For just $2.99, you can purchase The Thinking Poker Diaries, Volume 1 directly from me (you’ll get an EPUB, a PDF, and a Kindle file) or from Amazon (Kindle file only).

There’s a substantial preview available on Amazon, but for a better idea of what to expect, here’s the Table of Contents:

Introduction
How I Became A Poker Player
Introduction to the WSOP
Day One
Three-Betting Light
Day Two
The Bubble
Day Three
Playing a Short Stack
Day Four
More Stories! More Strategy! More Poker!

For those who do read it, please star & review on Amazon and recommend to your friends. I deliberately made the book very inexpensive because I’m more interested in reaching a wide audience than in maximizing my profit.

I’d also be very appreciate for any constructive criticism, as I plan to do a lot more of these and would love to see them improve with each volume.

Thanks!

Andrw

The Big News

For those of you who can’t get enough Thinking Poker strategy, now you can get more! We’ve released a series of premium podcasts featuring more than five hours of strategy content relating to tournament poker in general and drawing specifically on examples from the 2013 WSOP Main Event. Whether you’re preparing for the World Series of Poker or another big event yourself or just enjoy hearing stories from the world’s biggest poker tournament, there’s something here for you. You can score your Thinking Poker Premium Podcasts here for just $19 at www.nitcast.com.

Timestamps

:30 – Hello and welcome; Andrew at Lucky Chances; Thinking Poker Premium; Poker’s 1%
25:39 – Strategy from the Mailbag

Secrets of Professional Tournament Poker Volume 1 is a dangerous book because it has the potential to lull inexperienced readers into a false sense of understanding. Only the simplest of concepts are explained in clear and straightforward fashion, with Little blithely advising readers to use their judgment whenever things get complicated. Help with these tricky judgment calls is of course what all but the most inexperienced players will be looking for in a poker book. For example, “If called, you should make a continuation bet on every flop, as you are representing a strong hand by re-raising pre-flop. Again, do not go overboard with these plays or they will become unprofitable.” So, continuation bet every time, but don’t go overboard with it?

You can read my full review here.

Also don’t forget that John will be the guest on this week’s podcast, so you’ll get to hear more about the book and the man behind it soon.

John “KasinoKrime” Beauprez, winner of the 2013 $5000 pot-limit omaha $1500 no-limt hold ’em 6-max WSOP event, will be our guest on Episode 43 of the podcast. In addition to talking to him about his poker career and the excitement of winning his first bracelet, we’ll also talk PLO strategy.

John is the author of PLO QuickPro, a hefty soup-to-nuts strategy book. We considered featuring PLO QuickPro on a month-long bookclub, but ultimately decided against it on the assumption that the $300 price tag would be a barrier to participation for a large percentage of listeners. Instead, John has made one chapter of the book free for readers of this blog to download, and we encourage you to read it before you listen to our interview.

It’s worth noting that although featuring a book or author on the show doesn’t necessarily constitute a recommendation thereof, speaking for myself, I’m nearly finished my first read-through of the book and have found it quite good so far. I’ll be publishing a review in the next week or so.

If you have suggestions for questions either about John or about PLO strategy, please leave them as comments here and we’ll consider them for the show.

Timestamps

0:37 Hello and Welcome
26:30 Strategy
42:05 Civil Unrest in Istanbul
52:48 Book Club

This is the thread that spurred Nate’s simulation of the WSOP $10K Heads Up event. This is a new thread he started about the simulation.

Strategy

Effective stacks $260. Villain opened MP over a few limpers to $11. Hero flatted the CO with 10c8c. Limpers all folded.

(Pot: $29 before rake) Flop is: Js2h6s

Villain c-bet $20
Hero raises to $65
Villain asks for a count after about 20 seconds, I tell him, then he counts his stack of green (about $400) and calls after an additional 30-40 seconds.

(Pot: $159 before rake) Turn is: 7d
Villain leads for $175
Hero folds

Timestamps

0:30 Hello and Welcome
3:38 Book Club: Parts of The Mental Game of Poker 2
30:35 Strategy
56:15 Taylor Caby, approves of this segment

Bookclub

This week’s bookclub includes some references to a recent What’s Your Play? post. Next week will conclude our discussion of The Mental Game of Poker 2. We’ll focus on Chapters 5 – 8 and the Conclusion, pages 119 – 171.

Strategy

Blinds 25/50, Hero has 15K, Villain has 32K

Two limps, Villain raises to 225 in MP, one call, Hero raises to 625 on BTN, SB calls, Villain calls, others fold

Flop K76r (1900 in pot). Checks around.

Turn 2r (1900 in pot). Check, Villain bets 850, Hero calls, SB folds.

River 9 (3600 in pot). Villain bets 3300, Hero calls, Villain shows AQ

Edit: This episode was originally, incorrectly titled “Episode 34”. It is in fact the 33rd episode of the show. Apologies for the confusion.

Book Club

The book is just a starting point! Ed responds to listener questions and Andrew and Nate’s critiques with some of the best strategy discussion the show has seen to date. Topics include multi-way pots, re-exploiting players trying to exploit you, concealing information from tough opponents, categorizing opponents, and much more! Even if you haven’t read the book, you want to hear this in-depth strategy discussion.

Ed is @EdMillerPoker on Twitter. His self-published books, plus a lot of free strategy content, information about coaching, etc., are available from his website.

Next Month

Next month we’ll be reading Tommy Angelo’s Elements of Poker. In Episode 26, we’ll discuss Part I: Universal Elements, which runs through page 84 of the book.

Timestamps

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

Seidman not only updates his advice for contemporary game conditions but also corrects a few of his own earlier mistakes and re-explains some material in light of his current thinking about the game. The result is substantial value added to what was already an exceptionally good no-limit hold ’em cash game book, one of the few offering really high-level insights to experienced players.

You can read the full review at https://www.thinkingpoker.net/poker-book-reviews/book-review-easy-game-by-andrew-seidman/.

While you’re there, check out some of Gareth’s other posts as well. Like mine, his blog is a nice mix of strategy content and anecdotes from his travels. Gareth, originally from Canada, is currently backpacking through South America while playing a mix of live and online poker. He’s got some fascinating and funny stories that are well worth the read.

As a book for small stakes cash game players, it’s not bad, but not bad isn’t good enough when it’s covering ground already tread by great authors like Ed Miller and Dan Harrington. This was my second and more significant disappointment with No Limits: the authors write as though they are the first people to address the subject, when in fact several very good books covering the same concepts have already been written. There’s never any engagement with these other authors, never any attempt to compliment, criticize, or build on those who have gone before.

If you’re interested in reading more, check out the full review.

Has anyone else read this book? What did you think?

In the early to mid- twentieth century, millions of African-Americans departed the deep South, where many still worked as sharecroppers on the same plantations on which their ancestors slaved, to seek a better life in the metropolises of the North. The resulting demographic shifts were seismic: the black population in states like Mississippi and South Carolina decreased by more than a third, while that of Northern cities like Chicago and Detroit increased ten-fold in the space of a few decades. They sought better wages, equitable treatment, and the freedom to live and work where they pleased. What they found was a new set of hardships that, cold as their reception was, usually represented an improvement over the lynchings and Jim Crow culture of the South.

None of this is ground-breaking stuff, but it was always something that I vaguely knew without ever thinking much about. “The Great Migration” was never on the curriculum of any US history class I ever took… Read the full review.

HOCG is the single best resource I’ve seen for anyone just starting out online or still learning to beat the microstakes games (i.e. stakes smaller than $.25/$.50). Though still good, the section on moving up to small stakes games ($.25/$.50 through $1/$2 blinds) is a lot less thorough and somewhat more hit-or-miss than the majority of the book, which is aimed at microstakes players. I’d recommend the book without qualification for anyone still aspiring to beat the microstakes. Others will need to approach the small stakes advice more critically, but there’s still a lot of good material to be found there.

Check out the full review!

My One Minute Recommendation- The Poker Blueprint gets an 8.5/10 for content but a 5/10 for presentation. It contains plenty of great material for players who need help beating smaller stakes online short-handed games, but I fear the often terse, jargon-laden explanations will be too confusing or overwhelming for many players who would otherwise benefit greatly from reading it.

Had Tri Nguyen and Aaron Davis published their e-book The Poker Blueprint several years ago, I would have recommended it in the strongest possible terms. It’s reminiscent of the Cardrunners videos of that era: an opportunity to peer into the mind of a great player but with no real effort at teaching rather than simply reciting information. The information is valuable, no doubt, but processing and making use of it will require a lot of work on the part of the reader. In this day and age, the same material is available in more user-friendly books and videos, so while the content of The Poker Blueprint is easily good enough to warrant the $47 price tag, I can’t offer a whole-hearted endorsement.

The Poker Blueprint is one of the nicer looking e-books that I’ve seen. It is well-laid out, with good use of headers, footers, colors, card images, boxed text, and other touches that give it a professional look and welcoming, readable feel. One thing I miss from Nguyen’s PLO book are the sidebars he used to great effect. Basically, though, it feels more like reading an electronic version of a textbook than a Word document, which is welcome.

Unfortunately, this impression is undercut by typographical, spelling, and grammatical errors, at least one or two of which potentially interfere with understanding. I can’t comment on the e-book security measures, as the version I received didn’t seem to have any, though I believe the commercial version does.

Nguyen and Davis are writing for a relatively narrow audience, a fact which in some ways they make clear up front but in some ways they do not. The subtitle of the book, “Advanced Strategies for Crushing Mico- and Small-Stakes NL”, makes clear the stakes for which the book is geared, but it also hints at the level of familiarity with poker jargon that the authors presume. Anyone who isn’t conversant in the short-hand of poker strategy forums will have some not-insurmountable difficulty following along. The one-page glossary at the end of the book will be of little help even to those who realize it is there.

The Poker Blueprint also presumes online short-handed games, which is made clear on the book’s website. Plenty of the material is in theory applicable in any deep-stacked no-limit hold ’em game. The real danger here is that much of the book’s advice is exploitive, meaning that it assumes your opponents will be playing in a certain way and making certain mistakes. As the authors put it, “As exploitable as that sounds, that’s how players play.” That’s very helpful for as long as it holds true, but it runs the risk of becoming dated as the game evolves and players adapt, and of limiting the book’s applicability outside of online short-handed games.

Though they don’t do it often enough, Nguyen and Davis are capable of clear, thorough, and generally excellent presentation of concepts when they take the time to do it right. Their “Math is Easy” section offers a great introduction to calculating things like fold equity, pot odds, and the Expected Value of a semi-bluff. Those who are intimidated by math or who aren’t already conversant in these concepts ought to snap the book up for this section alone.

There are sporadic flashes of clarity and insight like this throughout the book- a chart classifying factors like skill, all-in pots, and showdowns seen as a function of stack size comes to mind- but they are few and far-between. Overall it comes across as hurried and somewhat disorganized, and some important concepts are presented without nuance or caveat.

A good example is Nguyen and Davis’ advice concerning 3-betting. One passage reads, “If my opponent keeps folding to 3-bets, then I will 3-bet him all day. If my opponent calls 3-bets but check-fold [sic] when he misses the flop, then I will 3-bet him all day as well. Of course, I wouldn’t go out of my way to 3-bet with bad hands such as 74o or J7o.” Why is that an “of course” when we were just told to 3-bet “all day”?

There is also little guidance regarding how to recognize mistakes like those mentioned here, folding too often to 3-bets or to continuation bets in 3-bet pots. An early section provides some advice about classifying opponents based on HUD statistics, but it doesn’t address 3-bet pots at all. Given how much of the author’s advice is based on exploiting specific mistakes, it would benefit from considerably more discussion of how to recognize those mistakes by looking at a player’s statistics.

On the plus side, The Poker Blueprint will probably get readers thinking about some new situations and plays. There are good, if short, discussions of how to bluff on paired boards, on monotone flops, and in multi-way pots. Importantly, these include not only identification of the situation but advice about which parts of your range are best suited to making these plays.

Still, there is the same frustrating failure to help in identifying opponents who would be good targets for such plays: “Of course, against some players who aren’t paying attention or don’t like to make hero calls, I would float on a paired board and take it away on a later street. No one can help you determine which players will fold on a paired board to your aggression. You have to try it and figure it out for yourself.”

To be fair, Nguyen and Davis do sometimes step outside of the rapid-fire poker lingo to consider where the reader is coming from and address potential misunderstandings and mistakes. These come in the form of notes in shaded pull-boxes that offer warning, clarification, or reassurance.

Such touches are a step in the right direction, but there just aren’t enough of them to make this book as useful as it could be to a player trying to learn small-stakes no-limit hold ’em. The authors get the concepts and the material itself overwhelmingly right. In fact, even many higher stakes players could learn a thing or two from these pages. But overall The Poker Blueprint is too cursory, informal, and disorganized in its presentation to help readers take full advantage of the valuable information it contains. In short, I fear it will be too confusing or overwhelming for many players who would otherwise benefit greatly from reading it.

While the grist for Cowboys Full is plenty interesting and contains more than a few entertaining stories. McManus’ specific treatment thereof is hit-or-miss. The historical chapters are mostly well-researched and -written, but the more contemporary ones feel rushed (on the author’s part) and laborious (for the reader). The former sections I enjoyed as a sort of anthology of obscure poker lore, particularly those focusing on the presidents and military leaders who loved the game. I found McManus’ treatment of present-day subjects such as the UIGEA, the WSOP, and the Ultimate Bet cheating scandal, however, to be long on trivialities and short on research and nuance.

Overall, Cowboys Full will be an entertaining and informative read for anyone, professional or amateur, interested in poker. Needless to say, the game has a rich history, and McManus ably expounds upon the ways in which it intertwines with the history of the United States. The knowledgeable insider, however, will be disappointed by the author’s perfunctory treatment of contemporary controversies. Worse, those who haven’t closely followed such issues themselves may even be misled.

Early chapters survey the origins of gambling, playing cards, and the games that preceded poker. Documentation from this era is scant, but McManus seems to have done his homework. Quoting records as diverse as ancient religious texts and the diaries of Civil War soldiers, he traces the emergence of the game we have come to know as poker.

By the outbreak of the Civil War, poker was a widespread pasttime, and Cowboys Full offers more than a few examples of ways in which it influenced the thinking and tactics of generals on both sides. Of course, misrepresentation and bluffing played a role in military strategy for millenia prior to the development of poker. What is significant, and what McManus highlights well, is the extent to which military leaders from the Civil War on articulated their thinking using the language of poker. He makes a compelling case that the game actually helped these men (and, in at least one instance, women) learn and refine such tactics.

For example, during World War II, America attempted to deceive the Axis about its plans by dropping dummy paratroopers on several potential invasion points prior to D-Day. What’s really cool is that they also dropped these dummies at Normandy, hoping to convince their enemies that this was yet another bluff. When their troops later stormed the beaches, they benefited from what poker players would call a “reverse tell”- relying on past bluffs to convince your opponent he has caught you in yet another, when you in fact possess considerable strength.

With the advent of the Cold War, poker logic extended increasingly into American diplomacy and politics as well (though McManus also includes far earlier examples of this as well, including one bluff which convinced France to sell off the Lousiana Territory at fire sale prices). Though most US presidents played poker, Eisenhower and Nixon were particularly avid players, and McManus argues that this influenced their handling of the Soviet Union. Then again, it was Kennedy calling Khrushchev’s bluff during the Cuban Missile Crisis that provides the single best illustration of Cold War diplomacy as poker played for the highest possible stakes.

Cowboys Full takes a turn for the worse when McManus turns his attention back to the game itself. His treatment of the “first World Series of Poker” intriguingly suggests that the famous days-long match between Johnny Moss and Nick “the Greek” Dandalos may never have occurred, at least not in remotely so dramatic a fashion as legend suggests. From there, however, he quickly becomes bogged down in a long and tedious recitation of past WSOP winners, including in some cases the winners of side events, along with largely uninteresting personal details about them.

This brings him to online poker, the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act, the cheating scandals at Ultimate Bet and Absolute Poker, and some predictions about the future of poker. Here, McManus slips from journalist and academic to cheerleader and propagandist. Whereas past chapters seemed thoroughly researched and often challenged received wisdom, these last nakedly present the author’s own opinions (including, quite irrelevantly, on the failures of George W. Bush’s presidency), quote directly from interested industry sources without any attempt to provide alternate viewpoints or balanced evidence, and in some cases just plain get the facts wrong.

To be clear, it’s not that I disagree with the author’s positions, on either poker legislation or our former president. It just doesn’t strike me as good journalism or good advocacy not to at least give the other side its due. McManus makes quite clear, for instance, that he believes the UIGEA to be an irresponsible, ill-advised piece of legislation. Yet he makes no attempt to explain the concerns of its proponents or why anyone supports it. Whether those arguments hold water is for the audience to decide, but they deserve a fair portrayal.

The bottom line is that if you’re interested in poker, you’ll like Cowboys Full. There are plenty of humorous anecdotes and great stories that even your non-poker friends will get a kick out of. It was only frustrating for me because I felt the topic had so much potential, especially in the hands of a writer of McManus’ caliber. Just take the last few chapters with a grain of salt, and you’ll be very happy with this book.

From his early days as a pool hustler and USO performer to his days on the road with Doyle Brunson and Sailor Roberts and his eventual victory in the World Series of Poker, Amarillo Slim surely led a memoir-worthy life. With the help of co-author Greg Dinkin, he shares his tales of daring hustles, outrageous proposition bets, and near-death experiences with both humor and humility.

Even accounting for Dinkin’s likely contributions, there’s no doubt that Slim is a great storyteller and an all-around smart guy. As one would expect from a professional hustler, he’s particularly sharp when it comes to human psychology. The book is full of advice about gambling and astute observations about human behavior, usually in the form of a moral to one of Slim’s countless gambling stories. As he puts it, “Gambling is a reflection of life. A man’s true character comes out when he’s sitting at the poker table- his strengths and weaknesses, his good traits and his faults. Whenever money is involved, you see the worst in people.” Slim even makes a few apt references to Freud, whom he calls “Ol’ Siggy.”

The forced Texas dialect mostly fades into the background, though it can get distracting at times: “Now, ordinarily, I’d rather see early frost on my peach trees than write some book giving away my secrets to success, but, as I said, I’ve got seven grandbabies- six fillies and one baby boy- and it’s about time they learned my life story. So grab yourself a cup of coffee and hold on to your britches. I’m fixing to tell you a few things that I’ve been keeping to myself for a lot of years.”

