What is covered, week by week, and which topics each lecture draws on.
Twelve dated lectures, one for each teaching week. Each opens by naming the earlier week it revises or extends, so the sequence is cumulative rather than modular — a result from week 3 is still load-bearing in week 10. Week 3 carries the slide deck, where the exact-outs calculation is worked one step per slide.
What formalizing an instinct even means
Orientation — a short history of poker theory, what this course means by "formalize," and the folk claims we'll spend the semester cashing in
Week 1 · 22 February 2027
Counting the deck
Combinatorics before probability — how many starting hands there really are, and why the answer depends on what you're counting
Week 2 · 1 March 2027
Pot Odds, Equity, and the Calling Decision
Reopening week 1's rule of 4 and 2 — its exact error, outs-counting by draw type, and one real hand priced from equity through to a dollar EV
Week 3 · 8 March 2027
Expected value and variance
Formalizing EV beyond one hand, why a correct call still loses most of the time it's made, and why sample size is doing more work than it looks
Week 4 · 15 March 2027
Position and the value of information
A clean decision-theory result — the value of perfect information — used to put a number on why acting last is worth something
Week 5 · 22 March 2027
Range reading and Bayesian updating
Turning a partial signal — a bet size, not a revealed hand — into an updated probability, and watching it flip last week's call into a fold
Week 6 · 29 March 2027
Mixed strategies and the algebra of bluffing
Deriving optimal bluffing frequency and minimum defense frequency from indifference conditions, in the simplest toy game that has both
Week 7 · 5 April 2027
GTO versus exploitative play
What "unexploitable" actually means, formalized as a zero-exploitability property of week 7's equilibrium, versus the higher-EV but riskier alternative of deviating to exploit a fixed opponent
Week 8 · 12 April 2027
Multi-way pots
Which of this course's two-player results survive a third player at the table, tested against a real Monte Carlo simulation rather than assumed
Week 9 · 19 April 2027
Tournament equity and the Independent Chip Model
Why a chip isn't worth a dollar once elimination is on the table, made precise with the standard recursive ICM calculation and checked against the naive chip-proportional model it's often confused with
Week 10 · 26 April 2027
Bankroll management and the Kelly criterion
Why the size of a bet matters even when its EV is fixed and positive, formalized as maximizing long-run exponential growth rather than per-bet expectation
Week 11 · 3 May 2027
Capstone: how much of good poker intuition can be formalized
Grading the semester's own four promises, solving the real Kuhn poker equilibrium and checking it against the published result, and naming what stayed outside every tool this course built
Week 12 · 10 May 2027