Great Minds Think Alike

What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; 

there is nothing new under the sun. 

--Ecclesiastes 1:9

I was surfing the archives section of the 2+2 forums last night and stumbled upon a neat little flowchart of how to play a poker hand. The guy who long ago created this flowchart had evidently done so in an effort to teach his girlfriend how to play poker. He wanted a means of simplifying her thought/decision process on each street of a hand, and this is what he came up with:

My first thought when seeing this chart was, "hey, this is pretty cool!"

My second thought, however, was, "hey, wait a minute! This is a simplified version of my REDi system. He's just put it into flowchart form!"

In other words, I can (almost) overlay REDi directly on top of the flowchart process:

Granted, the flowchart is pretty simplistic, and wouldn't work very well in a tough game with L2 or above thinking opponents. It ignores some key things like Reading your position, board texture, your own image, and so forth. It also misses the key step of Estimating your pot commitment level. There are also a bunch of advanced lines and implementation strategies like check-raising, semi-bluffing, floating, inducing bluffs, and the like that are left out...

.... but, honestly, for a beginner, this is actually a pretty good way to think about a poker hand and arrive at a reasonable decision.

So, my third thought was a repeat of my first one: "hey, this is pretty cool!"

They say that there are no new original thoughts, just original people rediscovering and reorganizing things to fit their own world view. I suppose this is just another example of that notion in action. Pretty cool, indeed.

All-in for now...
-Bug