Slim’s book does a lot to combat negative stereotypes about gamblers. He doesn’t claim to be a paragon of virtue, but he convincingly argues that for a professional gambler, good behavior is good business: “Remember what I said about being able to shear a sheep mana time but only being able to skin it onces. It sounds corny, and it is corny, but it works. Be good to people- treat them nice and they’ll want to gamble with you again.” Slim also makes clear that his professional reputation and kind nature helped to extricate him from some sticky situations along the way.

That said, Slim’s is not exactly a coherent ethics. He cops to and apologizes for some of his transgressions, including fixing the 1948 GI Baseball World Series, though he doesn’t mention making any effort to return anyone’s money. There were other cases, though, that struck me as shady but that the author treats as business as usual.

Despite his rural Texan’s suspicion of contracts and fast-talking lawyers, Slim seems to regard deliberate deception and sometimes even outright cheating as just part of the game. In other words, it’s your job to triple-check the wording of any bet you make and to inspect the deck yourself, because if you don’t, your opponent has the right to take every angle he can.

While it can be rewarding to see Slim turn a hustler’s angle back on him or fleece a cheater at his own game, it’s a little shocking to see some of the ways in which he relieves friends and strangers alike of their money. For example, he famously accepts a bet with a world champion Ping Pong player on the condition that he be allowed to choose the paddles. Not even the best player in the world can beat Slim at Ping Pong played with a frying pan with which the hustler’s been practicing for the past month. In Slim’s defense, though, his fellow gamblers seem willing to accept that they were hustled “fair and square”, and in the rare case that the author gets hustled, he’s quick to pay up himself.

This, in a nutshell, seems to be Slim’s life philosophy and the message he wishes to impart to his readers: kindness and honesty are generally good business, but in the end, it’s get or get gotten and every man has got to look out for himself and his family first. Think what you will about that message, because the author isn’t so much proselytizing as reminiscing, but know that when you’re riding alongside Amarillo Slim, the getting is always good.

As a poker player, I found PBSK fascinating for a number of reasons. For one thing, there were a lot of little details about Bobby’s Room (the high-stakes section of the Bellagio poker room, named for Bobby Baldwin) and the people who play there that I didn’t know. Craig writes for a broad audience, but even as someone who is relatively in-the-know about the poker world, I came away with a much better sense of the culture and traditions of that game. There were even a few regulars I hadn’t heard of, which I suppose is in itself a statement about the nature of the game.

Title notwithstanding, the book’s truly central characters are Beal and Doyle Brunson, not Beal and Howard Lederer. Craig chronicles the two men’s parallel struggles, Brunson’s to herd a team of notoriously stubborn and independent poker players into a functioning team with a 10-figure bankroll, and Beal’s to find an edge against the game’s greatest.

For Brunson, there are logistical difficulties and personality conflicts. Few players could afford to take on Beal on their own, and in any event the banker insisted on playing heads up. Nevada gaming law requires any game to be open to any player, meaning that the only way to ensure one-on-one action was to give everyone who could remotely consider playing the option to buy a piece of “The Corporation”. This, in turn, meant getting everyone to put up hundreds of thousands of dollars and agree on who would play Beal when. No one was too keen on either losing his friend’s money or seeing his own money lost, plus Beal insisted on playing at inconvenient times such as during the World Series of Poker or at 8 AM.

This was no accident. Beal quickly realized that his only chance would be to push the pros out of their comfort zone by insisting on astronomical stakes, arriving in Las Vegas with little notice, and otherwise making things as inconvenient as possible for The Corporation. Over time, he also came to take elaborate measures to neutralize their potential advantages over him: sunglasses, headphones (to discourage conversation), a random number generator, a homemade abacus (sorry, you’ll have to read the book to make sense of that one), etc.

I found the insights into both the financial relationships that undergird the poker economy and the psychology of an amateur who would attempt to take on the best of the best to be quite interesting. PBSK isn’t just for poker junkies, though. In fact, the central conflict of amateur vs. professional makes it equally appealing to a casual reader with little or not knowledge of poker. The book is remarkably light on actual hands played or anything else that would require more than a passing familiarity with the game, and Craig does a good job of explaining what little the reader does need to know without ever boring his “insider” audience.

All in all, Michael Craig’s The Professor, the Banker, and the Suicide King is an interesting and fast-paced introduction to the high-stakes poker world built around an inherently intriguing story. Any poker player would enjoy it, and it would also make a great gift for anyone you’d like to educate about the vagaries of professional poker.

As I say, I’ve been working on this for a while, and on Day 1 of the PCA, I felt like I was doing it about as well as I ever have. I was a statue, sitting placidly at the table, back straight, hands in my lap, slowly and deliberately breathing in and out.

With about two hours left in the day, my original table broke, and I was moved across the room to meet a new group of players. I walked deliberately but unhurriedly across the conference center floor to take my new seat. Two seats to my right was a heavy-set kid with greasy hair, an unkempt beard, a backwards ballcap, and a basketball jersey stretched out over his considerable gut. He was loudly recounting the hand that had vacated the seat I now occupied, in which the European kid to my left (who spoke barely a word of English to defend himself) got it all in with AK in a three-way pot and busted ADZ, who’d held KK. The big hairball seemed to think this was an awful play and was telling everyone who would listen about it, though as best I could tell he’d not actually been involved in the hand himself.

I was still unracking my chips when the dealer said something about a player mucking his cards. “Players don’t muck cards. Dealers muck cards. Players discard cards, and then dealers muck them,” the shaggy sports fan corrected her, loudly and matter-of-factly. She nodded in acknowledgment, but he insisted on explaining the distinction several more times, in several different ways. I had finished unracking and was just sitting there, not reacting to this at all or even looking at the downy detractor, but taking it all in nonetheless. Annoyance slowly crept across the dealer’s face as the guy continued to bloviate, but she said nothing, and neither did anyone else.

About ten minutes passed, most of which was to the tune of the meatbag’s constant rambling. He talked virtually nonstop, to no one in particular, about things going on in the room and hands he’d seen, always returning to this AK vs KK situation with the Euro-kid on my left. I ignored it all, though, barely playing a hand, just breathing and looking and listening and sitting upright quietly and attentively.

So I’m just sitting there, I’m a rock, so fucking impassive that the Buddha would shit himself with shame to see me, when this same loudmouth recounts some story and specifically refers to “mucking” his cards. He finishes the anecdote, with none of the rest of us saying anything for fear of giving the impression that we’re paying attention or want him to continue. I let a couple seconds of silence go by, still stone-faced and unmoving, and then quietly say, never looking at him or even turning my head, “Players don’t muck cards.”

Only the people on our half of the table could hear me, but several of them chuckled. “He’s right,” Hairy assured them. “He’s making fun of me, but he’s absolutely right.” I didn’t acknowledge him or anyone else, didn’t crack a smile or in any way show pleasure at the reception my needling had received. I couldn’t help but notice the dealer beaming her appreciation at me, like she wanted to have her way with me right there on the table. But I was all business, dark shades and brim pulled low. No time for that now, ma’am.

About half an hour goes by without me saying anything to Chewbacca or anyone else. He’d actually kind of calmed down. Then a short stacked player moved all in for only two times the blind. After some consideration, Sasquatch flat called. I had 65o in the small blind and considered making a move. Slowly my eyes took in the short stack and then the caller, who was staring back at me knowingly. I mucked (sorry, discarded), the European who’d been the subject of so much derision called, and the big blind called.

The flop came QJ2, all clubs. It checked around to Tubby, who bet 3K. His fishy friend called, and the big blind folded. The turn was blank, and they checked it through. The river was an offsuit T, and now Euroboy quickly threw 11K into the pot in what could only be a show of extreme strength. I expected to see a straight or better.

The portly pontificator snap-called and discarded angrily when the kid tabled 74cc for a flush. “You’re the best. You’re too good,” the guy began his berating, standing up from the table. “I should have had you crushed on that flop. How do you do it? How do I not have you crushed on that flop? I have fucking Kings with a club, and you flop a flush. Unfuckingbelievable. The one time I try to trap. I’m trying to induce a back-raise from this guy,” he points over at me with one meaty paw.

Growing red in the face, he was beginning to look more and more like a primate. I was severely tempted to tell him that I’m at least as likely to play back at an isolation raise as at a flat call, maybe even moreso, but I just sat placidly, eyes forward. I couldn’t have gotten a word in anyway.

He’s really gone now, foaming at the mouth, eyes wild, speckles of saliva glistening in his beard as he snarls and rages. The Eurolucksack understands barely a word of it but seems to find it just as amusing as I do.

I’m looking now for opportunities to get involved with this guy, who I’m sure is in spewbot mode. At 300/600/75, I open to 1800 UTG with ATo. He makes it 4200 from the SB, and I can’t resist the pot odds. Flop is 855 with two diamonds (I have none), and we both check. Turn is the Qd, and he checks again. I toss a little T4400 underbet out there, ready to bet 15K on the river if called. He ponders for a while and raises to about 16K, and I, with just a hint of a contented smile on my face, quickly fold.

He fires his cards angrily into the muck, and, huffing and puffing, stares daggers at me. After letting him fume for a few seconds, I ask, with genuine concern, “What’s the matter?” It’s the longest phrase I’ll utter to him all day.

Somewhat surprised by my verbacity, he shakes his head confusedly for a moment and explains, “Just…not happy with the result of the hand. I mean, I won it, but…I mean, I guess you didn’t have anything…I can’t give you a free card though… versus your range…you could have the Ace of diamonds…” he fumbles some more, throwing around some disjointed jargon and generally failing to make much sense.

A few minutes later, he asks me if I’ll tell him what I had when we’re done for the night. I turn to look him in the eye, shake my head slightly, then face front and resume my thousand-yard stare. “You won’t tell me? No? We can’t share stories at the end of the day? It’s not like we’re going to play together tomorrow, bro.” I continue to stare straight ahead and give him a little half shrug.

He spends the rest of the night fuming, ostensibly at the Euro but really I think at himself, while I take measured in-breaths and out-breaths. Then I get into my big pot at the end of the night, where I’m all-in with 66 on a 5c6c8d flop versus 74 and AcJc and eventually lose my ass to the straight. He oohs and aahs for a while over the size of the pot, and then starts giving his take on it. “Wow…I mean, wow. Set, straight, nut flush draw… nothing anyone can do there. No one can get away from it… he has to call,” referring here to his favorite Eurokid. “Maybe you can get away from it?” he looks at me, then corrects himself, “No, no, you can’t fold.”

He says this last like he’s reassuring me. Are you sure? Are you sure I can’t fold? You know I’m the favorite, right? Do you get that? Do you get that I’m that I’m the fucking favorite to win it, you FUCKING BABOON?!?!?!?

Happy New Year everyone! I hope you all enjoyed yourselves responsibly last night (and last year, for that matter), and that you are striding confidently forward into a new year.

Yesterday, I revisited my 2009 poker resolutions. Now, it’s time to make some new resolutions and set some new goals for 2010.

Resolution One: Play NLHE Cash Games

Particularly in the big games, virtually everyone is good and getting better. It’s not enough to be better than they are at the start of the year; if they keep improving and I stagnate, then they’ll be owning me by year’s end. So this year my focus will be on putting in hours at and away from the table.

Goal 1: Average 15 Hours/Week Playing My “Regular” Games

If I wanted a job, I’d get one. I want to have plenty of time for other things that are important to me: friends, family, travel, volunteer work. Then again, most of those things require (or at least benefit from) money, too.

I’ve found that 15 hours/week enables me to earn a pretty healthy income, far more than I could make at any real job I could get, without impeding too much on my lifestyle.

I consider my regular games to be anywhere from 2/4 NL to 50/100 NL as well as big tournaments like the Sunday Majors, the FTOPS, and the WCOOP; time spent playing any of these will count towards my goal.

Goal 2: Earn $X in NLHE Cash Games

It’s very tough to predict or control what I will earn playing tournaments. With cash games, though, it’s mostly a question of game selection and putting in hours. It’s not something I’m going to announce publicly, but I am going to set a target, and I am going to put in extra hours towards the end of year if I’m on pace to come up short.

Goal 3: Earn Supernova status on PokerStars

I gave up on this goal last year, largely because Stars doesn’t have deep stack or ante tables. I don’t want to sit in bad games just to get VPPs.Poker Stars is continuing to sweeten the deal, though. In addition to the cash bonuses that can be purchased with FPPs, they’re now offering up to $1000 in bonuses just for earning VPPs.

My plan for this is to table select as usual in the beginning of each month, and then assess my progress towards the end of each month. If I’m on pace to come up short, I’m going to put in extra hours above and beyond my weekly goal just grinding 9 tables of $1/2 NLHE (or smaller) until I hit my VPP target for the month. Hopefully this is something I can do relatively stress-free, just an hour or two at a time, when I’m not in the mood to put in a proper session in higher stakes games. To be honest, my hourly rate should still be quite good multi-tabling SSNL, so hopefully this will incentivize me to make a little money in what would otherwise be downtime.

Resolution Two: Diversify My Income Streams

This has been a long-term goal of mine, and I feel like it’s well underway now. Not only is it nice having some guarantee, variance-free income, but it’s a fun and rewarding break from grinding to coach aspiring MSNL players, write for Two Plus Two Magazine, or make videos for Poker Savvy Plus. It even helps me to cultivate and demonstrate other skills, like writing, teaching, and marketing, that would prove useful should I ever decide to seek proper employment.

Goal 4: Monetize This Blog

I know I keep saying it, but sooner or later I really am going to look into making money a little more directly from this blog. I feel like it’s right on the cusp of being pretty profitable. That doesn’t have to mean ads, though it might. Maybe I’ll…

Goal 5: Write a Book

I’ve talked about this before, but this is the first time it’s ever been an explicit goal. I’ve already got some downtime sketched out in the next few months to work on this and have been kicking around some ideas in my head. Rather than trying to write one big, expensive e-book as a lot of people have done, I’m thinking of doing a series of smaller, modular works that could be purchased separately or as a set. Those of you who read this blog regularly are going to be a big chunk of the target audience, so keep an eye out for posts in the next few weeks soliciting your input about what you’d like to see in a poker book authored by yours truly.

Goal 6: Average One Blog Post Per Day

I know it’s been a little quiet on here of late. Part of that is the holidays, and part of it is just laziness. I want to get back to posting once a day. There will probably be more non-poker content, and not all of the poker stuff will be equally in-depth, but overall you can expect to see more and better content here.

The other part of the problem is that fairly often during the week, I’m staying somewhere where I don’t have a reliable internet connection. I’m pretty sure it’s possible for me to write stuff in advance and schedule it to post on a particular day, though, so that’s really not an excuse.

Goal 7: Average Five Hours of Coaching Per Week

Coaching was extremely fun and rewarding for me last year. So far, except for my group seminars, I haven’t done much to market myself as a coach or actively solicit students. I’ve mostly just worked with students as they’ve come to me, and so so far that’s kept me just about as busy as I’d like to be with coaching. I want to ramp it up a bit this year by setting a monthly goal and actively soliciting students if necessary to ensure that I’ve got a regular stream of students.

By the way, if you’re interested, check out my poker coaching information.

Resolution Three: Improve My NLHE Skills

There are so many good reasons to make an active effort to improve my NLHE. In addition to the obvious benefit of getting better and winning more money, studying can give me new material for blog posts and book reviews, introduce me to new coaching and video producing techniques, help me to monetize what would otherwise be downtime, restore my focus and confidence during a downswing, and help me keep up with what my opponents may be learning and trying at the tables.

Goal 7: Average an Hour a Day of Dedicated Studying and Improvement

I’m going to be very broad about what this can include: reading books, watching videos, reviewing hands in Hold ‘Em Manager, talking poker with a friend, and even blogging (when it’s related to reviewing my play).

I may even hire a coach. It’s funny: many of my students expressed some concern about the cost of coaching when we first discussed working together. After a few hours with me, though, these same students have always told me that coaching was far more valuable than they expected and that in retrospect they considered it a very good investment.

Yet, cheapstake that I am, I still balk at paying hundreds of dollars an hour for a high-stakes coach. I probably ought to just suck it up and purchase a few hours. To be fair, though, I do charge less than most comparable coaches. Plus, I don’t have the option of hiring someone who coaches as well as I do :-).

Goal 8: Use Hold ‘Em Manager

I switched from Poker Tracker to Hold ‘Em Manager last year. PT2 is great, but HEM is just better. For the last part of the year, I was playing without it on my laptop. It does get in my way sometimes, but I’d rather learn how to work with it than insist on playing without it.

Goal 9: Finish the Year with a 4BB/100 Win-Rate at 5/10 NL and/or Higher

Same goal as last year, since I didn’t achieve it but still think it’s very viable. It might be cheating a little, but I’m going to allow myself to count my results from bigger games towards this goal or not depending on whether I do better in them than I do in 5/10 (this was the cast last year). Basically, if I am at 4 BB/100 over a big sample at 5/10, then I don’t care how I’m doing in bigger games. If I’m not doing quite that well at 5/10 but am at 4 BB/100 if I also count bigger games, then that’s certainly a fine result as well.

Goal 10: Play 50,000 Hands of Heads Up NLHE at 5/10 and Higher

Last year, my win rate at heads up was twice what it was at ring games. Plus, it’s a great way to improve poker skills in general, and at stakes above 10/20, it’s often the only way to get action.

The only problem is that I can’t play as many tables at once, so my hourly rate isn’t necessarily better, plus it’s tough to get action from people I actually want to play. Unlike with my other goals, I don’t want to resort to playing smaller stakes just to hit this goal. I will try to be more diligent about starting tables and maybe even playing some people against whom I don’t necessarily have an edge, since part of the point here is to get better.

What About You?

How did 2009 treat you? What are your goals, poker or otherwise, for 2010?

Resolution One: Keep Grinding NLHE Cash Games

This is my bread and butter game, and even if I don’t do anything to improve, just maintaining my current winrate and putting in hours will be very valuable to me. Of course I do want to get better, but my general focus will be on playing rather than doing stuff to improve (posting hands, watching instructional videos, etc.).

This was a bit of a mistake. The 2+2 strategy forums, especially the high stakes ones, have really gone downhill, so I don’t regret not having frequented them. I do feel like I ought to take better advantage of the great instructional videos that are out there, though. It’s a particularly good thing to do when on a downswing or just generally feeling frustrated or a lack of confidence.

Also, I’m not going to worry too much about non-NLHE games. I tried to do it last year, but it didn’t prove too productive. I’ll play/study them when I feel like it, but it’s not going to be a priority. I’m confident in my ability to pick them up quickly should that become necessary/desirable and I choose to devote all my time to it, such that I don’t think I need to prioritize working on them now.

I do think this was the right approach. I just don’t want to dedicate that much time to poker, and I’d rather spend that time making money at a game where I’m already very good than worry about become more well-rounded.

