From Anaconda to Zig-Zag

I read "Poker Strategy", a 1971 book on poker by A.D. Livingston. Mr. Livingston seems to be quite a polymath, since according to the front matter, he has also written books about bass fishing, cooking and grilling. This book is so old that it even uses the word "niggardly" with no apparent shame.

The book consists of three parts. First one is about poker in general, the second is a bunch of useless probability tables (for example, the table for hand improvement probabilities in 7-stud doesn't feature dead cards, which you'd think would be pretty essential) and the third and the most interesting part examines various poker home game variations. This part also featured an interesting section about nonstandard poker hands such as "blaze" (five paint cards), "big dog" (ace high, 8 low, no pair) and "bobtail straight" (four card straight) that some exotic poker variations use. The Finnish national poker variation Soko was listed under name "New York Stud".

The advice that this book gives out is old and in places contradicts what we have learned now. The most amusing thing about it was when it started to talk about an interesting poker variation of "Hold Me" which I realized only after reading the description of its mechanism that it was actually Texas Hold'Em. But it was interesting to see this otherwise so familar game momentarily through the eyes of somebody coming from old school poker. The strategy advices of this book about Hold'Em is so simplistic that I now truly understand how easy the card sharks had it and what a massive improvement Super/System was, if this was really the level of knowledge back then.

Comparing this simplistic view on Hold'em to the massive amount of strategy analysis published during the past decade also raises the question if these other obscure forms of poker would contain similar depths for the theoreticians to plumb, were these games as popular and played as widely as Texas Hold'Em. "Sklansky on Cincinnati Liz"... that has an interesting ring to it.