How to Win at Texas Hold ‘Em: A Free MIT Course

In 2015, we fea­tured a short MIT course called Pok­er The­o­ry and Ana­lyt­ics, which intro­duced stu­dents to pok­er strat­e­gy, psy­chol­o­gy, and deci­sion-mak­ing in eleven lec­tures. Now comes a new course, this one more square­ly focused on Texas Hold ‘Em. Taught by MIT grad stu­dent Will Ma, the course “cov­ers the pok­er con­cepts, math con­cepts, and gen­er­al con­cepts need­ed to play the game of Texas Hold’em on a pro­fes­sion­al lev­el.” Here’s a quick overview of the top­ics the course delves into in the 7 lec­tures above (or find them here on YouTube).

• Pok­er Con­cepts: pre­flop ranges, 3‑betting, con­tin­u­a­tion bet­ting, check-rais­ing, float­ing, bet siz­ing, implied odds, polar­iza­tion, ICM the­o­ry, data min­ing in pok­er
• Math Con­cepts: prob­a­bil­i­ty and expec­ta­tion, vari­ance and the Law of Large Num­bers, Nash Equi­lib­ri­um
• Gen­er­al Con­cepts: deci­sions vs. results, exploita­tive play vs. bal­anced play, risk man­age­ment

You can find the syl­labus, lec­ture slides and assign­ments on this MIT web­site.  How to Win at Texas Hold ‘Em will be added to our col­lec­tion, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

MIT’s Intro­duc­tion to Pok­er The­o­ry: A Free Online Course

150 Free Online Busi­ness Cours­es

Learn Python with a Free Online Course from MIT