Cool idea. I was a professional poker player off/on during my life and came of age during the Sklansky "Theory of Poker" days, which I was pleased to see on the reading list. However, much/all of the reading recs and I imagine some of the theory taught (only skimmed the lectures) is considered very outdated nowadays in the semi-pro and professional scene.
Today, much of poker theory is driven by analyzers that are supposed to implement a practice called "GTO" (game theory optimal). There have been a lot of interesting findings in the last ~5 years that have come from these that I would be surprised to see in a course like this.
To bring someone from completely n00b level to "okay", this course is probably fine.
With a big caveat that GTO is only an optimal strategy against other players who are trying to play optimally.
If you have a table full of clowns who are playing a range of strategies (ranging from being spiteful to just all-ining every hand, to barely knowing how to play poker), you will very quickly go broke with GTO, because you didn't adjust.
This is wrong. If a strategy is actually GTO, then it is unexploitable. Meaning that if you’re playing GTO poker against a super loose player, you may not be maximally exploiting them, but you should certainly not be losing money (in expectation). See Nash Equilibrium
This is untrue. Nash equillibriums in general, and especially in poker, can be exploited in situations where one player is playing a negative EV strategy which happens at loose games. Morton's theorem can be used to derive examples where a player playing optimally under the assumption that all players are acting independently loses out to another player playing suboptimally under that same assumption due to the presense of yet a third player playing a negative EV strategy. These kinds of scenarios are known as implicit collusion, basically the two players who are implicitly colluding together have an advantage over the single player who is making optimal decisions.
Ignoring the fact that there is no known GTO solution for more than 2 players, GTO only applies under the assumption that everyone is acting independently for some fairly formal and strict notion of independence. This requirement is broken in many real world games with more than 2 players potentially playing loose and wild, where they may not actually be colluding or coordinating with one another, but they behave as if they were.
In heads up no-rake NLHE where GTO exists: do you agree that anyone playing GTO has nonnegative EV against any player regardless of their strategy?
I agree with you that you can probably construct some pathological multiplayer situations where collusion forces negative EV on a "GTO" player - assuming GTO exists in this setting.
Going back to the original parent comment:
> If you have a table full of clowns who are playing a range of strategies (ranging from being spiteful to just all-ining every hand, to barely knowing how to play poker), you will very quickly go broke with GTO, because you didn't adjust.
I feel pretty strongly that this is not representative of practical reality. I don't believe that caveats about implicit collusion against a GTO player should prevent one from calling out a harmful belief that is also provably wrong in the heads up setting (the setting where GTO is actually known to exist).
In practice, I have never seen anyone who played remotely close to Nash have negative EV against very bad players. On the other hand, I have heard a hundred times someone complain that they are losing money because their opponents are "too bad" (for their presumably excellent strategy to work as planned). This is close to ridiculous in most practical settings and also quite self-limiting.
>In heads up no-rake NLHE where GTO exists: do you agree that anyone playing GTO has nonnegative EV against any player regardless of their strategy?
In heads-up, no-rake, NLHE implicit collusion is not possible, so yes playing GTO has a non-negative EV.
>I agree with you that you can probably construct some pathological multiplayer situations where collusion forces negative EV on a "GTO" player - assuming GTO exists in this setting.
GTO always exists, but in the presence of implicit collusion it may result in a negative EV.
> feel pretty strongly that this is not representative of practical reality.
GTO is not representative of practical reality. Very very few people, if anyone, really plays GTO poker consistently. It's an excellent theoretical result, and using GTO solvers and simulators can build up good intuition, but the idea that there are these poker savants playing GTO poker in 6+ handed games is mostly a myth.
Also your claim that you have never seen anyone play against poor players have a negative EV kind of gives away that you are likely overconfident and possibly naive about your position.
I highly doubt you have been in a position to calculate someone's EV while playing poker, or assess whether someone is playing GTO poker against multiple opponents who are bad. And assuming you did possess this amazing power, GTO poker does not guarantee against losses against bad players over any particular night or week of poker. So if you've never observed that then you are likely biased in your observation. You forgot/underweighted the scenarios where someone playing really well lost money to bad players and overweighed the scenarios where someone playing well made money against bad players.
My experience is that talk about GTO poker is mostly used by people to add a more sophisticated and technical dimension to poker, people like to say that a poker play was GTO because it makes it sound authoritative and you can geek out over it, so to speak. People do the same thing across many hobbies including sports.