Goal 1: Earn $X in NLHE Cash Games

It’s very tough to predict or control what you earn playing tournaments. With cash games, though, it’s mostly a question of game selection and putting in hours. My goal for 2009 is to earn in NLHE cash games what I made playing any form of poker in 2008, so that anything from tournaments is just a perk. Hopefully this will help me to keep my focus even if I do make a big tournament score, since that won’t count towards the goal.

Epic fail. I made maybe like 30% of this number in cash games, and I basically broke even in tournaments if you count the 15K PCA prize package I’ve still got coming to me.

Goal 2: Earn Supernova status on PokerStars

This shouldn’t be tough, and I’m already off to a good start. Basically I need to earn 100,000 VPP’s (PokerStars’ frequent player reward) over the course of the year. Having earned 3200 already, I’m on course to do this by September.

Last year, I played on Full Tilt almost exclusively because they have rakeback. My understanding is that the Stars VPP program is actually worth more if you devote the time to getting into the top tiers of it, though. Plus bigger games seem to go more frequently and are maybe a little softer.

There are a couple of drawbacks, though. For one thing, I have way more money on FTP than on Stars and it’s not that easy to reload. At the moment I’m mostly grinding up my balance playing 5/10 full ring games, and that’s going OK, so hopefully this won’t be a barrier. But I’ve already passed on a few potentially good 25/50 games for lack of funds.

Also, Stars doesn’t have Deep tables, which are getting really popular on FTP. They do have some tables with a 50BB minimum buy-in, which helps with the short-stacking problem, but I really like playing deep. There are a lot of regulars who can handle a 100BB stack very well but make mistakes playing 200BB deep. Since the bigger games are comprised mostly of regulars, that makes a big difference.

Still, I don’t think Supernova status will be tough to get, so I’m going to go for it. The next level, Supernova Elite, require 10 times as many VPP’s, though, and I don’t think I have any prayer for that.

Fail. I basically gave up on this one halfway through the year. I just don’t like playing on Stars nearly as much as I do on FTP. Full Tilt has the deep stack games and now the ante games that are just so much better. Oh and the ease of playing heads up at higher stakes is really huge too. In order to do this, I would have had to spend a lot of time playing games that weren’t particularly good just to get the FPP, and I didn’t feel like doing that.

Resolution Two: Diversify My Income Streams

I laid the foundation for this last year, but I really haven’t capitalized on it yet. Now that I’m starting to get a higher profile in the poker world, I think there are ways for me both to generate passive income and to combine poker with some of my other interests, such as writing and teaching.

Goal 3: Monetize This Blog

I was surprised by how much I made off of blog ads last year with virtually no effort. In general do find internet ads to be tacky and intrusive, but in this case I am giving away a lot of very valuable information at no cost to you, so I hope my dear readers will understand if there are a few ads on the page. I’ll try to keep it minimally intrusive, and the plus side for you will likely be a nicer layout and better content. Expect to see a new look later this month.

Semi-success. I made some effort to find advertisers, but I never really came across a good enough offer from a reputable company. I don’t want to host ads from shady poker rooms and people who claim to have a product that will help you cheat at online poker, and I’m not really in a huge hurry to get ad revenue, so I’m going to continue being patient until I find something I like.

The blog was helpful, however, in raising my online profile and helping me to get some writing, reviewing, and coaching opportunities. I owe much of that to my girlfriend, who did such a great job giving Thinking Poker a badly needed makeover earlier this year.

Goal 4: Get Back Into Coaching

I’m not going to set an hourly goal for this because I don’t want to force it, but I think I ought to do some more coaching. With the right students, it is in fact very enjoyable and rewarding. Plus, Poker Savvy tells me I can offer my students a free three-month subscription, which hopefully will sweeten the value of the package without costing me any more time. I may also consider doing group sessions that lower the costs for any individual person while helping to get me an hourly rate comparable to that of actually playing poker. Expect to see more information about this soon.

Success! I worked one-on-one with some higher stakes players and also offered a few group seminars for smaller stakes players. Though the latter are a lot of work, both proved very successful. Everyone I’ve worked with has been very satisfied with what I was able to do for them, and many of are already achieving the goals they set for themselves in terms of winning at higher stakes, improving their win rates, and just generally feeling more confident at the tables.

From my end, I got to meet and work closely with some very smart and very cool people from all around the world. Playing poker is generally such a competitive, individualized, dog-eat-dog experience that it’s nice to take a break from that and work cooperatively with other players (not at the tables, of course!) towards a common goal. Helping others to succeed is very rewarding, and I’m looking forward to more of it in the coming year.

Goal 5: Market My Writing

I’m still just doing the easy stuff, writing for the occasional people who approach me. I think I want to get my name out there a little bit more and publish in some more high-profile ways. I don’t know about writing my own book, but I’m in discussions with a well-known player now about contributing a chapter to a book he’s doing.

Meh. I didn’t end up doing too much with this. Other than showing up in translation on a Finnish website and seeing occasional blog posts show up on the Poker Savvy and Cardplayer feeds, I didn’t do much with this. Maybe next year…

Resolution Three: Improve My NLHE Skills

This is a lower priority than just putting in hours. Then again, practice is the single best way to improve, so I want to do what I can to maximize the learning value of my time at the tables.

Goal 6: Use Poker Tracker More Effectively

I barely use Poker Tracker for anything beyond record keeping, and I know I’m only getting like 10% of its value. I often don’t even use the HUD because it distracts me when I’m playing a lot of tables. But I want to be able to do at least some basic evaluation of my play to try to identify some leaks, such as I found with suited connectors in one of my year-end posts. Plus I want to put together a HUD layout that is truly useful for me.

Fail. I’ve been living nomadically since September and playing pretty much exclusively on my laptop, where I didn’t have Hold ‘Em Manager. Even on my desktop, I didn’t always use it because I found the HUD intrusive when playing a lot of tables. That’s more of a problem on the smaller laptop screen, but I need to figure something out, because it’s too valuable of a tool to ignore.

Goal 7: Finish the Year with a 4BB/100 Win-Rate at 5/10 NL.

This is somewhat beyond my control because I won’t play a large enough sample size (there are good players who have had 100K hand break-even streaks), but if I can maintain this win-rate, which I think is about twice what my “true” rate is now, I’ll be in great shape.

Semi-Fail. Overall I’m happy with most of my win-rates. I’m actually doing a lot better at 10/20, and in both games combined, I’m at 2.6 BB/100 over 250K hands. Drilling down even further to games at those stakes with 3 to 6 players, which are my real bread and butter, and I’m at 3.4 BB/100 over 140K hands. I’ve got 25K hands at 25/50 NL with a 2 BB/100. I’m happy with all of that, even if the 5/10 rate isn’t quite where I’d like it to be.

Goal 8: Play 50,000 Hands of Heads Up NLHE

If I’m not going to do PLO, heads up is probably the next best game for me to get better at. At stakes above 10/20, it’s often the only way to get action, and that’s even more true the higher you get. Not to mention that thinking through heads up situations makes you better at playing marginal hands in general. Maybe I’ll read and review Moshman’s new book as well….

Success! I played 47K hands of heads up NLHE with a 5 BB/100 win-rate, so close enough.. Zeroing in on just the 5/10 and 10/20 games gives me 40K hands with a 6 BB/100 rate. Still haven’t read Moshman, though.

Milestones

Largest Pot Won

Kings over Queens at a 40/80 deep table

Largest Pot Lost

Poker Stars, $25/$50 NL Hold’em Cash Game, 5 Players
LeggoPoker.com – Hand History Converter

Hero (SB): $7,973
BB: $5,000
UTG: $11,744
CO: $7,716
BTN: $16,145

Pre-Flop: J A dealt to Hero (SB)
2 folds, BTN raises to $100, Hero raises to $400, BB folds, BTN raises to $1,000, Hero calls $600

Flop: ($2,050) 8 3 J (2 Players)
Hero checks, BTN bets $1,000, Hero calls $1,000

Turn: ($4,050) 3 (2 Players)
Hero checks, BTN bets $1,800, Hero raises to $5,973 and is All-In, BTN calls $4,173

River: ($15,996) 7 (2 Players – 1 is All-In)

Results: $15,996 Pot ($2 Rake)
Hero showed J A and LOST (-$7,948 NET)
BTN showed A A and WON $15,994 (+$8,021 NET)

Worst Cooler

Quads under Quads vs Peter Eastgate

Yearly Graph

Oswald Jacoby was a world-renowned bridge author and player who published 17 books and over 10,000 articles on that and other card games. In Oswald Jacoby on Poker, he turned his considerable card skill to “The Great American Game”.

Originally published in 1940, the book discusses primarily Draw and 5-Card Stud, with some attention paid to 7-Card Stud and to variations of these games. There is no mention of Texas Hold ‘Em, and only the briefest mention of any sort of community card game: Cincinnati, in which players have five cards of their own and five community cards from which to make a five-card hand.

There is also no mention of casinos or professional card rooms of any kind. It seems the intended audience are those playing in friendly games with family, co-workers, or fellow soldiers. Indeed, Jacoby explains how to set the stakes for various games so that they do not prove too high for anyone involved and proposes some means of compensating the biggest losers in any given session.

He even offers some advice for Dealer’s Option games that has withstood the test of time: “The dealer’s option should be restricted to not more than seven or eight games. Otherwise the players simply vie with one another in seeing what absurdities they can concoct.” Thus, while Jacoby includes considerable strategic content, his book also functions as a how-to manual for anyone looking to host or play in a regular, friendly game.

The Good: For pre-dating David Sklansky’s seminal text by nearly 50 years, Jacoby understands a fair bit of poker theory. He advises tight play but emphasizes the need for occasional “incorrect” play, which he compares to an advertising budget. Jacoby does seem to think of bluffing exclusively as a metagame consideration, rather than a potential source of innate profitability, but in many very loose friendly games, that’s probably not so far from the truth. Jacoby also cautions about reverse implied odds, though not in so many words.

The Bad: Oddly, while he is quite aware of reverse implied odds, Jacoby rarely considers implied odds. This despite the fact that he apparently played in some fixed limit games where it wasn’t unheard of to see a pot get raised 15-20 times on a given street. There are several instances where he advises folding a draw based on the immediate odds but without any discussion of what might be won if the draw comes in.

There’s also this surprising quote about good and bad “streaks” of luck, reminiscent of some of Doyle Brunson’s less coherent rambling in Super/System: “this liberality occurs only when I am winning and able to be liberal with someone else’s money. In other words, I am not bucking my bad luck but I am pushing my good luck.”

A whole chapter of the book, as well as the inside cover, is devoted to tables of statistics and probability. Most of these are of the “odds of being dealt four-of-a-kind” variety and without particularly much practical use. Another chapter presents some “Problems” in a question and answer format, but these tend to lack important details such as position or pot size.

The Quaint: This, more than anything else, is why I enjoy old poker books. I love the lingo. A lock is an “immortal hand”, possibly a precursor to “the mortal nuts” that we hear about today. No-limit games are “table stakes”, and an all-in bet is “tapping”. The first player to act is “under the guns”, plural, and while Jacoby calls a deuce a deuce, a trey is a “three-spot.”

Though he introduces the idea of an 8 qualifier to make a low hand in Stud High/Low, Oswald treats the unqualified version of the game as standard. His rules for how to handle a side pot in this game were so convoluted that I couldn’t follow them, but they seemed far more complex than is the standard today.

The author mentioned, but does not explain, several “additional combinations of cards which are given rank in various localities”, all of which have colorful names: “the Dog, the Tiger, the Skeet, the Kilter, the Cat-hop, the Mississippi Bearcat, the Blaze, etc.” Of these, the only ones that he defines are the Tiger and the Dog, both of which runs of five closely ranked cards cards that makes neither a straight nor a pair. In common practice, these rank higher than straights but lower than flushes.

Finally, Jacoby includes an optional rule known as the “Impossible Call” that illustrates nicely what friendly games he envisions: “In a Stud game, when the last player to act is beaten in sight but calls by mistake he should be given his money back, since there was no conceivable manner in which he could gain by his call.”

I also found most of the content to be not nearly as controversial as the author seemed to expect it would be. This, I think, is due to the fact that I was not previously familiar with the academic literature that Wright engages. The central thesis of Nonzero is that, at both the cellular level and the cultural level, the possiblity of realizing nonzerosum gains rewards cooperation and complexity and punishes those who go it alone. Though I found it unremarkable to suggest that life on earth is evolving towards ever-greater complexity and that this evolution is not solely motivated by changes in the external environment, Wright exerts a good deal of effort refuting some prominent academics who argue otherwise. In his defense, he does provide a very accessible introduction to these long-standing debates.

The accessibility of Wright’s writing is both its strength and its weakness. On the one hand, Nonzero engages, educates, and entertains those, like myself, who know very little about its subject matter. However, the large part of such a wide audience will have little interest in the most academic details Wright presents. For those few who do have the background to care about these debates, this book is surely too superficial. Wright dismisses a book-length argument by famed paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, for instance, in no more than a few paragraphs.

For all of its academic diversions, Nonzero has disappointingly little to do with game theory, the field from which it derives its name. In fact, I frequently found myself wondering why Wright chose the unwieldy term “nonzerosumness” when it seemed that terms like “cooperation” or “mutually advantageous” might have fared just as well. Apparently I wasn’t the only one: Wright dedicates a lengthy appendix to arguing, rather convincingly, for his choice of terminology.

The key distinction is that a nonzerosum relationship is not, in itself, cooperation. It is only the potential for cooperation, which is not always realized. Wright’s argument is that it is the realization of nonzerosum benefits, moreso than a changing environment or a quirk of human history, that has driven the evolution of ever-more-complex social arrangements. Just as nature selects for plants and animals for their survivability, so it selects for the human societies most adapt at taking advantage of nonzerosum opportunities. A single hunter acting alone can catch a single rabbit. Thirty hunters acting in concert can catch fifty rabbits with a net. The latter, either through violence or cultural assimilation, will eventually drive the former to extinction. And then the rabbit-catching tribes that best maximize trade opportunities with nearby fishing tribes will prosper at the expense of less social tribes, and so on until we have the internet and the World Trade Organization orchestrating the mutually advantageous exchange of goods and information among billions of people.

It is in this sense that Wright’s subtitle speaks of “destiny”. His claim is not that this particular configuration of human societies was inevitable, nor even that human beings themselves were destined to come about, but rather that nonzerosum logic will always drive humans towards higher degrees of organization, and even that organic evolution would eventually have led to some species with particularly human characteristics: tool-making, written and spoken language, political organization, etc.

Wright’s case for these claims is both fascinating and compelling. He is conversant across a wide range of academic disciplines and brings evidence from all of them, as well as from the course of human history and indeed the history of all life on earth, to bear on his subjects. Impressively, despite the breadth of the book, it rarely feels rushed or superficial. The author’s writing is lively, succinct, and targeted. He moves briskly from the birth of hunter-gatherer societies to the dawn of the modern age by focusing on detailed case studies from each era and weaving them all together into a coherent pattern, or an arrow, as he puts it.

When it comes to the question of where that arrow is pointing, Nonzero is somewhat less satisfying. Wright argues that the pressure on a societies to evolve or die has generally come from other societies. The Iroquois nations banded together to fend off the Europeans, the European Union formed to compete with the United States, etc. With humanity now on the brink (according to Wright) of becoming a single society, where will the pressure for such a transformation come from? Extraterrestrial invasion is a possiblity, but Wright argues that transnational problems like climate change and terrorism are already driving the world closer together.

That’s all well and good, but it’s little more than observation. Perhaps Wright can’t be expected to provide the details, and in fact his central argument is that they don’t ultimately matter, but his book is also disappointingly short on policy recommendations. Though he never explicitly advocates for such, the expansion of free trade zones and lowering of trade barriers and protectionist tariffs would seem to hasten the advent of a world government. However, he also barely addresses the common objections to economic globalization: the plight of laborers, the empowerment of unaccountable multinational corporations, and the eradication of diversity in favor of a global monoculture.

This latter is a particularly damning problem, to which Wright does pay some scant attention, since diversity has always been critical to evolution. Diverse species or societies competing for the same resources generates evolutionary pressure and ultimately selects for the best mutation or idea. Part of Wright’s argument for the inevitability of advanced life is that, even if homo sapiens hadn’t achieved it, a different species eventually would have. He repeatedly emphasizes that critical technologies such as irrigation, language, and writing evolved separately among several different civilizations, the implication being that even if one society stumbles, others will eventually generate similarly good ideas and useful technologies.

But is this still possible in a monocultural world? Wright acknowledges the problem but offers little reassurance, save to say that this raises the stakes and humanity will have to be extra-careful to avoid a catastrophe. Nonzero touches on several other potentially interesting implications of its thesis, including the potential role of divinity and the seeming unneccesity of consciousness, but wisely chooses not to engage these tangential issues too deeply.

The result is a fascinating interdisciplinary account of human civilization complete with tantalizing hints about what the future may hold. Though not a truly academic book, and certainly not a game theory book, Nonzero is an eye-opening read for anyone unfamiliar with its subject matter. It doesn’t quite live up to its authors lofty ambitions, but that’s saying only so much given that the book’s subtitle promises “the logic of human destiny.”

Professional No Limit Hold ‘Em, Volume 1 (PNLHE) is one of my all-time favorite poker books and the one that I recommend to anyone looking to get started to the game. I eagerly awaited the publication of Volume 2, which was rumored to deal with short-handed games and more advanced concepts, and mourned its loss when its authors parted ways with Two Plus Two Publishing.

Ed Miller, Sunny Mehta, and Matt Flynn ultimately self-published the book now known as Small Stakes No-Limit Hold ‘Em (SSNL), and it’s even better than I’d hoped.

Read the full review including my “Two-Minute Recommendation” in the Book Reviews Section of the site.

Read the full review

The Full Tilt Poker Strategy Guide: Tournament Edition
Edited by Michael Craig

This Full Tilt guide is a 19-Chapter anthology, so I’ve broken down my review chapter-by-chapter.

