of this review. Nonetheless, Case (a pseudonym, although the name the author reveals in the book, Will Hyde, seems almost equally improbable to me) performs enough calculations so that the results are trustworthy. The methodologies are clearly explained so that all but the most math-phobic reader can easily understand how the author arrives at his results.
The bulk of the book is made up of tables. These tables take a given two card starting hand in Texas Hold’em, for example, QJ suited, and ran it against from 1 to 10 random other starting hands 500,000 times each and determined what percentage of the time the given hand won. Of course, a hand that wins 37% of the time against 3 other opponents is probably worth playing. Therefore, Case also adjusts each hand based on the number of opponents playing, with any hand recording a positive number being a positive expectation play. There are additional tables detailing in each of these situations what the distribution of the values of the winning hands are (e.g., two pair, straight) among other information.
Case even goes so far as to advocate this Slot Gacor…