In reality the best advice for playing poker if you want to be profitable is to find fish and play against them. The sad truth is that there's no shortage of gambling addicts to take advantage of, or people who overestimate their abilities but lack discipline, or heck are simply rich and play poker socially and have no problem losing money and have fun doing so.
That's far more likely to yield profitable results than pretending that you can play an incredibly volatile and dynamic game like poker with anything remotely resembling game theory optimal.
Eh I don’t think we disagree on anything fundamental - and I hadn’t considered the collusive case so I’m glad you brought it up.
I see good poker players lose to bad players in a single session all the time. Even if you are crushing with a +15 BB/100 hand winrate you’re still going to lose 30-40% of your sessions. That is not an indication of negative EV.
I’ve never seen someone who understood poker very well have a losing record over a long period of time against bad players. I don’t disagree about humans never playing actual GTO, which is why I use phrases like “remotely close” to optimal. My point is that the bar is low enough that any reasonable deep attempt at learning and approximating optimal play should clear the bar to be +EV against bad players.
Parent comment says “if you’re playing GTO against clowns you’ll go broke because they are too bad and you are too GTO.” I strongly disagree with this - the reason you have negative EV is not because you are “too GTO.” If you losing money in expectation you are just not very good at the game yet. What is needed is to understand the game better (and moving closer to optimal play is a reasonable goal). I suspect you agree on this - any reasonably good player should have positive EV against fish, regardless of whether they go out of their way to exploit.
Depends what you mean by unilateral. You can have a Nash equilibrium and also implicit collusion, for example if one player is playing GTO, that is they are playing optimally under the assumption that all other players are acting independently, and two other players are implicitly colluding with one another, you can still have a Nash equilibrium so that none of the players stand to gain anything by changing their strategy, and also the player playing GTO will have a negative expected value.
Imagine a situation where the collusion was explicit, you are playing GTO against two opponents who are colluding with one another. A Nash equilibrium will still exist in that situation but your EV will be negative. Now explicit collusion is considered cheating but you can imagine a scenario where two players play in such a way that even though they are not explicitly colluding with one another, they behave the exact same way as if they were. This happens among a group of loose players where their actions as a group rewards the group as a whole against players who are acting independently.
In other words, just because a strategy is optimal does not mean that it results in a positive expectation. You might be in a situation where playing perfectly just minimizes your losses, but you will still lose anyways.
Video sets up a situation where GTO player is bluffcatcher vs nuts or bluff. He has negative EV with those cards in that spot, not negative EV marginally.
If a GTO player has negative EV in heads up poker, he is not playing GTO.
You don't understand multi-player poker and I see this meme repeated on many poker forums. It's possible for GTO to be worse than other strategies, based on suboptimal strategies of other players at the table.
I’m going to answer a different (maybe more helpful) question than the one you asked:
Q: As a noob, what’s the quickest way to become better than breakeven, then better than breakeven including the rake/seat charge?
A: Find a way to play against the worst players you can find, or at least players worse than you. There are likely some tough games near you; avoid those. They might be some soft games; play in those.
Game selection and exploiting opponent weaknesses can easily turn a player with a grasp of the basics into a winning player.
I've long decided that this is basically the only skill in poker. OK, that's too trite, but it dominates all other skills.
If you can play even a little bit - eg you know some hand rankings and don't get too drunk - you're better than some players, and you can find a game you can beat.
If you're the 20th best player in the world, but instead of looking to play against weaker players you yearn to challenge yourself against the best, or in general if you move to bigger and tougher games every time things are going well, you will lose money in the long run.
It's not quite that simple in practice. You might be one of the worst players in your local cardroom, so your only winning move is not to play. Or you might be one of the best, but you don't travel to other games, so you win in spite of your self. I've seen so many people like this! If you play on the Internet, however, that's effectively not possible.
Game selection is the most important way to make money in poker, but the stronger a player you are, the more games you can select from. Isaac Haxton is a top pro player who only plays only tournaments that cost $10k+ to buyin to, and recently discussed how this works on a recent episode of the Thinking Poker podcast by Andrew Brokos. He actually recommends against tournaments for less experienced players aiming to make money since smaller buyin tournaments have large fields and thus large variance, but the "high roller" tournaments have smaller fields which make variance more reasonable.