Chapters Reviews:

Chapter 6 – Play Before the Flop by Andy Bloch

Chapter 10-Online Tournament Strategy by Richard Brodie

Chapter 11-Pot Limit Hold ‘Em by Andy Bloch and Rafe Furst

Chapter 12-Limit Hold ‘Em by Howard Lederer

Chapter 13-Omaha Eight-or-Better by Mike Matusow

Chapter 14-Pot Limit Omaha by Chris Ferguson

Chapter 16-Seven Card Stud: Tournament Strategy by David Gray

Chapter 17-Stud Eight-or-Better by Ted Forrest

Chapter 18-Razz by Michael Craig, Huck Seed, and Ted Forrest

The Good: Advanced tactics, high-level strategy, strong theoretical grounding, well-explained, genuinely insightful, appropriately calibrated for its target audience

The Bad: Some concepts, including but not limited to certain basic skills, not covered in great detail

The Ugly: A little unpolished, with some typos and minor grammatical errors; feels pretty much like reading a Word document, albeit a nicely laid out Word document

Tri “Slowhabit” Nguyen’s Transition from NLHE to PLO delivers just what the title promises: a strong guide to Pot-Limit Omaha, delivered at a pace and level appropriate for a poker player with a fairly sophisticated understanding of No Limit Hold ‘Em. Though there is plenty of practical advice and hand examples, this is not a soup to nuts “how to” guide offering a ready-to-play strategy. In fact, it could stand to be a bit more comprehensive in its advice for specific, common situations. Rather, it is a rigorously mathematical theoretical framework for approaching the game. It will require a thorough understanding of poker to appreciate the depth of this book, but for someone with such an understanding, it should prove an invaluable text, certainly worth its not inconsiderable $375 price tag.

Nguyen could be more explicit about his intended audience, though the title and I imagine the marketing strategy will likely make this clear enough. The introduction does promise, accurately enough, to “teach you the nuances of PLO and what variables you should consider during hands to turn yourself into a more profitable player,” with the ultimate goal of getting the reader “crushing small and mid-stakes PLO.” The text assumes a sophisticated understanding of crucial poker concepts such as equity, hand ranges, semi-bluffing, and planning ahead. None of it should be beyond an active reader of 2+2 or my blog, but this is not a mass market book. The Glossary includes only two terms and offers a superficial description even of those.

The only time this affects the quality of the discussion is with Nguyen’s use of the term “outs”. I’ve generally understood the term to mean something like “cards that could come to win you the pot when you are not currently ahead”, but Nguyen sometimes uses it to talk about cards that will improve a hand, whether or not that improvement is actually enough to win the pot. Given that it is so important in PLO to distinguish between nut and non-nut draws, it couldn’t hurt to define these terms more explicitly.

Though the book is definitely written with a NLHE player in mind, it should be useful to any serious poker player. There are a lot of helpful analogies, though, where Nguyen considers similarities and differences between how specific concepts function in the two games or explains that holding X hand in PLO is akin to holding Y hand in NLHE. Being primarily a NLHE player myself, I found these very insightful and helpful tools.

It also helps that many of the hand examples, integrated into every chapter via convenient sidebars alongside the relevant text, seem drawn from the author’s own transition from NLHE to PLO. It is both welcoming and encouraging to see him admit to misplaying a hand as a result of a misunderstanding common to NLHE players learning PLO. I found I was able to recognize specific mistakes that I had made and begin to understand why my past forays into PLO had not gone as well as I hoped- and that was before I got to the “Common Mistakes” chapter.

Such reinforcement is nice, because while Transitioning from NLHE to PLO rekindled my excitement for the game, it also made me realize how much I don’t know and how much work will be required to master hand reading and equity calculation, both of which are far more complicated than their NLHE equivalents. It’s not that the tools aren’t there. The text provides plenty of examples and in-depth analysis of advanced concepts like blockers, backdoor draws, and floating. It just makes me realized what a tall mountain there is to climb. Thankfully, Nguyen also emphasizes how many players in today’s PLO games don’t have an inkling about any of this stuff, which is reassuring.

It does beg the question of the book’s longevity, though. There’s a mix of tactics that seem fundamental to playing the game well in any context and those designed to exploit mistakes and tendencies common in contemporary PLO games. It will be interesting to see how long the latter remain viable. Since Transitioning is an e-book, Nguyen could theoretically update it, though to my knowledge he hasn’t promised anything like this.

I’m not particularly familiar with e-book technology, but I would guess that Transitioning falls somewhere in the middle of the spectrum with regard to balancing the reader’s convenience with the protection of the author’s intellectual property. The book is protected by LockLizard Safeguard, meaning that you need to download and install a special PDF viewer, then register your version of the book, before you can read it. This sounds like a hassle, but the instructions were clear, and it took me less than five minutes to set up. After that, I had full rights to read and print, though not copy and paste, the document indefinitely.

The other potentially intimidating aspect of the book is the math. It isn’t actually that complicated, and the author does a great job of explaining it, but there are a lot of graphs and calculations and even some algebra. Next to The Mathematics of Poker, it’s the most math-heavy poker book I’ve seen.

Not that that’s a bad thing. In fact, these were probably the best parts of the book. I particularly liked a chart enumerating the possible hands on each street in PLO vs. NLHE, and Nguyen’s quantification of the heretofore nebulous concept of “post-flop playability” struck me as pure genius. Understanding it does require interpreting a graph of hand equity on all possible flops, though. Again, the text offers a crystal clear explanation, but I’m sure a good high school math education helps.

The other concept I found very helpful, and which seems to motivate Nguyen’s general approach to the game, is equity realization. Basically, because hand values tend to run close together in PLO, Nguyen places a premium on bluffing, fold equity, and winning pots without showdown. He argues quite convincingly for making a lot of turn and river bluffs, often deferring aggressive action on an earlier street in order to make a better, often more aggressive, decision later in the hand.

Amidst all of the more advanced theory and strategy, certain concepts do feel a bit glossed over. Although the chapter on pre-flop hand selection is one of the longest, it still offers relatively vague advice about exactly which hands to play from which position and how to play them. It’s consistent with Nguyen’s general approach of “here are the key considerations, work through the specific situation yourself”, but readers will probably be accustomed to finding more specific starting hand advice in a poker book. That’s probably as much the nature of PLO as it is a flaw in the book, though.

More disappointing is the “River Play” chapter, which covers barely three pages. As much emphasis as Nguyen places on river bluffing, it was disappointing not to get more hand examples and an extended discussion of key concepts like value betting and inducing bluffs.

Nguyen’s writing style is less professional than I’m accustomed to seeing in a poker book. Some will find the casual tone welcoming, though nits like myself will be perturbed by minor grammatical errors, none of which influenced my understanding of the text.

Overall, Transitioning From NLHE to PLO is a fantastic book for a veteran No Limit Hold ‘Em player who wants to make a serious effort at learning Pot Limit Omaha. Nguyen requires a substantial investment of time, effort, and money from his readers, but it’s hard to imagine any smart poker player not getting very good at this quite complex game if he spent enough time working with this text.

In the meantime, I’ve got a few suggestions to help you get your Wire fix:

1. Homicide: Life on the Street– Simon created but mostly did not write the critically-acclaimed NBC series. It’s a far more traditional crime drama than The Wire, but especially in it’s early seasons it epitomizes the best possibilities of the genre to explore psychology, philosophy, and sociology. Homicide‘s fantastic cast includes several faces that will be familiar from The Wire. Clayton LeBouef who plays strip club owner and wannabe drug dealer Orlando on The Wire but villainous police Colonel Barnfather on Homicide. McNulty’s ex-wife, played by Callie Thorne, appears as one of the lead detectives in Homicide’s later seasons. Most significantly, Clark Johnson, one of Homicide‘s stars from the very beginning, appears in season 5 of The Wire as Sun paper editor Gus Haynes. Also be on the lookout for guest appearances by Robin Williams, Chris Rock, John Waters, and many more!

2. Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets– The book that started it all. Sun reporter David Simon spent a year with the Baltimore Police Department’s homicide unit, ultimately producing a gripping and fascinating account of their work and the people who do it. Don’t be intimidated: it’s a long book but a quick read, and quite different from the Homicide series it spawned, though its influence on both that series and The Wire is clear. Wire fans will particularly enjoy getting to meet the real Jay Landsman, who actually did appear on the show in the guise of Western district Lieutenant Dennis Mello.

3. Clockers– The influence of this 1993 novel by The Wire co-writer Richard Price on the series is clear, as several popular scenes (including one of my personal favorites, when Herc asks where the kids buy the hats with the brims turned to the side) are lifted whole cloth from Price’s book. Clockers is fundamentally a character study of a young New Jersey drug dealer and the homicide detective investigating him. Price is an acclaimed and accomplished novelist- frankly, recruiting him to write for TV was a tremendous coup for Simon- with a sensitive eye for the complexitities of the urban drug trade and the humanity of those affected by it. I haven’t seen the Spike Lee film or read anything else by Price (though I just got Lush Life from the library), but I imagine they are good as well.

4. The Corner– This HBO miniseries is a very clear predecessor to The Wire. It follows a single family, based on the one Simon followed for his book of the same name, battling with drug addiction and poverty in their Baltimore neighborhood. Be warned: it’s a far darker series than The Wire, which does a brilliant job of finding humor and levity in a fundamentally tragic narrative. One might even call it crushingly depressing, though there is a little unintentional humor in seeing Lance “Lieutenant Daniels” Reddick as a drug addict and Clarke “Lester Freamon” Peters as a drug dealer (and addict). I haven’t read the book, but I’m sure it’s good too.

5. Generation Kill– This is the only thing that makes me skeptical about a new miniseries. I was really excited to see David Simon’s take on Iraq (the first war, mind you), but I found this miniseries to have a rambling, convoluted plot, bland, indistinguishable characters, and surprisingly little deviation from themes already well-explored in The Wire. Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t a bad series by any means, but I didn’t think it was up to the standards set by Simon’s other work. Once again, he reminds us that perverse incentives for institutional middle managers lead to inefficient and counterproductive missions for those at the bottom and on the ground.

One last, humorously troubling note. I was recommending The Wire to a friend who recently discovered The Sopranos. I told her that The Wire was overall a less violent show, but that it was maybe more disturbing because it was more realistic. She, a resident of Baltimore County, reassured me, “Oh, I don’t think that will bother me. I don’t get into that part of the city much anyway.”

Deke Castleman’s Whale Hunt in the Desert, though, is not so much a biography or memoir of Steve Cyr as it is a history and exposition of the ways in which Las Vegas caters to, and does battle with, the biggest gamblers in the world. In fact, the chapters that explicitly focus on Cyr are the least interesting, reading as though they were written by an adoring fan (or, as is perhaps more likely, by Cyr himself). Elsewhere, though, Whale Hunt is a fascinating, entertaining, and funny distillation of Las Vegas gambling culture.

An interview with Cyr on the Two Plus Two Pokercast first piqued my interest in this book. Cyr was funny and insightful, telling a few good stories of high-roller degeneracy and hinting at many more. I picked up Whale Hunt in the Desert hoping to find an anthology of these stories.

I nearly put it down when the first few chapters proved to be a star-struck account of Cyr’s rise from telemarketer to super-host to the stars. Castleman unapologetically paints Cyr as an underappreciated genius persecuted by the “dinosaurs” who were responsible for servicing the casinos’ biggest players, or whales. Cyr himself is not nearly as interesting as his customers and his interactions with them, yet the book’s early chapters are loaded with trivial details of his young life.

Thankfully, Castleman soon turns away from Cyr to examine the early efforts of the Las Vegas casinos to rope in bigger gamblers in the 1980’s. Though Steve Wynn was initially criticized for spending hundreds of millions of dollars building the Mirage, with its volcano erupting hourly on the Strip, his super-casino’s immediate success quickly spawned a wave of imitators. Soon, the major casinos were competing to offer the swankiest villas, priciest shopping sprees, and most coveted show tickets to the same handful of six- and seven-figure players.

Castleman chronicles the emergence of these perks and highlights the most extravagant ways in which high-end casino hosts barter food, liquor, sex, and drugs for a shot at a multi-million-dollar bankroll. It seems Cyr’s contribution, which the author never fails to point out, was proving that “if you comp it, they will come.” According to the author, Cyr cajoled his bosses into making substantial up-front investments in individuals who, with the proper cultivation and cajoling, had the potential to become giant whales. Such players now routinely receive private jet and limousine transportation, hundreds of thousands of dollars in “appearance fees” (cash received up front for agreeing to play at a particular casino), and discounts on their losses in addition to luxurious accommodations and round-the-clock butler and concierge service.

I was surprised to learn just how small the house edge can end up being by the time these high-end comps are accounted for, though of course a small edge on millions of dollars wagered still translates into serious profit. Nevertheless, many accountants fear the biggest whales. It seems that casinos generally do not have the bankrolls to absorb the variance that a big-money craps player brings with him, and some actually discourage the largest wagers for fear of eating a loss that could crush their quarterly profits and consequently the value of their company’s stock. Castleman even suggests that the biggest gamblers, who are often savvy business executives, sometimes capitalize on their winning sessions by shorting a casino’s stock after leaving the table with millions in profit.

Though Castleman fawns entirely too much over Cyr, he does occasionally call him to account, most notably in a chapter on the ethics of casino hosting. By Cyr’s own recokoning, he considers many of his customers to be friends yet admits that approximately one-third of them cannot afford to lose the money that he encourages them to gamble away. Cyr, while claiming that his goal is never to break a player but rather to “bleed” him over many years, concedes that more than a few have lost life savings, bankrupted businesses, and ruined marriages on his watch. The author does not take his subject fully to task, but he does cast a critical eye on Cyr’s apologetic that there was nothing he could do and that the players would have lost the money to a different casino if they hadn’t lost it to his.

Trivial biographical details and hero-worshipping aside, Whale Hunt in the Desert is a fascinating introduction to the world of high-stakes gambling in Las Vegas. The focus is not on anecdotes of extravagance and degeneracy, though there are a few, but rather on the gamble that the casinos themselves undertake when they match wits, and bankrolls, with the world’s biggest players.

This is my bread and butter game, and even if I don’t do anything to improve, just maintaining my current winrate and putting in hours will be very valuable to me. Of course I do want to get better, but my general focus will be on playing rather than doing stuff to improve (posting hands, watching instructional videos, etc.).

Also, I’m not going to worry too much about non-NLHE games. I tried to do it last year, but it didn’t prove too productive. I’ll play/study them when I feel like it, but it’s not going to be a priority. I’m confident in my ability to pick them up quickly should that become necessary/desirable and I choose to devote all my time to it, such that I don’t think I need to prioritize working on them now.

Goal 1: Earn $X in NLHE Cash Games

It’s very tough to predict or control what you earn playing tournaments. With cash games, though, it’s mostly a question of game selection and putting in hours. My goal for 2009 is to earn in NLHE cash games what I made playing any form of poker in 2008, so that anything from tournaments is just a perk. Hopefully this will help me to keep my focus even if I do make a big tournament score, since that won’t count towards the goal.

Goal 2: Earn Supernova status on PokerStars

This shouldn’t be tough, and I’m already off to a good start. Basically I need to earn 100,000 VPP’s (PokerStars’ frequent player reward) over the course of the year. Having earned 3200 already, I’m on course to do this by September.

Last year, I played on Full Tilt almost exclusively because they have rakeback. My understanding is that the Stars VPP program is actually worth more if you devote the time to getting into the top tiers of it, though. Plus bigger games seem to go more frequently and are maybe a little softer.

There are a couple of drawbacks, though. For one thing, I have way more money on FTP than on Stars and it’s not that easy to reload. At the moment I’m mostly grinding up my balance playing 5/10 full ring games, and that’s going OK, so hopefully this won’t be a barrier. But I’ve already passed on a few potentially good 25/50 games for lack of funds.

Also, Stars doesn’t have Deep tables, which are getting really popular on FTP. They do have some tables with a 50BB minimum buy-in, which helps with the short-stacking problem, but I really like playing deep. There are a lot of regulars who can handle a 100BB stack very well but make mistakes playing 200BB deep. Since the bigger games are comprised mostly of regulars, that makes a big difference.

Still, I don’t think Supernova status will be tough to get, so I’m going to go for it. The next level, Supernova Elite, require 10 times as many VPP’s, though, and I don’t think I have any prayer for that.

Resolution Two: Diversify My Income Streams

I laid the foundation for this last year, but I really haven’t capitalized on it yet. Now that I’m starting to get a higher profile in the poker world, I think there are ways for me both to generate passive income and to combine poker with some of my other interests, such as writing and teaching.

Goal 3: Monetize This Blog

I was surprised by how much I made off of blog ads last year with virtually no effort. In general do find internet ads to be tacky and intrusive, but in this case I am giving away a lot of very valuable information at no cost to you, so I hope my dear readers will understand if there are a few ads on the page. I’ll try to keep it minimally intrusive, and the plus side for you will likely be a nicer layout and better content. Expect to see a new look later this month.

Goal 4: Get Back Into Coaching

I’m not going to set an hourly goal for this because I don’t want to force it, but I think I ought to do some more coaching. With the right students, it is in fact very enjoyable and rewarding. Plus, Poker Savvy tells me I can offer my students a free three-month subscription, which hopefully will sweeten the value of the package without costing me any more time. I may also consider doing group sessions that lower the costs for any individual person while helping to get me an hourly rate comparable to that of actually playing poker. Expect to see more information about this soon.

Goal 5: Market My Writing

I’m still just doing the easy stuff, writing for the occasional people who approach me. I think I want to get my name out there a little bit more and publish in some more high-profile ways. I don’t know about writing my own book, but I’m in discussions with a well-known player now about contributing a chapter to a book he’s doing.

Resolution Three: Improve My NLHE Skills

This is a lower priority than just putting in hours. Then again, practice is the single best way to improve, so I want to do what I can to maximize the learning value of my time at the tables.

Goal 6: Use Poker Tracker More Effectively

I barely use Poker Tracker for anything beyond record keeping, and I know I’m only getting like 10% of its value. I often don’t even use the HUD because it distracts me when I’m playing a lot of tables. But I want to be able to do at least some basic evaluation of my play to try to identify some leaks, such as I found with suited connectors in one of my year-end posts. Plus I want to put together a HUD layout that is truly useful for me.

Goal 7: Finish the Year with a 4BB/100 Win-Rate at 5/10 NL.

This is somewhat beyond my control because I won’t play a large enough sample size (there are good players who have had 100K hand break-even streaks), but if I can maintain this win-rate, which I think is about twice what my “true” rate is now, I’ll be in great shape.

Goal 8: Play 50,000 Hands of Heads Up NLHE

If I’m not going to do PLO, heads up is probably the next best game for me to get better at. At stakes above 10/20, it’s often the only way to get action, and that’s even more true the higher you get. Not to mention that thinking through heads up situations makes you better at playing marginal hands in general. Maybe I’ll read and review Moshman’s new book as well….

Gersony tracks back and forth between young Uriah “Utah” McCormick’s initiation into the world of poker and subsequent search for his uncle and an older Utah’s battle to win a major poker tournament.

It takes the author a while to engage his readers. This isn’t to say the book starts slow. In fact, the exposition often feels clunky and rushed. But it takes a while for the central conflict and mystery to reveal themselves, and Gersony’s characters are too flat to carry the weight of the novel alone.

