Michael Acevedo - Modern Poker Theory: Building an unbeatable strategy based on GTO principles

Michael Acevedo is a professional online tournament player, coach and leading poker theorist. In 2013 he quit his job as a financial analyst to pursue his dream of becoming a professional poker player. His background as a mathematician and expertise in process improvement helped him master the theoretical aspects of poker. He started playing online professionally in 2014 and has earnt over $1,500,000 in online tournament cashes.

During the last few years Michael has worked alongside some of the brightest minds in modern poker, including WSOP bracelet winner Martin Nizmojiz Kozlov, WCOOP bracelet winner and PLO coach Fernando jnandez87 Habegger and the living legend, three-time triple crown winner and author, Jon Apestyles Van Fleet. Michael makes educational poker videos and content for training websites and staking groups including pocarr.com and coaches hundreds of players from around the world. He has become one of the most recommended tournament coaches in the pocketfives.com coaching directory.

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First published in 2019 by D&B Publishing

Copyright 2019 Michael Acevedo

The right of Michael Acevedo to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission of the publisher.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: 978 1 909457 89 8

Cover and book design by Horacio Monteverde.
Printed and bound by Versa Press in the US.

All sales enquiries should be directed to D&B Poker:

www.dandbpoker.com

I have met so many people throughout my life and poker career who have helped and guided me in some way that unfortunately, I wont be able to acknowledge them all.

First, I want to thank Alex Carr and his staking group Pocarr for giving me the opportunity to start playing online multi-table tournaments (MTTs). Pocarr started backing me when I couldnt beat $11 MTTs and assisted me all the way up to playing $10,000 buy-in world championship events. They believed in me, offered me staking and gave me access to world-class coaching when I was no one, and that is something Ill never forget.

When I was playing $22 MTTs I was very fortunate to get a private coaching session with Jon Van Fleet. In that first session we connected immediately. At the time I was working on my first GTO ranges. Jon liked my ideas and invited me to listen in on his GTO study group, a group that included top tier players such as Stephen Chidwick and Elio Fox. At that time, they were studying Will Tiptons Expert Heads-Up No-Limit Holdem, gathering weekly to go over the concepts in a time before GTO had gotten into the mainstream MTT realm and well before modern-day solvers existed. They made me part of the group despite the fact I was many levels below them, giving me the opportunity to thrive and realize my true potential and forever changing the course of my poker career.

Later down the road other great poker minds such as Daniel Dvoress, Dylan Linde and Martin Kozlov joined our GTO study group. Martin was also obsessed with solving poker and our minds were very alike, so we worked together for a long time after the original GTO group dissolved. Martin introduced me to the rest of his poker crew and eventually I started traveling with them, playing the live poker circuit and meeting a lot of new and interesting people from all around the world. Today, Martin is one of my closest friends and I thank him for supporting me all this time.

PioSOLVER was the first GTO solver I ever used. I have received a lot of support from the program developers Piotr Lopusiewicz and Kuba Straszewski, who incorporated many of my ideas for general improvements into PioSOLVER. Working with them greatly helped me with my GTO study.

Thanks to Jonathan Little, Byron Jacobs and Dan Addelman for believing in me and offering me the opportunity to share my ideas with the world. They helped shape Modern Poker Theory into the book you are now reading. This book would not be possible without them.

And finally, thanks to my Mother, Hannia. Everything I have and everything I will ever be, I owe it to you!

Michael Acevedo, July 2019

I first met Michael when he was a low- to mid-stakes grinder and I became his coach. From the start of our first session, I was struck by his level of enthusiasm and theoretical knowledge. When he showed me the Heads-Up Display (HUD) he had constructed in Holdem Manager, I was impressed, and even a little envious. The HUD was about the most functional and deep-diving HUD I had ever seen and I have used quite a few paid-for HUDs. What really stood out was the incredible degree of attention to detail, and I was astounded by the amount of work it must have taken him.

That HUD, combined with Michaels background knowledge and eagerness, led me to invite him into a study group of which I was a member and which also included elite, high-stakes players such as Stephen Chidwick, Elio Fox and Martin Kozlov. There was a catch, though. Michael had to read four out of five chapters of Will Tiptons Expert Heads Up No Limit Holdem in two days because we were reviewing the final chapter. This book is not exactly a page-turner and I had created the study group simply because I wanted some personal accountability around reading it and practicing. Frankly, I did not expect Michael to actually read it all but he showed up claiming he had, so I quizzed him and verified hed done the reading and, still somewhat cautiously, let him into the group.

I must admit, another selfish reason I invited Michael to join the group is that I thought he might be happy to work on some of the Excel spreadsheets and other data-organizing tasks that we really didnt want to do. We were just beginning to learn PioSOLVER back then and Michael was a big help in structuring our findings and optimizing our studying. I would like to think that this was the moment when Michael began to discover his passion for studying theory, unearthing new ideas and doing the data-crunching necessary to get novel information.

However, the real reason why I made the offer to Michael is that I value hard work, persistence and enthusiasm above pretty much any other trait, even intelligence. As well as being very bright, Michael clearly has all three of these crucial traits.

I do not subscribe to the common high-stakes attitude of keeping knowledge hidden to keep the losing players losing. When I first started playing the cleverest players were, arguably, those who won the most as very little modern information (in the form of solvers, Nash and ICM calculations) existed at the time. Back then, players often formed social groups where they would exchange ideas and build on each others insight. I was lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time and, from the beginning, surrounded myself with brilliant poker players. Now, with the existence of solvers, one can generally get objective answers to any question. Therefore, it is no longer the most intelligent or the most popular who make the most money, but rather those who are willing to put in the hours, grinding away and tinkering with these powerful but frustrating programs.