The bigger point is that while playing against worse players is an important skill if you want to make money, poker is still a very complex game with a high skill ceiling similar to a game like chess. If you're good enough, even pro players are "worse players" and you can "select" those games. Though admittedly even the high roller tournaments require some "recreational" businessman players for enough pros to be willing to play it for it to run.
Solver study has become essential for the vast majority of top pros, which Haxton also discusses in the podcast, and I mentioned my project in the space in my other comment.
For people actually trying to make a living playing poker, it isn’t enough just to find a game you can win; the game also has to return enough per hour to make it worth your while. Even if you can reliably win, but only $5 an hour, it isn’t worth your time. There is an opportunity cost to consider.
It’s true that playing against bad players will increase your win rate but it’s also true that if you study and improve you will also improve your win rate. It’s not true that there’s no point in studying since you should only play against bad players, because “bad player” is relative to your skill.
The podcast episode I recommended is a long time pro player interviewing another long time pro player, whose widely regarded as one of the best players ever, so I think these people know better than the HN comment section of “well 20 years ago I read one sklansky book and a year ago I played a 2/5 game and didn’t win much so poker is pointless unless you play idiots”
> The bigger point is that while playing against worse players is an important skill if you want to make money, poker is still a very complex game with a high skill ceiling similar to a game like chess.
I used to strongly agree with this (skill ceiling is so high that large edges can be found if good enough) but no longer believe this is the case - I think the edges are much narrower now in the top levels of the pro scene, much of which I'm sure is due to the rise of solvers and the game being closer to "solved" now than it was even 5 years ago.
There's a lot of complex evidence for this, but without going into too much, the degree of scumbaggery in pro scenes going on is usually a strong indicator. When edges get small, pros tend to get a little scummier to get ahead.
There's also the psychological aspect of continuing to play in those soft games even when the other players know they are losing.
A guy I dealt to for years was known at the table as Hillbilly. He had a manner that just disarmed some other players. He wasn't an amazing player, but he was a lot smarter than most people assumed, and you wanted him at the table because he was fun to chat with and you thought you could beat this disheveled, ol' country boy.
When you lost to Hillbilly, it was just bad luck. When you won, it's because he's a simpleton, of course. But somehow, he always had a pretty big stack of chips in front of him.
A lot of pro players have this edge, too; just the right personality to get other people to believe their superiority, ignore their discipline, and "go on tilt" (make suboptimal decisions)
Agreed. I think the same strategy also applies to a given table or night: only play hands where you have good cards. It's a good strategy for beginners
If you mean at the live casino, for low stakes (2/5 or lower), you only need one tip: find a starting hand chart from any strategy site, book, platform, whatever. Follow the chart. It will be very tight out of position and loosen up in position. Do not deviate. If you follow it, you will be the tightest player at almost any table.
You should now be a winning player. Most decisions will be easy. Any post-flop improvements will start to mint money.
Other players will note how tight you are and still give you action. They cannot help themselves.
I was a pro player for a number of years, just to give context to this advice. Start with playing very tightly, be instantly profitable, and add skills from there. And please, please, please, don't talk about poker strategy at the poker table.
The other half of this (the "Most decisions will be easy" part) is knowing rough odds.
Four to a flush on the flop? One in three chance of getting it. If a lot of people are in the hand and the flush looks like it would be the best outcome, stay in.
Same with an open-ended straight, and you should know whether others could have a better straight draw than your own.
If you see a bunch of random crap on the flop e.g. no straight draw or flush draw or high cards? If you have high pocket pair or two pairs, get aggressive as everyone else is either drawing (and you want them under the profitability threshold of 3+ other players in the hand) or playing a hopefully lower pocket pair or very ill-guided low two pairs (so watch the big blind or historically loose players).
You can usually calculate in your head how many of the unseen cards need to be somewhere to beat you: Suppose I have the best two pairs on an otherwise unspectacular board. My opponent needs a pocket pair to beat my hand. I have 8 opponents, usually a pocket pair is dealt 6% of the time. Even if I sum all the percentages---mathematically wrong but worse than the truth---it's less than 50% chance SOMEONE has been dealt a pocket pair, so I don't have to feel bad about staying in.
If you can do this quickly and make it look like you are acting impulsively or inexperienced, more money will bet against you.
I'm not semi-pro but I would expect spending hours with GTO solvers and other poker training software will play a large part in it. The idea is to get quick feedback on how well you are judging difficult situations.