Utah’s introduction to the poker scene is one of the highlights of the book. In backrooms of bars and in Las Vegas casinos, he meets a variety of very believable poker archetypes: the motorcycle-riding hothead, the grizzled Stud veteran, and the drugged out young star.

It is only in these all-too-brief scenes that the poker content feels germane to the rest of the novel. For the most part, the story would work just as well whether the main characters were poker players or interior designers. Poker is mostly just a veneer beneath which the plot unfolds. Only at the very end does the author draw some thematic connection between poker and the events of the story.

This may be for the best, though, because Gersony’s writing far outshines his knowledge of poker. At times he has a keen eye for the people who populate the game, but his attempts to portray the thinking of world-class players are laughably bad. In the interstitial scenes recounting their epic head up battle, two of the supposedly best players in the world display complete ignorance of basic concepts like pot odds. These scenes contribute virtually nothing to the plot or character development and are generally jarring and distracting given their infidelity to actual poker strategy.

Poker Slam is an entertaining adventure despite, not because of, its connection to poker. If you want a quick diversion, it’s an amusing read. But don’t pick it up looking for a poker novel, because for the most part it isn’t, and when it is, you’ll wish it wasn’t.

There really aren’t that many books written by successful internet players, so if you play internet poker tournaments, this will almost certainly be worth buying. And if you’re going to buy it, please use my affiliate link at the right. It won’t cost you anything extra, and I’ll donate 100% of the proceeds to my non-profit organization, the Boston Debate League.

If this review is helpful to you, please consider purchasing this or other poker books through my Amazon affiliate links. 100% of the proceeds go to the Boston Debate League.

According to their introduction, the authors of Kill Everyone set out “to marry poker math with real-time experiences to provide a sound approach to recurring situations you’ll encounter as you accumulate chips and approach the money” in poker tournaments. Although the book does contain a healthy mix of math and tactics, I can’t agree that the two are married. In fact, they are rather bifurcated: Lee Nelson writes largely about the latter in two sections of the book, while Tysen Streib focuses on the former in his “Endgame Strategy” section.

The Streib section is fantastic, easily some of the best poker writing I’ve seen and well worth the cover price in its own right. Nelson’s material is more hit-or-miss. He explains a lot of concepts and plays well, though many will be familiar to successful internet players already, and at times his presentation is distracting or downright misleading. On the whole, Kill Everyone is a solid tournament book, and even the “bonus” short-handed cash game section by Mark Vos is pretty strong.

Not only is Streib’s contribution excellent, it’s also especially valuable because it focuses on late game and final table play, where the stakes are at their highest. Central to Streib’s analysis are some concepts he calls CPR (cost-per-round, or the sum of the blinds and antes), CSI (chip status index, which, like Harrington’s M, tells you how many more rounds you can survive without winning a pot), and the bubble factor (a measure of the non-linear value of chips based on stack sizes and payout structure). His explanation of this non-linearity and quantification of how it ought to affect decision making is the most convincing and helpful material I’ve seen on the subject.

A wide variety of charts and graphs elucidate these concepts and demonstrate how to put them into practice. Because late game tournament play sees short stacks moving all in pre-flop, Streib is able to solve optimal strategies for shoving, folding, and calling that take the bubble factor into account. The techniques he employs, called Independent Chip Modeling (ICM) are extremely important for tournament players to understand.

Naturally, this material is of special interest to sit-and-players, and Streib’s section even includes a hand-for-hand analysis of an actual sit-and-go played by Juanda, Ulliot, Ferguson, and Ivey. I suppose there’s something to be said for the name recognition, but as good as these players are, none of them is actually a sit-and-go expert. Still, Streib uses their mistakes as much as their correct plays to illustrate important concepts.

Perhaps the most innovative portion of Streib’s work are shove/fold/call charts that incorporate empirical data on how small stakes sit-and-go players actually play. In other words, he details not only the game theoretically optimal solutions but also the best way to exploit opponents who do not themselves understand or implement optimal play.

Nelson’s material is more scattershot. It ranges from tight-aggressive (TAG) play to loose-aggressive (LAG) play to picking up tells to what to eat and when to sleep before and during a tournament. There’s some good stuff in there, but it’s not presented in an especially thorough or methodical way. Rather, tactics and “pointers” are blended with anecdotes and disparaging comments about “online players”.

Nelson’s first section is about accumulating chips in the early stages of a tournament. His overviews of TAG and LAG play are good, and he offers some helpful explanations such as why it’s worth raising speculative hands even when blind stealing is not an important consideration.

Key concepts here are Fold Equity and Fear Equity. The former should be familiar to most poker players, but it’s important enough to warrant discussion anyway. Nelson does give it thorough consideration, including an explanation of why and how fold equity matters even when you have the best hand.

Fear Equity is a way of getting Fold Equity. It refers to building an image of a tough, aggressive player whom other players will want to avoid. Later in a tournament, this is important for stealing blinds pre-flop and picking up pots with continuation bets.

Though much of this material will be useful online, Nelson is a live pro and his work generally assumes that context. For the most part, he is good about explaining the assumptions that underlie his plays, such as the important observation that on the contemporary tournament scene, all-in bets are often perceived as weaker than smaller bets. However, he also has an annoying tendency to make disparaging asides about “online players” as a group.

Unlike Streib’s heavily mathematical material, Nelson’s is grounded primarily in experience and anecdote. The author’s insistence on sharing these stories is generally more distracting and results oriented than it is entertaining or enlightening. When he does touch on math, he doesn’t always get it right. For instance, his consideration of the “5-10 Rule” (you can call with speculative hands for 5-10% of the effective stacks) is superficial and misleading. The rule rests on a lot of assumptions about an opponent’s range and tendencies that Nelson does not consider and that probably do not hold in his examples.

I do appreciate that Nelson references other poker authors both to support his arguments and to explain how and why his views differ from theirs. It’s unfortunate that so much poker literature insists on either reinventing the wheel or contradicting other well-respected works without explanation. This can leave inexperienced readers bored or confused. Hopefully more authors will take Kill Everyone’s lead and begin dialoguing with each other rather than pretending that they write in a vacuum.

Nelson, a retired doctor, also addresses a grab bag of other topics such as how to deal with jet lag, how to relieve stress and clear your mind, what to eat to keep your mind sharp during a tournament, etc. Those who appreciated Tommy Angelo’s Elements of Poker will find this material helpful, as Nelson is a lot more concrete in his recommendations and even offers some pharmaceutical and technological shortcuts.

The final section, penned by guest author Mark Vos, is surprisingly good. I say “surprisingly” because it’s all about playing with 100BB+ stacks, and Vos is notorious for short stacking the big NLHE games on Full Tilt Poker, where he’s a sponsored player. But he provides a competent, concise introduction to short-handed cash game play.

In particular, he offers some helpful tidbits that will orient tournament players unaccustomed to seeing a lot of turns and rivers. These streets are the trickiest for cash game beginners, but also the most important. Vos doesn’t have room to address them thoroughly, but the tips he does give should plug some common leaks.

Unfortunately, this section is much better on the 5-10 Rule than was Nelson’s. Though Vos recognizes that, “If the player is tight aggressive and skilled post-flop, speculative holdings lose a lot of value, because the skilled players seldom pay you off by losing their entire stacks,” he still claims that implied odds of 10-1 are good enough to call a reraise with a suited connector. It also would’ve been nice to see a more thorough discussion of board texture and how it affects what kinds of plays you try to make.

Though not particularly well integrated with each other, the contributions of each author are overwhelmingly good, and on the whole Kill Everyone is one of the better tournament books on the market. The biggest “weakness” of the book is that a good chunk of it focuses on exploiting currently popular trends and plays, so it may become dated at some point. But that’s all the more reason to buy it soon!

If you enjoyed this review, you might like my other book reviews or my poker strategy articles as well. And don’t forget to benefit the Boston Debate League by purchasing your copy of Kill Everyone using my affiliate link above.

He was demanding a retraction, which I was obviously not going to do, and I was ready to give him a piece of my mind. I’m sure whatever I said would have closed the door on my ever writing for the magazine again, but that seemed like a fait accompli at that point anyway. However, Bryan convinced me to hold my tongue until he spoke with Mason again. I wasn’t optimistic, but I let him do his thing, and boy did he ever come through. Apparently, though he still insists that my reviews misrepresent the contents of the books, Mason no longer believes that this was deliberate on my part and he is OK with my continuing to write for the magazine.

In his defense, Mason apparently did not know that Foucault the 2+2 poster was Andrew Brokos the magazine author. This makes it somewhat more reasonable for him to reach the conclusion that I had malicious intent in reviewing the books. Though I still don’t think it’s an appropriate conclusion for him to jump to, it’s more understandable and I am no longer particularly insulted. I mostly just want the whole thing to blow over at this point, which seems to be his preference as well.

Except that he wants me to meet with him, Bryan, Dan Harrington, and Bill Robertie this summer when I’m in Vegas for the WSOP. Under different circumstances, that would be very cool, but since they all have good reason to be feeling antagonistic towards me, I’m pretty sure it’s going to be uncomfortable.

But whatever, I wouldn’t have put it in writing if I wasn’t willing to defend it to the authors’ faces. I do regret that the tone of the reviews was so hostile, but so far I haven’t been convinced that any of my actual arguments are wrong. And I certainly owe it to Bryan to attend, assuming the meeting ever actually happens, because I get the sense that he stuck his neck out a bit to keep me on the magazine.

Though I asked him not to, I’m glad that he did. It’s -EV, but I’ve enjoyed writing for the magazine anyway. Looks like I’ll have an article in the May issue after all. Thanks Bryan.

Oh and I appreciate the support that you all have shown in the comments here and in the 2+2 thread, but please don’t post in it now. Like I said, I want this to blow over. Thanks.

At dinner with Dan and Bill, we actually discussed these reviews a little bit. The main question they had was why would someone so completely mis-characterize what was in the books, and then explain why so much was wrong. My answer was that if you can be the one who shows how Dan Harrington (and Bill Robertie as well as Two Plus Two Publishing) got it all wrong, you will achieve instant credibility as a poker expert who should be listened to.

I gave myself as an example of someone who over a period of well over 20 years produced a body of work that was there for anyone to evaluate. But many of these new writers, due to the fact that the poker boom is now, don’t have 20 years (or more) to establish themselves. So they take this other path.

Given how long I have been contributing to the 2+2 forums and writing for 2+2 Internet Magazine, not to mention favorably reviewing other 2+2 books, this is both absurd and insulting. Technically my article for the May issue of the magazine is due on Friday, but at this point I’m not sure if I want to continue writing for them, nor if my submission would be welcome. At the moment, Mason has said he isn’t going to “bother” responding to my defense of the review, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he changes his mind on that. Or just bans me. Guess I’ll see what happens in the next day or two and then make a decision.

Thanks for reviewing the book.

I won’t comment on everything — you have some valid points although I do feel a beginner can use this book. It’s a little steep for a true beginner but with some work I think anyone can get it (my Mom’s never played or read about poker but is now giving the micro’s a go after reading my book :P)

My target audience was from beginners to 200 NL players FWIW. Things like the 600NL video to show what a game like that plays like.

Agreed the affiliate shilling is lame and will be removed in the next edition.

As for things like the games changing, I plan to update the book every 6 months or so to keep it fresh and up to date — such as 3-bet %, which is available on Hold ‘Em Manager and will be on PT3, will be very important stats to use in upcoming games.

I feel the book has more value than you do, although that’s up to interpretations about my writing. From my experience with poker books, I’ve felt I’ve wrote concepts more clearly and plainly in a conversational tone so someone can really understand it and apply it.

Also, as for “you need more experience..” stuff. I can see it being considered a “cop out” though it’s what I really feel. I think some things just can’t be explained in a book.. I would need to be 1 on 1 with someone, know exactly how they play, etc etc before I could really give them advice on some deeper subjects.

Surprisingly, How to Beat NLHE 6-Max Cash Games is one of the only poker books on the market focusing on the short-handed games that are so popular online. Bill Vosti is a good author for such a book. Though he doesn’t have the winnings or reputation of an internet wunderkind like Phil Galfond or Brian Townsend, he’s been a solid winner in both tournament poker and cash games on the internet for several years.

What Vosti is not, however, is a teacher. While a lot of important fundamentals and advanced concepts can be found in his book, the presentation is often shallow and disorganized. The central problem is that the author seems not to have a clear audience in mind. The ad copy promoting his e-book appeals to complete newbs looking to get-rich-quick by playing poker online, and the book itself starts out pretty slow. There isn’t enough introductory information to help a complete novice get off the ground, though, while information about rakeback, Poker Tracker, and certain very basic concepts will be old hat to most experienced players reading this book to help them move into mid- to high-stakes games. Ultimately, there’s a little something for everyone, but the book is much less successful than it would have been if the author had a more clear audience and objective in mind from the beginning.

This approach hurts the beginning players more than the experienced ones. Marketing gimmicks notwithstanding, I wouldn’t recommend this book to anyone looking to get started in internet poker. There just isn’t enough coverage on the fundamentals that, though probably second-nature to Vosti, can be sticking points for new players.

More experienced players willing to pick through the overly simplistic material will find some solid discussion of advanced tactics and concepts that don’t appear elsewhere in print. Vosti’s in-depth analysis of semi-bluffing is particularly good, analyzing factors like the strength of your draw, your read on your opponent, and the size of the remaining stacks. While semi-bluffing is a popular concept explained by almost all poker books, Vosti’s emphasis on practical advice should be very helpful when readers need to use the concept at the tables.

Vosti’s brief discussion of board texture is also surprisingly insightful. In just two pages, he offers several good examples and identifies some of the key factors that should inform an analysis of flop texture.

This is typical of Vosti’s e-book, which is shorter but more expensive than most print books. Nevertheless, the author manages to say nearly as much as those who write with ink. This is despite the marginally useful introductory material, the many title pages and half-full pages, and Vosti’s tiresome shilling for his affiliate business and bragging about the “hundreds of thousands” he has won playing online poker.

Vosti makes good use of the e-book format, peppering the text with hyperlinks to related concepts and presenting key information with colored text and bullet points to enable easy skimming. He is also able to supplement the text with PDF charts and instructional videos where he explains concepts further and puts them into practice. These go a long way to make up for some of the shortcomings of the book, in particular the short shrift that it gives to complex ideas like forming reads, calling river bets, and higher level thinking.

Vosti’s videos also suffer some of the same shortcomings of the book, in particular their lack of a targeted audience. To date, there are three videos available: one for small stakes (25NL), one for medium stakes (200 NL), and one for slightly higher stakes (600NL). As good as these are, they obviously can’t cover everything, and more videos for the same game level would present more comprehensive lessons to a particular audience.

As good as Vosti is at offering practical advice for particular concepts, his book really lacks when it comes to putting it all together and evaluating competing factors. Too often, the author cops out of explaining the most difficult aspects of a concept by saying that “only experience” can lead to better decision-making. The videos are helpful on this front, since they simulate that experience, but more targeted videos would be more helpful, as would some attempt actually to explain the lessons that experience is supposed to teach.

The other danger arising from the book and videos is that some advice may lose value over time. In other words, Vosti sometimes focuses more on how to exploit certain mistakes or deal with plays that are popular in the current poker climate. Trends relating to bet sizing, timing tells, and light 3- and 4-betting can and do change over time, such that this advice could be dated in a year or two. Then again, the e-book format does enable the author to update the manual easily, if he’s willing to do that.

Overall, How to Beat NLHE 6-Max Cash Games could be better written, but it’s one of the only books of its type on the market. For that reason alone, smaller stakes players who want a big picture view of advanced concepts that they’ll need to understand to win at higher stakes will probably get their money’s worth. Beginners, however, should find another resource that’s written specifically for them and presented in a more tiered and structured fashion.

If you enjoyed this review, you might like my other book reviews or my poker strategy articles as well.

If this review is helpful to you, please consider purchasing this or other poker books through my Amazon affiliate links. 100% of the proceeds go to the Boston Debate League.

Harrington on Cash Games Volume II (HOC2) is subtitled “How to Win at No-Limit Hold ‘em Money Games” but it might well have been subtitled “Cash Game Poker For Second-Level Thinkers” instead. Harrington’s advice is useful up to a point, but he rarely gets past his own hand and his opponent’s possible hands to think about what his opponent believes he has, let alone what she thinks she has represented to him.

As in Volume I, Harrington gets a lot of poker theory right, often finding helpful and insightful ways to explain complex ideas, but generally fails in his attempts to illustrate how these concepts should be put into practice. This is particularly unfortunate because so much of the Harrington on Cash Games series focuses on practical application (for turn and river play and a loose aggressive strategy, in this volume) over the theoretical explanation that is really the author’s strong suit.

Tight-Aggressive Turn Play

HOC2 picks up right where the first volume left off, detailing how Harrington’s tight-aggressive (TAG) strategy works on the turn. The second volume is much superior to the first, but because they are so mutually dependent in this way, it would be difficult to purchase and read only the better book.

The section on turn play is one of the highlights of the book. Abandoning the tedious minutiae of dozens of examples, Harrington wisely focuses on the broader principles of turn play. He clearly and comprehensively lays out the reasons why you would want to bet or check the turn and concludes with some very valuable and important advice: “If you have shown consistent strength throughout the hand, and on the turn your opponent either bets into you or raises your bet, top pair is very unlikely to be good.”

The sample problems that follow are also stronger than previous problem sets have been, in no small part because Harrington delves deeply into the thought process behind each play. He puts his opponent on a range of hands, considers his equity, speculates about likely river action, and usually arrives at a good play.

Tight-Aggressive River Play

After a strong section on turn play, Harrington quickly loses his momentum. He’s right that the river is the most important street in deep-stacked no-limit hold ‘em (NLHE) for a variety of reasons, but his advice on how to play it is some of the weakest in the book. His suggestions for playing the nuts and other strong hands are solid, but he exposes one of the central flaws in his strategy when he argues that, “When you have some value in your hand, you’d like to see the showdown as cheaply as possible.” In fact, the ability to turn such a hand into a bluff or to get away from it under the right conditions is key to playing the river well. Yet the author goes so far as to say that “Bluffing with middling-strength value hands like middle pair is a waste because those hands might actually win the pot in a showdown.”

When it comes to catching bluffs, Harrington’s theory is lacking as well. He is correct that you must sometimes, for game theoretical purposes, call big bets when you can only beat a bluff. Otherwise, savvy opponents can bluff you mercilessly on the river. Harrington doesn’t seem to understand what this really means, though. He claims that you can “review the hand and see if your opponent’s betting fits the hand he’s representing. If there’s a good fit, let the hand go. Save your calls for the hands where there are obvious betting discrepancies between the betting history and the hand that’s being represented.”

