Story time. Yeah, you know me.

Ok, so I ask myself, if I was new coming to the forum and I came to the BC to learn what would I hope/expect to find, what would be valuable to me and what would confuse the hell out of me?

One thing that could be argued is currently not as obvious as would be useful to an abject beginner is a filter that tells us what is standard and what depends - what is just an opinion. Another side of this is information overload - it is sometimes good to see the same thing described in three or four different ways by people who understand them slightly differently - it aids in deeper understanding - but for the initial fix the simplified explanation is probably better off standing alone.

The point I'm trying to get at is.. while a digest has a wealth of information on a variety of topics the quality and content coverage of the digest-worthy posts is not consistent. What I would treasure above all else is if we could distill the wisdom of these posts into structured essays that cover a subject. Spoon's recently bumped post about hand combinations and blockers is a classic example of the kind of distillation that makes other posts on a similar topic obsolete.

Also, I do not think these posts ideally live in a vacuum. Ideally there will be a structure - how to think about poker - whereby subjects are connected to other subjects and you can see how what you learn in one area begins to apply in other areas. Maybe it's not so much a structure as it's an intelligent hyperlinking of subjects one to another that I'm thinking about.

Let me see if I can think of some examples. Some good ideas in this thread already. Actually Bankroll Management is a classic example of this done well. The text is automatically transformed into a link to the classic strategy article on the topic. Similarly "hand combinations" or "blockers" could link to the above mentioned spoon post. Maybe a wiki-like resource could be used to take down the best, most succinct coverage of discreet topics and provide that auto-link when terms are used. Maybe the poker dictionary could be expanded to provide this type of functinonality.

Once again, I am not looking for numbers. I'm not looking for hundreds of thousands of posts, tens of thousand of threads, thousands of poker dictionary entries or hundreds of strategy articles. The number available is completely unimportant to me. What's important is that we have a high quality authoritative article at the heart of every discreet topic - or at the very least at the heart of all the beginner topics. An article that presents simply the unvarnished truth without backstory or opinion.

So, am I looking at taking Renton's classic strategy articles or Pyroxene's odds tables and discarding them? Kind of yes. For each topic I am thinking to consider carefully what the brief article on the topic must cover, draw inspiration from everything already posted, maybe rewrite parts of 5-10 existing digest posts to provide succinct coverage of the topic and then elevate this new best and authoritative description above all the alternatives. Do I want to throw away all the gold that is produced over the years? No, obviously not. But I would relegate it to a "further study" section rather than the immediate answer. And I would structure that, so it is more serviceable.

In a digest I would have a section for the current wisdom that lists the topics that are important covered in the best possible factual way. Below that would be a link to "The Wisdom of the Ages" - which will contain one link to each year, and within each year there will be one link to each month. Within each month will be the solid valuable posts produced during that month. One way of determining which ones they are is the star rating. Say if a post results in a 4 or more star rating it is linked from the "best of the month" post that becomes part of "Wisdom of the Ages". That way a lot of mediocre posts will fade further into the background and the good ones will be easier to find for those who want to do further study. I am not proposing doing this for the entire post archive - I'm proposing putting the structure in place and maintaining it going forward.

Many of these topics will have exercises against them. By exercises I don't mean one specific exercise that you can go through to put someone on a range or calculate EV in a situation. I mean it should outline how you pinpoint the information that allows you to do an exercise in this area and shows an example of how it is done. Like a hand range topic could refer to (a distillation of) Robb's posts on range practice. So each exercise will contain the process that is the exercise and an (excessively illustrated/explained) example.

What I am proposing is a project of some scope. The basic idea is to identify discreet topics, for each topic give some thought to and describe what the coverage of that topic must address - what the scope of the article must be - make a write-up of that topic - get feedback on it and get rid of fluffy language, opinions and unnecessary justifications - explain what topics are associated and in which way they are associated - identify potential exercises in the area and do the same for the exercise article.

Then when a newbie comes to the forum, posts a hand and is clueless - we'll quickly read it over, link him to the relevant 2-4 articles, tell him in this situation he needs to make an EV calculation (link to exercise telling him how to do that), put the opponent on a range (link to exercise telling him how to do that) come back to this post and post his results/thoughts based on what we ask him to do. Then when he comes back we say that he needs to spend some more time understanding equity - tell him to spend 6 hours on equty calculations with hand ranges (link to exercise etc) and then come back with another hand where he shows us what he's learned.

Complicated questions are complicated. Some things are style, some are opinion, some are strategy or based on image and flow. But some things are basic, and for the basic things we should have the truth on tap instead of having to construct it every time someone asks about it.

The other thing is that with a defined set of exercises (calculate showdown equity, put people on a range, calculate fold equity etc etc) - if these exercises are well enough described we can suggest as I mentioned in the example above that the person in question use x hours on this specific type of exercise. Rather than say "go study" and then when people are lost they don't learn and continue asking stupid questions - in this way we can suggest to them exactly the kind of study and exercise they should do.

This whole project is completely not worth it, if the results are going to be on the same level as and just an alternative to existing poker articles and the poker dictionary and so on. The process needs to cut to the bone of each topic and be universally seen as being true with no fluff or opinion so it can become not just true but also (hopefully) eternal. And for this the outcome of this project would need to be guaranteed a privileged place. The bankroll management style auto-linking is an obvious candidate, but even preferred treatment in the beginner's digest (as mentioned in the Wisdom of the Ages section) would be completely sufficient. But it would need to be clear which is the authoritative piece of truth and that should be a default answer that people stumble upon without reflection or research.

In terms of attribution (to authors) I'm a bit cold. The article that is the simple truth should not have the character of the author - or the opinions, backstory or justifications of the author. And it should also not be sacred. Let's say I write up something on hand ranges, we all agree that it's a solid piece and we put it up as the entry - time goes, I get hit by a bus and die, and it is found that my piece while fine is missing some crucial dimension. I would want it to be updated to be more correct and more true without bloating it with references to how I was the initial author and it was amended by this person for this reason yada yada. If using it as a resource all of that bloat is bad - the pure simple truth of the topic is what should be found when it is looked up.

When we get to advanced topics where style, strategy and preference become more of an issue there is much more room for author-styled, -justified, -argued and -attributed articles, but the core articles should focus on delivering the simple truth as simply as possible.

I'd be quite happy to contribute. I'm not particularly suited to writing articles of this type and would tend to put in lots of unnecessary fluff, but I certainly wouldn't mind giving it a stab - and I am particularly keen on the first and third stages - formulating the scope of an entry and defluffing it to make it as clean and simple as possible.