Some people also have to spend a lot of time working on emotional regulation to avoid throwing good money after bad.
> emotional regulation to avoid throwing good money after bad
I was once interested in going pro, and I landed on some advice that said to go to a poker house and fold every hand for 3 hours. Poker has very high variance, and you can easily have 3 hours of hand shuffled poker and not get a single playable hand. That was when I realized I didn’t have the emotional regulation to play properly, especially, since part of the exercise was to throw away the strongest starting hand even if you are dealt it during this exercise. Also, that was about the time I realized that poker is generally an extremely boring game, with the very occassional periods of high emotion.
It did teach me a lot about going on tilt though, it’s very easy to throw away a lot of profit after a big loss.
You need to be good at deciding which cards to hold and which cards to throw away. You need to know when to get out of a game, and when you should really go out running. Also never count your money while you are playing. You will have time later. But to be realistic the most that you can hope to is to die while you are sleeping.
There’s lots of training sites and a lot of opinions about the best one/way to do this, but I think doug polk’s website upswing poker caters to a broad range of skill levels and is the one I’d personally recommend (warning though the site itself is awfully designed). Nothing is really free out there I’m aware of unless you spend a lot of time discussing things in poker forums, which I wouldn’t personally recommend.
The Raiseyouredge free course is a good basic/starter course to gain a beginning level competency of modern fundamental strategies of today’s tournament poker. Note that most of these types of courses/sites do mainly focus on tournament poker. Raiseyouredge has an excellent rep, especially in the online scene.
I have a friend who's self-studied up to a pretty good hourly rate within ~2 years. The main thing he does is tons and tons of time studying solver outputs.
In this particular case I've just directly looked at the friend's pokertracker data, which includes rake values and then you just add rakeback to get the total. It's harder to cope oneself in an online setting where there's just a precise recording of all results.
I think you can safely assume that unless someone is part of the absolute poker elite, they are unlikely to be earning anything near the median software engineering income. It’s not impossible, but it would require access to some unusually soft high stakes games, and while such games do exist, they are typically invitation only.
I was a complete blackjack noob until a few months ago when I got interested in my states online casinos.
I would check literally every position (even obvious ones) to see the expected value for each decision and quite quickly built up an intuition when I was playing without the aid (the live dealer games sometimes move too fast to input and get results back in time).
Now its like second nature and only in rare situations do I double check my judgement.
noob to "semi pro" isn't the jump you are looking for. To get to a level even remotely close to 'semi pro' would require thousands of hours of playtime.
you just need to grasp the basics.
Phil Gordon's Little Green Book and The Theory of Poker (Sklansky) are common recommendations.
I do own "How to Decided" but haven't read it yet. I will say that "Bets" and "Quit" are both easy reads and are high on value and low on noise. That is, even if you have play poker you'll get something out of both.
She holds a World Series of Poker (WSOP) gold bracelet from 2004 and used to be the leading money winner among women in WSOP history, and is still in the top five as of April 2023, despite being retired from poker, last cashing at a tournament 2010.
I'm currently full-time on a project dedicated to helping people understand how to apply solver strategy to win at live games. I generally avoid the term GTO in favor of "theory-based" since GTO usually refers to equilibrium strategy, and generally you want to study equilibrium but diverge to exploit your opponents.
You can check out my project which includes a preflop trainer at:
I also have a lot of strategy articles that explore how to use solvers to understand live cash games, and I also just started posting Youtube videos that do solver walkthroughs of high-stakes LA cash games.
I'm also doing some unique things like spaced-repetition which none of my competitors do, unfortunately very few pro poker players have heard the term so it's not a selling point to them but HN crowd tends to have heard of it.
In terms of where to start, I'd recommend where the game starts, which is preflop, and incidentally where my product starts, which is a preflop trainer that helps you study equilbrium-based preflop charts using spaced-repetition. It's currently about 90% free with only one set of charts paywalled (BB defend).
I'm actively developing both postflop content and a native mobile app, though the current app is a responsive web app that should work well on your phone.
I also have a Discord with a lot of professional live players that I've attracted via my content marketing and I'm happy to answer followup strategy questions there.
Some good books I'd recommend that are more modern:
Modern Poker Theory by Michael Acevedo
Play Optimal Poker by Andrew Brokos
Grinder's Manual by Peter Clarke (pre-solver but basically the most exhaustive guide to every concept pre-solver)
I went to Vegas for a weekend, won the Wynn classic, and final tabled their main event the following night. Poker is simple, just be the best player at all the tables. How to get there, bankroll management.