This is a perfect example of Harrington’s failure to get past second level thinking. An opponent who realizes that you are very unlikely to have a hand stronger than one pair can easily bluff with a betting pattern that is perfectly consistent a strong hand. The point of game theory in this spot is that you have to call some percentage of the time when you can only beat a bluff, even though nothing about your opponent’s line suggests a bluff. Only calling when there is some inconsistency in an opponent’s story is not sufficient to counteract this bluffing strategy. In fact, savvy opponents are more likely to value bet when they know they have represented a weak hand and to bluff when they have shown strength consistently.

Harrington’s other strategy for stopping a bluff, the blocking bet, is nearly as ineffective. In most cases, a blocking bet has to have some chance of getting called by a worse hand to have value. Otherwise, it simply folds out worse hands (or worse, entices them to bluff) and gets called or raised by better. The author claims that a small blocking bet is difficult to bluff raise because it looks like a “suck bet” with a big hand, but he correctly argues that you should very rarely make such small bets with big hands on the river. Thus, in Harrington’s tight-aggressive strategy, a blocking bet will look exactly like what it is: a hand that doesn’t want to get raised.

When it comes to bluffs of his own, Harrington is similarly weak. He claims it is obvious that you shouldn’t bluff a calling station, but plenty of situations exist where a calling station gets to the river with a hand that won’t call a big bet. I’ve written an entire article on this point.

His advice to “Bluff players who’ve shown weakness somewhere along the way,” once again falls into the trap of low-level thinking. Smarter opponents are more likely to call on the river when they know they’ve shown weakness. They may even show weakness for the purpose of inducing a bluff.

Most importantly, Harrington never mentions that a river bluff still needs to be based on an analysis of an opponent’s range and the hands he is likely to fold. It isn’t enough to bluff because you can’t win any other way. You need to know which hands you expect your opponent to fold, what percentage of his range they comprise, and how much you’ll need to bet to take him off of those holdings.

Tells and Observations

This section brings the book back to poker theory, where it is strongest. The author does a nice job of dispelling certain misconceptions about is and is not worth noticing about one’s opponents. He rightly downplays the importance of physical tells and suggests instead that you focus on concealing your own tells and place opponents on a spectrum from loose to tight, passive to aggressive, and straightforward to tricky.

Playing the Loose-Aggressive Style

Despite his tongue-in-cheek nickname of “Action Dan”, the famously tight Harrington has a good grasp on what makes loose-aggressive (LAG) play successful. He clearly and concisely explains how LAG play loses value by entering pots with weak hands but regains that value through deception, frustrating opponents, and generally taking them out of their comfort zone.

It’s generally good that he avoids the minutiae that bogs down his explanation of his TAG style, but if anything he provides too little information about how exactly to play as a LAG. The text includes a nice little summary of some plays that LAGs can make but offers little advice on when to attempt them. Harrington also has too little to say about how to maintain a LAG style when smart players start playing back at you. His response, that, “There is no ‘correct’ answer to the problem; it’s endemic to the loose-aggressive style,” while not exactly wrong, is a bit of a cop out. There are things that LAG players do to deal with opponents who play back them, and Harrington would have done well to learn about and discuss some of them.

Harrington’s strategy for countering LAG play is not without its strengths, but it has some glaring weaknesses as well. He correctly points out that you must raise and re-raise a LAG more often than you would a TAG, but doesn’t provide much insight into when or with which hands. When he does talk about changing hand values, he misses an important point: although it’s true that broadway hands medium pairs have better equity against a LAG’s pre-flop hand range, they are not necessarily easier to play post-flop. An aggressive player forces you to hit the flop, and Harrington underestimates the value of suited connectors that can hit the flop strongly enough to play back at the nettlesome LAG.

Most surprisingly, Harrington insists that he would prefer to sit to the right rather than the left of a LAG player. His assumption is that the LAG is the “fulcrum” of the table and action tends to revolve around him: other players check strong hands waiting for him to bet, they re-raise him light, etc. Harrington assumes that since the LAG will predictably bet or raise anyway, there’s little informational value to be had from sitting on his left and it’s better to see how other players respond to his action.

There’s something to this at a full ring table, where pots are more likely to go multi-way, but it really only works against a LAG who is not particularly good. A player who understands his own image will often frustrate you by checking when you were hoping he would bet and re-raising you when you really wanted to see the next card for cheap. The simple fact that he is loose means you’ll play more pots with him than you otherwise would, and for that reason alone you should want to have position on him.

Beating Weak Games

When I saw this section heading, I thought to myself, “Isn’t that what this whole book is about?” But now we’re talking about really weak games: $1/$2 live tables and internet games where bets are made with decimal points. Harrington’s advice to play solid, straightforward poker and bet more hands for value is correct, and he explains the reasoning behind it well. If anything, he’s a little too conservative. Against weak players, you should welcome the chance to take cheap flops in position with very speculative hands, not for deception purposes, but simply for implied odds.

The advice in this section is so simple and straight-forward that the author probably devotes too much space to it. Then again, the majority of his readership probably plays in these games, so he probably has his reasons.

Bankroll Management and Other Topics

The obligatory hodge-podge chapter reminds us that this is a Two Plus Two publication. Harrington briefly discusses non-strategy topics such as bankroll management, avoiding tilt, and paying taxes, but doesn’t devote enough space to these topics to say much of substance. Anyone who actually needs an answer to one of these questions is unlikely to find this book very satisfying.

An Interview With Bobby Hoff

I’m generally skeptical of these “let’s talk to a venerate old pro and pretend that whatever he says is brilliant”-style interviews, but Hoff actually comes across very well here. He still plays high stakes games live and online and seems to have a good feel for the current poker climate, which a lot of the old-school guys lack. He certainly plays a different style than many contemporary professionals, but for the most part it makes sense and he has good answers to some tough questions. He seems to understand both the math and the psychology of very deep stacked live no limit hold ‘em very well, and I found the interview entertaining and educational.

Conclusion

Harrington on Cash Games Volume II is a much more diverse book than its predecessor, which focused almost exclusively on tight-aggressive play. The second volume, which covers turn and river play as well as playing loose and aggressive, dealing with others who play that way, bankroll management, and other topics, is more of a mixed bag. The author continues to explain complex poker theory well, but when it comes to putting it into practice, his advice is hit-or-miss. His recommendations for playing the turn are solid enough, but he badly misunderstands river play, and his advice for beating loose-aggressive players and beating weak games is a little lacking. Small-stakes players and those new to cash games will get a lot from this book, especially if they know what to ignore, but more experienced players will find the more advanced topics are often misguided and unhelpful.

If this review is helpful to you, please consider purchasing this or other poker books through my Amazon affiliate links. 100% of the proceeds go to the Boston Debate League.

Overview

The original Harrington on Hold ‘Em revolutionized tournament poker, introducing tens of thousands of amateur players to what were then advanced moves and concepts: the continuation bet, the squeeze play, and M, the now-famous ratio of a player’s stack to the blinds and antes. This legacy created unrivaled anticipation for the Harrington on Cash Games (HOC) series, the first two volumes of which were released simultaneously last week.

So are they worth the hype? As with so many questions in no-limit hold ’em (NLHE), the answer is, “It depends.” Players who are new to NLHE cash games will have the most to gain, especially if they are interested in full ring play. Those who are already moderately successful at cash games will find few springboards to improvement, especially if they are interested in short-handed online games.

Though Harrington and his publishers at 2+2 should have been more up front about the intended audience, the books are wisely geared towards fans of tournament books who want to venture into no-limit cash games. Harrington writes primarily about full ring (i.e. 9- or 10-handed) games, and though his examples sometimes suggest otherwise, his advice is most applicable in smaller stakes, passive live games. Again, this makes sense given the implicitly intended audience, but it ought to have been made more clear.

Reading HOC Volume 1 should certainly make cash game novices safer and more confident at the tables. Harrington’s advice steers them clear of common and expensive pitfalls, particularly the perils of playing out of position and overvaluing one-pair hands. Armed with this advice, new players will be able to protect their bankrolls and avoid hemorrhaging money while they learn from the best teacher of all: experience.

This is a double-edged sword, however. Because so much of the advice in HOC Volume I borders on the formulaic and overly cautious, it carries the very real danger of delaying, if not stunting, the growth of advanced no-limit hold ’em skills. Reading an opponent’s hand and manipulating his range, which even 2+2’s David Sklansky has acknowledged as the most important and profitable NLHE skills, are not only lacking from but positively devalued by HOC Volume I.

The result is a manual that, though very good for turning a new player into a reasonably good player, may actually delay that same player’s transition to becoming very good or great. More experienced, higher stakes players, particularly those accustomed to more aggressive short-handed online games, will find little of use, at least in the first volume of the series.

Concepts and Theory

Harrington gets a lot of tricky bits of poker theory right, explaining them concisely but clearly and convincingly. He suggests some analogies and thought experiments that should be very helpful to players who lack a clear understanding of metagame, implied odds, equity, and the way stack sizes affect proper play. Reading these sections of HOC Volume I before starting a session could easily double or triple the educational value of the experience accumulated during that session.

Unfortunately, it will be necessary for the player to supply the experience himself, because Harrington’s practical advice and examples, though numerous, are often misleading and sometimes painfully bad. In his Introduction, for instance, the author analyzes a hand from High Stakes Poker where the players brutally bungle nearly every key decision point. They even violate Harrington’s oft-repeated warnings against overvaluing one pair, not giving opponents enough credit in multi-way pots, and bloating the pot from out of position. Despite all of this, the author concludes that, “This was a great hand, with a lot of excellent decisions by the three main players.”

Part of the problem stems from the fact that Harrington seems confused about the central objectives of the NLHE cash game player and how they differ from those of the tournament player. In the Introduction, he nonsensically asserts that, “in tournament poker, your time horizon is very limited. You need to seize every opportunity as it presents itself or risk getting blinded away. Cash games don’t have that same kind of pressure. They’re much more a game of patience. You don’t need to swing at balls that just graze the strike zone; you can wait for the fat ones that you can blast out of the park.”

To the extent that there’s any truth to this claim, it is owing to the deeper stacks generally found in cash game play, not to any kind of time limitation. A tournament player can gladly felt an overpair in many situations simply because the money already in the pot is so large relative to the money remaining in his stack, not because he won’t have time to find a better opportunity. A cash game player with a similar stack would have no reason to pass on this opportunity, and a deep-stacked tournament player would need to be more cautious with all of his chips that have not yet been wagered.

In the very next section, Harrington offers a much more helpful summary of the key principles at work in NLHE cash games, which he calls “The Strength Principle” (bet strong hands, check middling ones, fold or bluff weak ones), “The Aggression Principle” (betting and raising is generally better than checking and calling), “The Betting Principle” (most good bets will either force better hands to fold, weaker hands to call, or drawing hands to pay too high a price), and “The Deception Principle” (“Never do anything all of the time.”) This is a pretty good introduction to deep-stacked NLHE play, and only the fourth principle is a bit incomplete. After all, many good players manage to be very deceptive while always playing a certain hand the same way simply because they also play very different hands in an identical fashion.

Though Harrington does an admirable job with these “Basic Concepts”, his explorations of these key concepts is ultimately shallow and rudimentary. This is part of what makes it good for beginners, but it is also the reason why more advanced players will have little to gain from this volume. Implied odds, for instance, are absolutely critical to NLHE and ripe for in-depth analysi, but HOC Volume I never gets beyond the elementary definition of ‘how much you stand to win if you hit your hand.’

But implied odds are about more than winning additional bets. They are about equity that can be accumulated on later streets, whether from value betting, bluffing, or all around out-playing an opponent because of a certain card that flopped, turned, or rivered Yet Harrington has little to say about how factors like position and bluff outs can influence the calculation of pot odds.

The second major part of the book focuses on “The Elements of No-Limit Hold ‘Em Cash”, topics like hand selection, pot commitment, and hand reading. Once again, Harrington explains these quite well and occasionally even rises to the level of insightful. A few of his gems may enlighten even some relatively knowledeable readers, as when he rather succintly states that, “By playing a mix of hands, you’re actually reducing your opponent’s implied odds on his speculative hands” or when he says, “you need to be sure that any betting action by you is capable of multiple interpretations by an observant opponent.”

The Tight-Aggressive Strategy

The bulk of the book outlines what Harrington names his “Tight-Aggressive Strategy”. Harrington’s emphasis on practical advice was a much-appreciated hallmark of his tournament series, but there is a reason why the better cash game books of late have focused on theory and principles. Even played full ring, deep-stack NLHE allows for a huge amount of flexibility in the play of any given hand. Nebulous factors such as history, table image, and meta-game can swing a call into a fold or a fold into a raise, but they are notoriously difficult to encapsulate in a playbook.

Harrington is on the right track by introducing a coherent strategy that demonstrates a possible mix of hand ranges in the situations he examines. However, readers rarely get more than a glimpse of the reasoning behind the particular frequencies and combinations he recommends. The author himself admits the haphazard nature of his strategy when he resorts to justifying a certain mix of checks and bets because it “feels about right.” Granted this is not going to be an exact science, but without a much more thorough explanation of how various plays and hands complement each other, the reader gets a recipe rather than a learning tool.

When Harrington does share his reasoning, it’s often disappointing. The fundamental problem is that he rarely argues in terms of equity. He prefers instead to talk about information, pot control, and “taking down the pot”, all of which ought to be subordinate to manipulating an opponent’s range so as to maximize your equity. Presumably hand-reading and equity analysis lie somewhere below the surface when the author indicates that a bet “smells like a bluff” or that it is “too soon to give up”, but he never reveals the warrants for his extra-sensory perceptions.

This flawed reasoning is evident when the author says things like, “A pot-sized bet is large enough to accomplish anything that a bigger bet could accomplish.” Although an overbet may provide as much information as a pot-sized bet and charge draws a good price, the one thing it does not accomplish as well ought to be obvious: putting more money into the pot when you have the best hand! Similarly, there is no intrinsic need to take a moderate but likely best hand to showdown. A bet that exposes you to a raise is not a liability if only hands that have you crushed will make that raise.

Harrington’s reasoning also tends to rely on assumptions about his opponents that will ring false to most players. They are people who fold AQ to a single raise on dry Ace-high flops and let the first person to bet at a paired board take it down, no matter how implausible his line.

As for the strategy itself, it isn’t bad. Pre-flop, Harrington makes some good points about how and why to diversify your ranges. His central premise, that NLHE is about seeing a lot of cheap flops, can’t be true for everyone at the table, but it’s true enough if you’re one of the best. This section also debunks some common myths about pot odds and what hands should be played out of position for a discount.

The section on flop play in heads up pots is the longest in the book, and undeservedly so. Flop play has at least as much to do with how the board texture fits your opponent’s pre-flop range as it does with your own hand, yet Harrington’s analysis always proceeds from the latter. And despite its length, this section barely scratches the surface of possible flop situations. It’s an admirable attempt, but offering practical advice for every situation is simply impossible. Explanation of the decision-making process, which is so much more important, is the inevitable casualty.

This isn’t to say that there is no explanation of the decision-making process- quite the contrary. But as explained above, a lot of important stuff is left out. Covering those details would have been much more useful than a engaging in a precise and minute analysis of a few select flop situations from every angle.

The section on flop play in multi-way pots is both shorter and better. Rather than analyzing examples ad nauseum, Harrington concentrates on the big picture. He repeatedly hammers home his central thesis that play generally should and will be more straight-forward. For this reason, position is especially valuable. And despite what Harrington says, your bets should often be smaller, since the mere act of betting will command more respect.

Conclusion

Harrington reserves turn and river play for Volume II, which severely limits the stand-alone value of this book. Tournament converts will need the most help on these streets, and the fact that these sections complete the Tight-Aggressive strategy, HOC Volume I does not contain a fully playable strategy, even though the outlining of such occupies the bulk of the book.

Ultimately, the author’s preference for practical advice over theoretical discussion makes Harrington on Cash Volume I something of a crutch for beginning players, with all of the good and bad that that implies. It will surely plug some common leaks and keep them out of trouble, which means that smaller stakes games will probably start to get a bit tougher. Because the material on winning NLHE thought processes is so sporadic and flawed, however, this book may actually stunt a reader’s growth at some point and will certainly be of little use to experienced players seeking to improve or to short-handed players of any stripe. They might do well to read it anyway, however, simply to be up on the latest formulaic play likely to invade the NLHE scene.

If you enjoyed this review, you might like my other book reviews or my poker strategy articles as well. And don’t forget to benefit the Boston Debate League by purchasing your copy of Harrington on Cash Games Volume I using my affiliate link above.

For a professional poker player, reading Dave Cinch is more than a little reminiscent of such an experience. His new book, The Poker World According to Cinch, is self-consciously paranoid and egomaniacal, a larger-than-life portrait of his experiences in and around the game of poker and of the worse-than-average luck he’s supposedly experienced. It is occasionally humorous and insightful, though never as often as the author intends. In the end, you’d like to say that your approach to the game has nothing to do with that of this inveterate gambler, but you can’t be so sure.

The Poker World According to Cinch is equal parts memoir, character sketch, and what might generously be called philosophical treatise. Cinch has spent twenty years playing, dealing, and hosting private poker games in Kentucky and at casinos around the country. At times, his tales resemble nothing so much as extended bad beat stories. To his credit, though, he always focuses more on the psychology and the experience of running bad than on the can-you-believe-it aspect (which isn’t to say such self-pity is entirely lacking).

His best tales aren’t even poker stories. Instead, they are about subjects as diverse as kidney stones and shark attacks. There is, however, always a poker analogy or metaphor at the heart of them.

In all cases, Cinch spins his yarns “gambler style”, with a healthy dose of colloquial spelling and grammar meant to evoke the sights and sounds of the gambling hall: “Frosty the Pool Shark got busted by Dusty Roads the horseman, with Dusty singing Christmas carols (“Frosty the Pool Shark”) and happily drawing to a deuce off-suit gutshot! There were seven witnesses to it in the game besides me, plus the dealer- and a flock of railbirds to boot. And I know you’re not gonna say the railbirds would lie. This is the straight scoop, man.” On the whole, this is an effective strategy for transporting the reader into that world, though at times it feels more than a bit forced.

The biggest distraction, however, is the author’s penchant for hyperbole. Everything is the shrewdest hustle, the worst beat, the wildest game ever. If the Guinness Book of World Records gave an award for most references to the Guinness Book of World Records, this one would be a cinch to win it.

