Book Review: Secrets of Professional Tournament Poker Volume 2

I’ve just published a review of Jonathan Little’s Secrets of Professional Tournament Poker Volume 2. Here’s the synopsis:

The book is subtitled “Stages of the Tournament”, but fewer than half of the book’s 270 pages are dedicated to this topic. Ironically, much of the book addresses topics on which Little is not an expert and on which his advice, though delivered with an air of authority, is founded only upon his own anecdotal experience and perhaps a little research.

What poker content there is is good and may be enough to justify the $27.95 cover price, just don’t buy Secrets of Professional Tournament Poker Volume 2 expecting an entire book full of poker strategy.

You can read my full review or buy Secrets of Professional Tournament Poker, Vol. 2: Stages of the Tournament

8 thoughts on “Book Review: Secrets of Professional Tournament Poker Volume 2”

  1. I really enjoyed Vol 1 by Little. Vol 2 however was a bit of a disappointment. I found the section on sunglasses to be particularly suspicious considering his association with Blue Shark optics. I agree with your overall assessment, and honestly the wait between Vols 1 and 2 probably raised my expectations too high.

  2. This book review isn’t listed on the reviews page. That leads me to ask are there any other reviews which aren’t listed? I swing by here every 3 months or so, so I might have missed some good stuff. Have you reviewed Little’s Vol 1, for example?

    • Yeah I haven’t updated that page in a while. It’s something by girlfriend created and used to do for me back when she was managing the website, which she doesn’t have time for anymore, so now it’s just whatever my lazy ass gets around to doing. Anyway here are all the blog posts I’ve tagged as book reviews. I didn’t review SPTP V1 because V2 is all the publisher sent me for review. My guess is that it’s probably a lot better, if it’s actually about how to play cards.

  3. Haven’t read the book but it’s good that you call Little out on stuff that he doesn’t really know enough about. The comments about $200 an hour and the gentle staircase up to high stakes HU sngs are ridiculous.

    You should probably go a bit further and advocate that people don’t buy the book, despite it being OK in parts. Readers deserve a better product and won’t get it unless mediocre poker books get justly harsh reviews.

    To have any chance of making a lot of money at online poker you need to be young (not always, but usually), very intelligent and totally committed. It’s possible to be all three of those things, read all of the good books, and still not be up to the task in 2012. In 2013, things are only going to get harder and silly notions about an average Joe crushing mid/high stakes just encourages the deluded and foolhardy to lose a lot of money.

    Then again, the games are now so dry perhaps that’s what Little is hoping for!

    • Being young has nothing to do with it. It’s true that young people or more likely to be in a situation where they can be fully committed, but that doesn’t mean if you find yourself in a situation to be fully committed you can’t because you’re young. So the more accurate statement is intelligence and commitment are the 2 criteria. Not living in the US could be a criteria in today’s world too.

      • It’s just far more likely that you have the capacity to learn when you are younger, though, and there is a lot to learn. You aren’t going to find many guys in their mid-50s who can start playing poker as a beginner and work their way up to mid and high stakes. Certainly not online, anyway. I doubt that one in ten could be taught to beat 6-max 100nl, anymore.

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Book Review: Secrets of Professional Tournament Poker Volume 2

Jonathan Little’s Secrets of Professional Tournament Poker Volume 2 contains the following words of wisdom: “Unlike basically every other area of interest, you do not have to be accomplished to write a poker book. You simply have to know how to look intelligent. Because of this, few poker books contain winning information.” This is quite true, and Little’s numerous successes leave no doubt that he’s among the winning few qualified to dispense advice about how to play cards.

Unfortunately, less than half of this book is about how to play cards. Though it’s subtitled “Stages of the Tournament”, fewer than half of the book’s 270 pages are dedicated to this topic. Ironically, much of the book addresses topics on which Little is not an expert and on which his advice, though delivered with an air of authority, is founded only upon his own anecdotal experience and perhaps a little research.

Little offers superficial, non-expert advice on topics as varied as psychology, nutrition, exercise, investing, traveling, and planning for retirement. Given the number of books qualified experts on these subjects have written, in some cases specifically for a poker playing audience, there’s no reason for a book purporting to offer poker tournament strategy to devote so much space to these topics.

The idea seems to be that this book is about teaching you to be a professional poker player, and so Little wants to address a number of topics that are of practical importance to a professional in addition to teaching specific in-game tactics. The problem is that there are many different kinds of professionals, playing at a wide variety of stakes both live and online and with a wide variety of goals, constraints, abilities, etc.

Secrets doesn’t address a particular audience but instead haphazardly speaks sometimes to one group and sometimes to another. It’s hard to imagine any aspiring professional requiring an explanation of what rake is or an admonition against putting chips in his pocket. On the other hand, even many winning professionals would have a right to feel frustrated when Little says things like, “Assume you can make $200/hour playing poker online,” or “If you have $5 million in your retirement fund, which isn’t too tough to do if you are putting $40,000 towards your retirement every year, you can retire and live the rest of your life doing basically whatever you want.”

These passages are indicative of Little’s general tendency to make it all sound so easy. Throughout the book, there isn’t a lot of empathy for the sorts of challenges aspiring professionals will confront. For example, Little wisely advises tournaments players to practice in heads up sit-and goes so that they’ll be experienced when they get heads up at the end of a tournament. He suggests beginning with $5 heads-up games and moving up in stakes, blithely concluding that, “Keep moving up and you will eventually beat the highest-stakes heads-up games,” as thought all it takes is a little practice to crush the $5Ks.

What poker content there is is good enough. I like Little’s discussion of his general approach to each stage of the tournament (pre-ante/deep stacks, middle stages with antes, bubble, final table, short-handed, heads up), where to find value at each stage, what sorts of mistakes players tend to make, and how to adapt to different sorts of dynamics at each stage. My only regret is that he doesn’t devote more space to these subjects, leaving him to sometimes conclude an interesting discussion with a vague platitude such as, “You should take small risks to gain a lot of chips at times, while other times you should fold without a second thought.”

This discussion opens the book, then is interrupted by a long diversion into all of the largely non-strategy stuff that I mentioned above. At the very end of the book, Little returns to hard strategy with a number of example hands that relate back to concepts discussed in the beginning. These, too, are good, and the beginning and end of the book alone may be enough to justify the $27.95 cover price. Just don’t buy Secrets of Professional Tournament Poker Volume 2 expecting an entire book full of poker strategy, because a lot of it addresses subjects that simply aren’t the author’s area of expertise and on which much better and more thorough information is available elsewhere.

If you found this review helpful and choose to purchase this book, please use this affiliate link to do so: Secrets of Professional Tournament Poker, Vol. 2: Stages of the Tournament

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