> Today, much of poker theory is driven by analyzers that are supposed to implement a practice called "GTO" (game theory optimal). There have been a lot of interesting findings in the last ~5 years that have come from these that I would be surprised to see in a course like this.
Where can one learn about these? Resources on fast moving areas like this is super hard to find if you're not "in the know" already.
A lot of it happens in closed discussions with pros who are running various simulations. Some of it is posted on training sites but a lot is not.
The game these days is all about reverse engineering strategy principles from GTO simulation output. E.g. what general principle causes the solver output to say raise 30% in this spot vs raise 80%? If you come up with a coherent story, you can apply that thought process to new situations. It's a totally different game than it was a decade ago
Just my advice, I would largely ignore the situation, and just take the overall advice that trickles down. For instance, one major advancement of the solvers was figuring out which part of your range to bluff with. There are advantages and disadvantages based on card removal--this is common knowledge now, but nobody had come up with it 15 years ago when I was a pro.
Anyway, it's still not best to play like a robot in live low stakes games, which are probably what you're going to be playing. Exploit the shit out of your opponents. GTO has some good concepts that are easy to implement, but I'd work on studying your opponents and the mistakes they are making, and decide how to capitalize on those mistakes.
If you are going to multi-table online, ignore everything I just said and become best friends with some solver software.
The problem with this advice is that solvers are one of the best ways to understand how to "exploit the shit out of your opponents".
Piosolver has several features that lets you emulate how your opponent plays, such as "node locking", that "lock" the game tree node to the strategy you suspect your opponent plays, and shows you how to maximally exploit it.
Otherwise, what is your exploitation based on? Certainly some people have great instincts for the game, but it's just untrue that solvers can't help you exploit weaker players. For example, if you're on a given board and a given river and an opponent makes a big bet, if your opponent bluffs too much you should call, if they don't bluff enough you should fold. But the solver teaches you how often they should be bluffing and thus what "too much" or "not enough" even means.
This is why I prefer the term "theory-based" to GTO, since the point of studying GTO is not to play GTO but to develop a better understanding of the underlying mechanics of the game.
Before solvers people still implemented strategies, so I'm not sure what you mean when you ask what my exploitation is based on.
I think GTO is a great way to think about the game. I don't think studying solvers is important to understand the game well, or GTO. When solvers provide an insight, it generally trickles out to the poker community and we all hear about it. It's much easier to digest traditional educational content than to futz around with a solver, and a much better use of time for a new player.
There’s not much else to say other than you’re wrong. People tried their best before solvers, then solvers came along and people who didn’t keep up with them lost to people who did. I think it’s possible for people to win without studying them because of a combination of soft games and natural instincts, but the vast majority of good players these days do solver work. If your brand new, having an experienced player distill some of those concepts is helpful, but if you want to be good you might as well start doing the things good players do sooner rather than later.
IME mostly in poker forums like twoplustwo.com or reddit or behind training site paywalls, but there are also a lot of bad/minsinformed opinions out there
Is it still possible to become a semi pro? I'm out of a job and if I can make $25 per hour with 500 hours of practice, I'll take my chances. The job market is horrible and when I'm salaried, I'm not making much more anyway (Europe). If anyone would want to mentor me, shoot me an email. I'd love to pay it forward down the line :)
It's possible, but not for most people, and it's far from easy. As others have pointed out on this post, game selection is your best path to success. If you can find games with reasonable stakes that tend to have a fair number of weak players (relative to you), you might profit nicely over time. But finding such games is easier said than done.
Making $25 an hour on average isn't just hard, for the overwhelming majority of players it's impossible, and for the group for whom it is possible, it will take a lot of time, and a lot of hard work to get to that point. And even when you get to the point where you can make that kind of money, variance will still kick your ass from time to time, and it can completely drain you emotionally.
If you do want to try, I suggest you learn how to play the game, find some games (either online or live) and see how you do. Keep track of your results. Reflect on your play. Be honest about why you're winning and why you're losing.
I think poker is best played for fun, and if you manage to learn and play well enough to the point where you're consistently making money, that's a bonus, and perhaps an opportunity to take it to another level.