Cinch’s sketches of the other characters who populate his world are the highlight of the book. As he explains it, “Poker is more about people than about cards. The people that gravitate towards the gaming sub-culture are the interesting thing, not the odds or the hands.” At his best, Cinch provides an insider’s perspective on this fascinating world, populated by such colorful characters as Cat Doctor, Marijuana Slim, Vic Mobster-elli (aka Baby Blue Eyes), and Fraulein Omaha.

Among them are thieves, hustlers, cheats, and above all degenerates, the kind who take their families’ gift money to the casino on Christmas Eve. Cinch’s portraits are whimsical and voyeuristic, but never judgmental. In fact, he has a special place in his heart for such devoted gamblers, believing that “That kind of gambling deserves it’s own wall in the Hall of Fame. I’m talking about the guys who will get up in there with the worst of it and don’t care.”

You see, Cinch is himself a gambler who just happens to play poker. Nowhere is this more clear than in his treatise on “Special Probability.” This is the bit where, despite the protestations to the contrary and the distinct lack of humor, you really hope he is joking. And the more he insists that he isn’t joking, the more you want to turn up your Ipod and move to a different car.

According to the Cinch Theory of Special Probability, “gambling isn’t science or math—it’s art. To be honest, I experience gambling not as a series of rational decisions, but more as a metaphysical drama—a kind of handicapping of the unfolding of a creative universe. I try to intuit about the nature of the game and the universe itself.” In other words, he believes that certain games, certain dealers, and even certain hands are out to get him. Supposedly he formulated the theory after a streak of losing 100,000 straight hands of Texas Hold ‘Em over a 10 year period.

This isn’t some off-the-cuff musing. Cinch devotes nearly 25% of the book to explaining, justifying, and promoting this theory. I’m not going to try to summarize it here—you’d have to hear it in the author’s own words. Not that I’m recommending that.

Cinch is a good story-teller, but he’s not much of a moralist, metaphysicist, or philosopher. His vignettes are entertaining enough, but they would be better if he would focus on the story rather than trying to extract a morals and truisms about gambling. Still, it makes me shudder to think just how close those of us who spend our time refining mathematically-grounded strategies are to abandoning that project, donning a joker hat, and creating a crackpot theory of the universe in our own images. Cinch seems to understand this dark side of poker all too well.

Upon re-reading it, I find that so many things I “learned” in the last year were there all along. No Limit Hold Em: Theory and Practice (NLHE:TAP), though heavier on the former than the latter, is an essential text for any serious player. It certianly couldn’t hurt beginners to read it, but getting the most from this book requires a combination of experience and multiple re-readings. It is a dense manual, often devoting no more than a few pages to crucial and complex information and not always presenting topics in logical progression, but damn near everything you need to become a strong player is in there.

The title is a bit of a misnomer, as the book contains a lot more theory than practice. However, this imbalance plays to the authors’ strengths and makes sense for a game as complex as no limit hold ‘em (NLHE). Rather than waste space on vain attempts to explain the many variations and exceptions that can arise, NLHE:TAP tells you “what factors you should consider when you make your decisions [and] how excellent players think about the game.”

The book begins with a discussion of key skills such as pot control, adjusting to different stack sizes, “winning the battle of mistakes”, hand reading, and manipulating your opponents. Not to quibble with the importance of any of these, but diving right into a discussion of particular skills is not the best way to begin a largely theoretical book.

From a theoretical perspective, NLHE is a game of implied odds. It is about threatening your opponents’ entire stacks while protecting your own. Though Sklansky and Miller emphasize this point repeatedly, they would have done well to introduce it early as a theoretical frame for the rest of their advice.

As for practical advice, NLHE:TAP’s central contribution is the best discussion of bet sizing in print, aptly summarized as “Big bets and big pots are for big hands.” The rest of the book expands out from this principle, explaining just how big is big, how that changes relative to flop texture and stack sizes, how to balance this strategy with properly sized bluffs, and when and why it might be appropriate to slowplay a big hand.

One of the great things about NLHE:TAP is that the authors approach the game theoretically and with an open mind. Even moves much maligned among many players, such as open limping, min-raising, overbetting, and buying in short receive serious strategic consideration. Personally, I came away from these chapters convinced that such plays are under-exploited even by very good players and thus offer profitable opportunities to anyone who masters them.

Though the above sections have more in common with optimal strategy, a substantial portion of the text focuses on exploitive strategy, that is, how to adapt a relatively unexploitable game in order to take maximum advantage of a weaker opponent. Sklansky and Miller call this “swapping mistakes”, giving up small amounts of equity to induce larger errors from opponents later on a future street or hand. They also consider other means of manipulating opponents and how generally to adapt your play to particularly tight or loose games. And though many examples implicitly assume a full ring game, most of the book is theoretical enough to be very applicable to short-handed and even heads up play.

At times, the authors take the idea of avoiding big mistakes too far, advocating the easy play rather than the best play. For instance, after raising Q9s pre-flop and getting an A95 rainbow flop, they contend that, “You likely have the best hand, but you also could easily be beaten. Since you don’t have much of a draw if behind, your goal should be to clarify whether your hand is best or not as early as possible…. Since you won’t call a check-raise, you should bet an amount that discourages a bluff.”

From out of position, I might like this line. With position, however, it will be easier to take your mid pair to showdown, and against most opponents, a good player should not be so fearful of skillful bluffing. Depending on the opponent, I would generally prefer to check planning to call most turn bets or to bet and call a check-raise planning to fold unimproved to a second barrel on the turn. The risk of occasionally facing a tough decision is not enough to justify a bet that will never fold out better hands nor be called by worse ones.

These are complex concepts that would require study under any circumstances. However, their presentation in NLHE:TAP doesn’t always help matters. In many cases, particularly the “Concepts and Weapons” section that concludes the book, complicated ideas are introduced in no particular order and often with minimal explanation. The latter is not necessarily a problem, as nothing essential to understanding is lacking. There is merely a minimum of hand holding, which ideally leaves room for more ideas to be introduced.

In some cases, though, particular concepts receive explanation and page space well out of proportion to their importance. One glaring example is the Sklansky-Chubokov hand rating system, which ranks hands based on how shallow stacks need to be to make open shoving them from the small blind profitable. These rankings are of very limited utility, especially relative to other ways in which hands can be ranked. Yet the charts themselves constitute a 12-page appendix, and their explanation garners more than a few pages from the main text. This is unfortunate given the number of more important and esoteric concepts that Sklansky and Miller treat in as little as half a page.

No Limit Hold ‘Em: Theory and Practice is a dense text, sometimes with good cause, sometimes needlessly so. A beginner won’t be able to read this book, sit down at the table, and win. But it is an indispensable tool for helping experienced players analyze their play, examine their game for leaks, and improve their decision-making ability.

The section “Sklansky on Razz” is certainly the best material on that game in print, but it’s a game that’s rarely spread anymore. As for the other essays, they were even at the time of publication little more than Theory of Poker simplified and explained for beginners. The examples and many of the concepts are specific to fixed limit games, and some even more restricted to obsolete games like jacks-or-better five card draw.

More recent publications, some authored by Sklansky himself, cover this material in greater depth and nuance. Tournament Poker for Advanced Players, for instance, subsumes the tournament essays in this manual. And numerous books targeted to beginners in Hold ‘Em or other games, not to mention Theory of Poker, introduce concepts like pot odds, implied odds, expectation, and semi-bluffing more clearly, in greater detail, and with more relevant examples.

These essays would be of little interest to most serious players anyway. This isn’t to say that even experts always get them right, but they at least understand the concepts in theory, which is all that Sklansky’s very short essays address. Only beginners would find this material new or helpful, and many better books are now available to them.

The exception to all of this is the second half of the book, “Sklansky on Razz”. This is Sklansky at his best and is well worth the cost of the book to anyone who wants to succeed in this deceptively simple game.

Razz is a game well suited to Sklansky’s particular talent for identifying counter-intuitive but mathematically sound plays. Since there is only one kind of hand a player can make, deception and hand-reading are less important than in other forms of poker and “many general principles and concepts of poker can best be illustrated via the game of razz.”

Sklansky goes on to use the game to illustrate some nuances of pot odds, higher level thinking, relative position, range mixing, inducing mistakes, and ante stealing/defense. He doesn’t always draw the connection in so many words, but reading Sklansky’s thoughts on razz should help astute players better employ these concepts in any game.

For razz players, he also demonstrates some little known facts about the game. On fifth street, for instance, a four-card six is often a favorite over a rough made nine. And on third street, depending on which cards are dead, 8-6-4 can be a favorite over 3-2-A. Recognizing these situations better than one’s opponents can be very valuable, as they may happily but mistakenly cap the betting thinking they have the best of it.

It is this razz material that makes Sklansky on Poker potentially of interest to today’s poker player. The information from most of the other essays can be better gleaned from Theory of Poker, Tournament Poker for Advanced Players, and the better beginner’s books on the market.

“tnx for the review.

i do believe all players would greatly benefit from the book. advanced or intermediate the most of course. but if you are a decent player of other games your skills can be transfered quickly enough to split.
so even a novice at the game can benefit from the book right away if he is experienced in poker.

a complete novice i think should get his feet wet with limit holem or seven stud first then expand his horizons.

no harm in reading any book once thru and getting a feel for it and then coming back when you can get the greatest use of it. if you havent at least skimmed thru it you wont know when you are reeady to digest its value.”

I don’t really disagree with this. Beginning players could surely find value in the book, and it couldn’t hurt for them to know what’s out there when they’re ready for it. But I do think there are better resources for players new to split-pot games that cover important basics like O/8 starting hands in greater detail.

Stud/8

Though it would be helpful if he came out and said this, Zee’s guiding principle in Stud/8 is that you need to know where you stand. Tough players are aggressive, and pots will often be capped on big bet streets. He advises to play hands that can give action like this and to get out of the way early if you won’t know what to do if your opponents start raising. Thus, rather than pushing small edges on early streets, “It is sometimes good not to play so fast so you can determine where the strength lies.”

In terms of showdown equity, Stud/8 hands often run close in value, particularly on early streets. Thus, how well a hand will play on future streets becomes the true test of its worth. Good players find their edge by recognizing the many conditions that affect whether and how a hand should be played. Will the pot be heads up or multiway? Which cards are live? Is there an opportunity to misrepresent your hand?

Much of Zee’s Stud/8 material is devoted to a street-by-street analysis of how to play. For third street, he offers a comprehensive analysis of the possible starting hands, when to play them, and how they ought to be played. This is one of the highlights of the book. Players make third street decisions on every hand they play, so it’s important to be airtight on the fundamentals, and this text can advance exactly that goal.

The discussions of future streets are good but much less thorough. They read more like a laundry list of possible plays than a full consideration of the situations in which a player may find himself. To be fair, this is not entirely Zee’s fault. Stud/8 is a complex game with a lot of variables, and it would be difficult to write a comprehensive guide to play on later streets. For advanced players who already know how to handle common situations, Zee’s thoughts on tricky spots and expert plays are a treasure trove.

Unsurprisingly, the text becomes even more disorganized in its second-half, where a hodge-podge of ideas is collected as “Miscellaneous Topics”. These include thoughts on slow-playing, bluffing, and random plays that didn’t fit elsewhere in the text. Again, it’s valuable information, but the presentation is a little lacking.

Zee’s sections on types of Stud/8 games (ie tight, loose, short-handed), psychology, and hand-reading fall short of the standard set by the earlier material. They are valuable enough, but rather generic (the Psychology and Hand-Reading sections of both the Stud/8 and O/8 manuals are literally identical, borrowed from Sklansky’s Theory of Poker, save for a few details). Much the same can be said for the Questions and Answers: I suppose there’s no harm in including them, but they introduce no new material and offer little advantage over re-reading the text.

O/8

Although the first section of the O/8 text is devoted to “Basic Play”, it is still not ideal for beginners. Zee does articulate the basic goal of O/8, particularly in weak low-limit games: “your primary edge comes from the fact that you won’t be drawing to less than the nuts.” Unlike the very helpful review of third-street hands in Stud/8, however, this section does not categorize the various types playable O/8 holdings or discuss when and how to play them. Instead, Zee presumes this knowledge on the part of the reader and dives straight into special cases of what not to play and which weak-looking hands could actually be played for a profit.

After this brief discussion of starting hands, the “Basic Play” section consists of a list of disjointed “Concepts” numbered and strung together. They are valuable tidbits, but the lack of any organizing structure prevents the reader from getting a holistic sense of the game and its flow.

Zee devotes the bulk of the O/8 manual to “Advanced Strategy” for higher-limit games. Here, just playing tight and drawing to the nuts will not suffice. Instead, “this is a game of trying to get in cheaply before the flop…. The big decision is to analyze the flop and understand how it relates to your hand and whether you should play on.”

Profitable players in these games make good decisions about how well flops connect with their holdings and how to play for maximum profit against opponent’s likely holdings. The key is “to have the nuts with draws to better hands.” In other words, in a game where most players are tight and only putting in money with the nut low, having counterfeit protection to the second nut low is essential. Outside shots to a gutshot straight or a backdoor flush also contribute important equity. Holding the nuts without any of these is rarely sufficient to withstand heavy action.

Of course, these ideal situations do not arise all that often. In the meantime, Zee explains how to steal pots, how to exercise restraint even with strong hands when there are a lot of draws out, and how to handle tough spots with marginal holdings.

Despite its catch-all name, the “Additional Advanced Concepts” section is actually organized more logically than most of the book. It consists primarily of advice on how to adapt your play to game conditions (i.e. tight, loose, or short-handed). As with the Stud/8 material, the Psychology, Hand Reading, and Questions & Answers sections are largely repetitive and generic.

Ray Zee’s High-Low Split Poker is not, nor does it purport to be, a comprehensive guide to playing Stud/8 and O/8. It reads more like an off-the-cuff brainstorming of all the little things that separate the players in these games from the merely good. But Zee is one such great player, and his musings, however disjointed, are worth many times their cover price.

Diligent readers who invest the necessary effort to follow Chen and Ankenman’s arguments and consider their implications, however, will not be disappointed. Careful study of this text will reveal a world of insight into poker concepts such as value betting, range balancing, and optimal strategy. Although more could have been done to elucidate its practical applications, The Mathematics of Poker is nevertheless an extremely valuable text for any poker player willing to give it the thoughtfulness it deserves.

It is not an easy read, but it should not be beyond the grasp of anyone with a high school education. Game theory is serious mathematics, and nearly every page of this book is packed with equations, charts, and graphs. This looks intimidating, but in fact, the authors do all the heavy lifting and help a diverse audience follow along in a variety of ways. For the real mathematicians, they show their work and occasionally suggest follow-up problems that readers might consider attacking on their own. However, they bracket these sections so that the mathematically challenged can skip past them to the (relatively) plain-language explanations of the process and results that follow. Chen and Ankenman do a remarkably good job of elucidating the conceptual meaning of equations and solutions, and every chapter concludes with a summary of the “Key Concepts.” Still, a passing acquaintance with statistical notation, graphical representation, and high school algebra is all but required to make sense of the text.

After some opening chapters that cover concepts like variance, sample sizes, hand reading, and pot odds, Chen and Ankenman introduce the concept of optimal strategy, a style of play that cannot be exploited even if your opponents knew ahead of time exactly how you would be playing. In other words, they are interested in finding solutions such as the exact ratio of bluffs to value bets that would make your opponent indifferent to calling or folding with a weak made hand on the river.

All commonly played versions of poker are far too complex to solve with the tools of game theory, however. Instead, poker must be attacked indirectly, through a series of “toy games” that represent highly simplified poker situations. One oft-revisited example involves two players each dealt one card from a three-card deck containing exactly one A, one K, and one Q. Throughout the book, the authors consider situations where the second player to act knows what card his opponent holds, situations where he does not have this information, situations where the first player is forced to check dark, and finally a full-street game where neither player knows the other’s card but may bet, check, or raise as he sees fit.

The text is very helpful in explaining the optimal strategy for each player in each game and how the addition of new strategic options affects these results. Still, the ultimate solution is nothing but the optimal strategy for a game that no one will ever play. Undoubtedly, understanding what optimal play entails and how it is derived can be enormously valuable at the poker table. But these games are accompanied by a few sentences, at best, explaining their relevance to actual poker situations.

Part of my frustration stems from the fact that the tidbits of practical advice that Chen and Ankenman do include are tantalizingly thought-provoking: “Bluffing in optimal poker play is often not a profitable play in and of itself. Instead, the combination of bluffing and value betting is designed to ensure the optimal strategy gains value no matter how the opponent responds”; “Betting preemptively is a perfect example of a play that has negative expectation, but the expectation of the play is less negative than the alternative of checking”; “it’s frankly terrible to find oneself in a situation with a marked open draw.” Any of these insights is worthy of several pages of extrapolation, but this work is largely left to the reader.

This is more than an error of omission. When Chen and Ankenman do directly address the question of how their material translates into poker strategy, they concern themselves overly much with pursuing optimal versus exploitive strategies, which is to say strategies that deviate from unexploitable, or optimal, play in order to capitalize on perceived weaknesses in an opponent’s strategy.

Their stated reasons for this preference are that it is difficult to determine another player’s strategy with certainty and that opponents will eventually change their play to counter your exploitation. While these are both reasonable concerns, neither is prohibitive. Although certainty is impossible, the ability to make quick and reasonably accurate assessments of a player’s strengths and weaknesses and the ability to adapt and re-adapt to him more quickly than he can do the same are skills from which a successful poker player derives his edge.

Whereas Chen and Ankenman advocate playing optimally against unknown opponents, I would argue that you often can and should assume and default to exploiting certain weaknesses until you see some evidence to the contrary. Balancing one’s river betting range in order to avoid exploitation by a check-raise bluff, for instance, is a poor default strategy because very few poker players are capable of such a tactic.

The real strength of The Mathematics of Poker, in my opinion, is not that it will help you to play a near-optimal strategy. Rather, it will help you to understand optimal strategy so that you can better recognize and exploit your opponents’ inevitable deviations from it. For example, one toy game illustrates how a player in position must value bet and bluff fewer hands when his opponent is allowed to check-raise than in a game where he is not. The lesson I take from this is that against an opponent who rarely check-raises the river, I should value bet and bluff more often than optimal strategy would suggest.

But ultimately, these are shortcomings, not flaws. The mathematics are there to illustrate the game theory that underlies poker. Even with the supplemental explanations and synopses, The Mathematics of Poker is a demanding read. It asks a lot of the reader both in following the arguments and in making the jump from toy games to real life poker. Those who invest the requisite time and energy, however, will be rewarded with a deeper understanding of how to exploit their opponents and how to avoid such exploitation themselves.

“…nowhere in poker literature was truly useful instructions on where to start. Everybody says the same thing: Play four cards that work together, A-A-J-T and A-A-K-K are the best hands, and four connecting cards are playable. But what else is playable and what am I trying to do when I see the flop?”