Is it harder than learning how to program? I've played poker a bit and learned being tight aggressive (just some basic strategy, the most "advanced" concepts I learned were polarizing hand ranges, implied odds and having a poker tracker in your games and what all those things meant).
I'm assuming you mean learning how to program as a profession, but it's a difficult question to answer. It relies on so many factors, both in terms of the "market" you're in, as well as who you are as a person. Based on the average person that tries to become a professional programmer vs the average person that tries to become a professional poker player, I'd say it's considerably more realistic to become a professional programmer.
But again, if you want to find out just play the game and see how you do. Find stakes you can beat and try to move up.
Nah, I think GP is spot on. I took a quick look at some of the materials and I would say that they're pretty outdated as far as current understanding of the game goes. It's more in line with how people talked about & thought about the game in the boom era (the 00s) or possibly even earlier, to be honest.
If I were teaching poker in a university setting I would generally work with a bunch of toy games to teach concepts of polarization, MDF, indifference, and so on. Those are the fundamentals of poker theory in the modern environment.
I'll give you a concrete example. In lecture five at 15m he starts talking about donk betting, which is when you lead out with a bet on a street into the aggressor from the previous street instead of checking to them to let them bet (for example, you're the big blind, you call a raise from the button preflop, and then when the flop comes you bet directly yourself instead of checking). He mentions that this is unusual, which is true, because normally you would just check and let the person with the betting lead bet into you if you have a good hand, and so the donk bet is typically weak--but then he goes on to say that advanced players may exploit this perception by donk betting with a strong hand knowing you will interpret it as weak, and then you can exploit that line of thinking, etc.
A more modern view of donk betting is this: the "betting lead" is not anything inherent to the game but just an artifact of the range of hands each person has. Typically when you call preflop from the big blind, you'll have a wider range of hands than the person raising preflop, because they can't raise too wide profitably due to players left to act after them, and you get to both close the action & also get better pot odds on your call from the big blind. Not only do you have a wider range of hands, then, but you also lack the strongest hands (AA, KK etc) because you would have reraised (3bet) them preflop. So overall, on most flops, the preflop raiser will have a stronger range of hands and can thus be expected to "take the lead" betting.
But! There are some flops that can neutralize or even reverse this range advantage. The flop 654 rainbow is now better for the big blind than for an early position (EP) raiser, because the big blind will have many straights, sets, two pairs, and pair+draw hands in their range, while the EP player will generally not have these hands. The EP's big pairs (AA, KK etc) are less strong, and some of their other strong hands preflop like AK or AQs have totally whiffed too.
As a consequence, it is correct for the big blind to have a donk betting strategy in this situation--the way the two ranges interact, the big blind is now incentivized to put money into the pot directly, and in fact, if the big blind does not have a donk betting strategy on this flop, the EP player should respond by virtually never betting themselves. The big blind is incentivized to bet frequently with a small sizing and put pressure on EP's overcards; if you have, say, 86s, and you can get a hand like QJo to fold, that's a pretty decent result on the flop, because QJo has six outs to improve to a better pair.
Anyway, sorry that this example was probably hard to follow if you don't play poker, but it's probably illustrative of some of the ways in which poker theory has evolved over the years--more focus on the specifics of range vs range interactions. There are many more complicated and intricate examples on turns and rivers that solvers are very good at finding but may or may not be obvious to humans.
> It's more in line with how people talked about & thought about the game in the boom era (the 00s) or possibly even earlier
Note that most poker games were very easy in those days. You'd log in and enter a couple of tables where most of your opponents were going to take the name 'Hold'em' very literally, also some of them were drunk and you could basically expect them to bet with anything without paying any attention to your table image.
So the optimal strategy in those days was to simply wait for solid hands, you would get paid for them anyway even if you had been folding everything for the last hour.
Good detailed example. One simple one I like to use without going too much in depth - it used to be considered heresy to simply complete in the small blind when the action had folded to you - you were supposed to raise or fold and if you deviated from that in the early 00’s you’d have been widely mocked.
Solvers love completing the sb. They also occasionally like to open limp on the button against certain strategies - another thing that would have been sacrilege not that long ago that’s completely commonplace now. The “donk bet” once belonged there too.
Today, much of poker theory is driven by analyzers that are supposed to implement a practice called "GTO" (game theory optimal). There have been a lot of interesting findings in the last ~5 years that have come from these that I would be surprised to see in a course like this.
To bring someone from completely n00b level to "okay", this course is probably fine.