The resulting book is far from the definitive word on PLO strategy, but it is an excellent introduction to the game, which, as Hwang points out, was a market niche badly in need of filling.

The author proposes a simple but effective strategy geared towards the low-stakes, full-ring PLO games primarily found in brick and mortar casinos. Echoing the advice of other Omaha authors, Hwang argues that PLO is a game of straights. In other words, the winning hand at the river will often be a straight.

But PLO is also a flop game, even more so than Hold ‘Em, and that is where most of the fireworks happen. Although big pots emerge most frequently when a monster draw runs into the flopped nuts, Hwang refutes the common misconception that PLO is primarily a game of luck and gigantic post-flop coin flips. Instead, he claims,

“there are a variety of common big-pot situations where not only does one player usually have the other one smashed, but in some cases will be on a total freeroll. Our goal is to be the one on the dominant end when the big pots get played: this involves first recognizing what those big-pot situations are, and then identifying the hands that have the potential to put us in the position to get the edge in those spots.”

This is exactly what he goes on to do, beginning with a discussion of the most common profitable flop situations in which an Omaha player may find himself. Just as the Hold ‘Em player is accustomed to winning big pots when he flops an overpair versus top pair top kicker or a set versus an overpair, the PLO player has his own set of dream flop scenarios, such as the Nut Straight Freeroll (nut straight with re-draws to a flush, full house, or higher straight versus the same straight without redraws) and the Dominating Draw (a 16-out draw to the nuts versus a lower draw to non-nut hands, or a pair and a wrap draw versus a bare wrap draw, for instance).

Having laid out these profitable situations on which one’s sights should be set, Hwang next considers which starting hands are most likely to produce such situations: combinations containing suited Aces and four connecting cards (gaps at the bottom only, if at all), and pairs accompanied by either of these. Higher is better, in all cases. These hands form the core of Hwang’s pre-flop strategy, which unfortunately cannot be laid out quite as clearly as can its hold ’em equivalents, given the much larger set of possible Omaha starting hands.

Hwang gives some consideration to how to play these hands pre-flop as well, such as whether to enter with a call or a raise, what can be played from which position, and what is still viable when the pot has already been raised. Frankly, this isn’t the strongest part of the book, and the advice here sometimes feels haphazard and a little weak. Still, the reader does accumulate a feel for what works by studying Hwang’s many examples, and this should be enough to get him started at the table, where he can work out his own answers to these questions.

Returning to the discussion of ideal flop situations, Big Play Strategy next discusses how much heat different kinds of hands can handle post-flop. Hwang devotes quite a lot of pages and examples to what is really a fairly simple strategy: only draw to the nuts, play big draws aggressively, don’t slowplay, bluff when your opponents show weakness. It’s not quite fair to call the many quizzes and example hands “filler”, but I’d rather poker books stuck to content and left the study aids to high school textbooks. A lot of the material is repetitive or downright irrelevant.

Hwang’s strategy is a good one, especially for relatively passive and straight-forward full ring live games. I don’t imagine it would adapt well to the short-handed games that are more popular online or to games with tricker and more aggressive opponents. One weakness in particular that shows up in some of the sample hands is an eagerness to bet big and take down the pot in situations where a hand is likely to be way ahead or way behind of an opponent. Though Hwang’s admonitions against slow-playing are generally well taken, it may not be best to bet pot again with AQQ8 on an AA6K board after getting called on the flop.

When I saw that Hwang included sections on O8 and PLO8, I was more than a little skeptical that he could cover three games adequately in one book. After seeing how little space he required to offer some excellent insights into PLO, though, and how much space he devoted to review, reiteration, and even the occasional bad beat story, I had renewed hope. As it turns out, he does an admirable job with both of the other games.

His approach is similar, identifying the most profitable post-flop situations and then working backwards to derive a pre-flop strategy. His recommendations concerning starting hands and how to play them is generally solid in both cases, though his bias for post-flop play occasionally leads him to disregard preflop edges. With A-A-3-x or A-A-4-x in O8, for instance, he advises a limp “in a ‘zoo’ game where everybody is going to call your raise.” Even if it will be necessary to give up on many flops, it’s hard to see a reason not to make a raise that will be called by so many hopeless hands that will both lose equity pre-flop and connect with fewer flops than this relative monster. Hwang also seems a bit too willing to give up on non-nut high hands for a fixed limit game where most opponents are playing primarily low cards.

Aside from these shortcomings, though, the O8 section is nearly as strong on post-flop play as on pre-flop strategy. It contains good advice on value betting, raising to clear the field and promote hands, semi-bluffing, and ‘demi-bluffing’ the river with the nuts in one direction in hopes of knocking an opponent off of half the pot.

Demi-bluffing plays an even larger role in the pot limit version of the game, where the bets are bigger and the bare nuts in one direction must sometimes be folded. In PLO8, high hands with any kind of low potential, like K-K-3-2, gain a lot of playability from the demi-bluff.

Hwang clearly highlights this and other differences between PLO8, O8 , and PLO. On the other, he makes good use of the similarities between the games to cover all three in a single book. Of course, none is covered in all its intricacies. But Pot Limit Omaha: The Big Play Strategy does a surprisingly good job of introducing all three of these games by orienting new players not just to the nuts and bolts but to the guiding objectives, the profitable situations towards that game’s strategy is directed.

Perhaps more importantly, Hwang’s fondness for Omaha shines through on every page, encouraging readers to recognize that it can be both fun and profitable. His book will certainly contribute to his dream of seeing “small stakes PLO games… become standard in card rooms across America.”

Elements of Poker is like no other poker book on the market. For the most part, it isn’t about pot odds or percentages or hand ranges or bluffing or raising or any of that other stuff that other books tell you how to do. Technically, it does include a pre-flop starting hand chart for hold ’em, but- well, you’ll see. Elements of Poker is about how to play poker, literally how you should be while you are playing. It’s about where and how you should sit, what and how you should think, when and how you should act, how and to whom you should speak, and even how and why you should breath.

Angelo begins by explaining that you have three poker games: “Your A game is when you play your best and feel your best…. Your B-game is everything between your A-game and your C-game…. Your C-game is when you play poorly according to you.” By his reckoning, most poker books tell you how to improve your A-game. That’s all well and good, but as he makes clear, poker is a stressful, psychologically and physically brutal game. No one can play his A-game all the time. Most of Elements of Poker, and all of the best parts, is about how to lop off your C-game and spend more time playing your best. Whereas fiddling with the margins of your A-game may improve your win rate by .5 BB/hour or so, getting out of your C-game is usually worth much more. Often, it’s the difference between winning and losing.

For Angelo, profit stems from reciprocality. That is, it flows from all of the things that you do better than your opponents. If you get Aces on the button and raise, you haven’t won anything yet, because anyone can raise with a pair of Aces. But if you fold those same Aces to a check-raise on the turn, in a spot where your opponent would have lost his stack, then you have turned a (theoretical) profit.

But it’s not just about how you play your hands. Every decision you make is an opportunity to decide better than your opponents will. You can eat better, choose your seat better, pay more attention at the table, and quit better than they would. Quitting is big in Angelo’s world. Players more prone to tilt than myself will probably find his advice on this point especially valuable. Personally, I struggle to find time to play as much as I should, so I’m more interested in ways to recover from the C-game mentality or even to improve my C-game rather than ways to quit. Still, it’s a good section and a powerful idea.

The underlying theme here is self-control. The reader certainly gets the sense that this book is the product of a long, perhaps ongoing struggle between Angelo and his tilt. He’s been a professional poker player for a long time, and what he reveals in Elements of Poker are the paths that he has taken to acquire greater control over his thoughts and greater discipline in his actions. What worked for him may not work for everyone, but it at least makes for instructive examples:

Don’t set expectations: “When you feel disappointment or relief, you have painted the Ace with your desires and fears- you attached.”

Avoid entitlement: “You are not entitled to play bad just because they are playing bad. You are not entitled to tilt on the grounds that anyone would tilt with the terrible luck you’ve had…. If you have time and money, you are entitled to a seat at the table. That is all.”

Don’t think in terms of streaks: “All of my good streaks and all of my bad streaks… have had one thing in common. They did not exist in your mind. They only existed in my mind.”

Ignore the chat box when playing online: “Let’s say you wanted to make it more likely that you will make misclick mistakes. And that you wanted to increase the probability that you will be distracted from the game and miss something important. And let’s say you wanted to disclose information to your opponents about yourself that will help them play better against you. How might you achieve all these goals with one action? Chat.”

Keep your reads flexible: “If you have an inflexible image in your mind of an opponent, then whenever he changes, your evaluation of him will be wrong.”

Breathe. Damn near an entire chapter is devoted to this one.

When he’s at his best, Angelo seems to tell you things that you already know, except that he states them so simply, clearly, and powerfully that you attain a new and deeper sense of their importance. Pay attention. Play your position. Find games you can beat. Everyone knows this stuff, yet everyone gets it wrong all the time.

At its worst, Angelo’s writing devolves into gross oversimplification or mystical mumbo-jumbo. When you know you want to get all in on the next street, bet 1/3 of the effective stacks on this street. No matter what. Guy with a $1000 open raises to $40 and you’ve got Aces? Make it $300. That’s an actual example from the book.

A lot of the more traditional poker advice tends to veer off track like that. Most of the Tournaments chapter, for instance, is an argument for the importance of survival backed up by numbers the author seems to fabricate out of thin air. I do sympathize with his reasoning for giving up tournaments, though: “the pain equation is way out of whack.” Busting out of a $100 tournament can feel as bad, or worse, than losing ten times that in a cash game.

Angelo’s discussions of ethics may prove controversial as well. We’re not talking about marking cards or multi-accounting here, but rather some genuine gray areas related to whether you should point out a dealer error in a pot that doesn’t involve you or when and how you should reveal your hand at showdown. He admits that what he advises can result in your revealing more information than is necessary about your hand and maybe even open yourself up to angel-shooting. Ultimately, though, he offers a compelling, almost Nietzschean justification: “In the grander scheme, you could say that the reason your opponents say, ‘I missed’ is because they are weak, and the reason you say don’t say ‘I missed’ is because you are strong, which means you are competing for money when you are strong and your opponents are weak. How fair is that?”

And that brings us back to reciprocality. Every time you make a better decision than your opponents, even when you’re deciding about something seemingly tangential like what to eat or how much to sleep, you profit as surely as you do when you make a heroic call or amazing fold. The former a lot easier to address, though, and there’s generally a lot more room for improvement there. So while the other poker books will tell you how to make even better decisions on a few key points (betting, folding, calling, raising, checking) that you probably understand pretty well already, Tommy Angelo’s Elements of Poker will help you recognize and take advantage of the many other opportunities for profit that exist all around you.

As was Flynn, Mehta, and Miller’s intent, their book addresses the elements of the game most likely to befuddle novice players: how to handle stacks of different sizes, how to weight pot odds versus implied odds, how to make the most with monster hands, and what to do with marginal hands in tricky spots. Their central lesson is to plan your hand. In other words, they advise players to think about what kind of flops they want to see, how big of a pot they will want to play on these flops, and what kind of turn and river spots they may face before deciding what to with their pre-flop starting hands.

This is common no limit hold ’em advice, but Professional No Limit Hold ‘Em gives it much more content than the average strategy guide. Most of the book is dedicated to what it really means to plan a hand and how to go about doing so. Since the threat of an all-in bet looms over every hand of no limit hold ’em, the authors work backwards from this possibility. They explain what it means to be committed to the pot and how to avoid putting your entire stack at risk when you don’t intend to do so. Again, ‘pot control’ is a much-bandied-about bit of jargon, but rarely is it explained as clearly or as practically as it is here: “Pot control means deciding early in a hand what size you want the final pot to be, and then choosing your actions to make it that size.”

To aid in hand planning, the authors introduce the concept of a commitment threshold, where one more big bet will (usually) commit your entire stack to the pot. Their rules make it easy to recognize when you are approaching this threshold and to decide whether and how you want to approach it. While it does an admirable job of helping players to navigate their own commitment decisions, this section would have benefited from some discussion of how recognizing an opponent’s commitment threshold can aid in bet sizing so as to encourage or discourage his further involvement in the pot.

With these baseline concepts out of the way, the book moves on to the REM- for Range, Equity, Maximize- Process, the “guiding process by which you gather information, calculate its consequences, and use it to make the best possible play.” There are better resources for learning how to put an opponent on a range of hands and how to calculate equity, and PNLHE thankfully does not dwell long on these subjects.

Instead, the bulk of the REM section, and indeed the bulk of the book, focus on how to “Maximize”, that is, how to make the best decision possible based on the information culled from the earlier steps. Topics covered include bluffing, value betting, and the especially thorny question of how to play various types of draws. The authors’ thoughts on these topics are none too deep, but for an introductory book, they are appropriate and come packaged in the form of concise guidelines, such as, “If your pot equity is relatively small…, usually avoid semibluff raising.”

In Section Four: Planning Your Hand Around Commitment, the authors return to the notion of commitment and how it ought to influence your play. Specifically, they introduce the concept of Stack-to-Pot Ratio, or SPR, a number the measures the size of the effective stacks relative to the final pre-flop pot. Armed with such a number, they argue, you can decide how strong of a hand you will need to flop to commit your entire stack to the pot against various opponents.

Working back from this consideration, they advise calculating a “Max SPR” for your specific hand and opponent that represents “the maximum multiples of the preflop pot that you can get all-in for postflop and have the best of it.” In other words, how big of a pot will this opponent be willing to play on this flop with a hand worse than mine? Then, with this question answered, you can establish a “Target SPR” that reflects how much money you want to have behind post-flop given your pre-flop cards and most likely opponent. Thus, big pairs likely to flop an overpair and broadway hands likely to flop top pair with a good kicker prefer smaller SPRs than small pairs that need to win big on the rare occasions that they flop a set.

This is where I really start to differ with the authors of PNLHE. They justify their emphasis on SPRs by arguing, “You plan hands to reduce expensive mistakes, and the biggest mistakes you can make are commitment errors. You plan hands to avoid tough commitment decisions, because they cause you to make those big commitment errors.” SPR is a tool designed to make post-flop play easier, and I concede that it may be helpful to smaller stakes players who can turn a profit merely by avoiding big mistakes of their own.

But it is presented as a crucial NLHE tool, not a crutch for simplifying the decisions of inexperienced players. Ultimately, a player’s goal should be not just to reduce expensive mistakes on his part but to induce such mistakes from his opponents. Towards this end, players need to consider not just how much money they can profitably put in with a certain holding but how the money goes in. In some situations, the authors’ advice to bet or raise as much as possible when you’ve decided to commit to the pot is sound. But in many other situations, such aggression will fold out bluffs and weaker hands that are only comfortable when doing the betting or raising themselves.

Worse, the measures recommended for hitting a target SPR pre-flop sometimes amount to turning one’s hand face-up to a strong opponent and scaring even weaker players away from big pots post-flop. In a particularly troubling example, PNLHE advises limping KK under-the-gun in a 7-handed $2/$5 NLHE game with a $500 stack and then re-raising from $20 to $50 after another limp and a raise. Even granting the generous assumption that the second limper will often call this raise, giving you an SPR of 3, I have trouble imagining those Kings being in very good shape if all of the money goes in on a Qh 7d 4h flop after this pre-flop action.

The authors claim that your hand will not be transparent since you’ll occasionally make a similar play with AK or AQ. Even against that range, a tiny limp-reraise planning to get all the money in whenever you flop an overpair against two opponents gives the first raiser the very profitable opportunity to call pre-flop with his entire range and fold everything worse than top pair, top kicker. And the situation only gets worse when there isn’t someone behind you limping and cold-calling a reraise for 10% of the effective stacks. Playing KK like this may enable you to hit what would otherwise be your target SPR, but having played KK like this, you need to adjust your target SPR way down.

On the other hand, many players, even many advanced ones, would likely benefit from putting more thought into likely post-flop scenarios when sizing their pre-flop raises and re-raises. As with most things in NLHE, it’s a balancing act. Flynn, Mehta, and Miller, however, tend to treat SPR as the most important element rather than as one factor to consider along with position, deception, and other important pre-flop considerations. In general, they do an excellent job of keeping their advice simple without making it misleading, but in addressing this particular concept, they err too far on the side of oversimplification.

Still, SPR can be a very valuable tool for helping players to plan their NLHE hands and make better decisions when their entire stacks are at risk. As these are the biggest and often most important decisions in the game, Flynn, Mehta, and Miller have certainly set their sights on the right target. What’s more, they find substantial new ground to cover, getting away from the starting hand charts and specific hand advice found in so many other NLHE texts. Armed with Professional No Limit Hold ‘Em, dedicated players will learn to think correctly about the game and to make the right decisions when the pressure is on and the stakes are at their highest.

One thing I admire about Kozol is that he is much more upfront about his agenda and the sacrifices required than are many other advocates of reform. He admits that, “Attorneys in school-equalization suits have done their best to understate the notion of ‘redistribution’ of resources. They try instead, whenever possible, to speak in terms that seem to offer something good for everyone involved…. No matter what devices are contrived to bring about equality, it is clear that they require money-transfer, and the largest source of money is the portion of the population that possesses the most money.”

This is where the issue gets thorny. Moral outrage is one of Kozol’s strongest weapons, and seeing the conditions of the schools he visits, it is hard not to be outraged. The problem is that it is getting harder and harder to find a specific law or institution, let alone specific individuals, to be outraged at.

One of the book’s themes, with which I agree, is that disappointingly little has changed since Brown v. Board of Education outlawed legal segregation and indeed since Plessy v. Ferguson allowed segregated facilities provided they were equal. What we have now is a separate and unequal system of education. What has changed is that no one in particular is responsible for this patently unjust system. There is no law that says, “only blacks shall attend DuSable High School,” and no Southern governor barring the door of a white school. Instead, there are parents, often liberal parents who in theory favor school desegregation and even affirmative action, trying to do what is best for their own children. And who can blame them for that?

Honestly, I think we have to blame them. Not in an angry or condescending way, necessarily, but as a society we need to ask for more sacrifices from those who have the most. The fifty years since Brown have demonstrated that schools that were actively segregated are not going to desegregate themselves. White families have moved out of cities, gerrymandered school district lines, and even pulled their kids from public school systems altogether rather than see them attend integrated schools.

This is undoubtedly racism, but it isn’t, for the most part, the open and virulent racism embodied by groups like the Ku Klux Klan. Many of these families have had no problem inviting upper-middle-class blacks into their classrooms, their neighborhoods, their homes, and their lives. It isn’t black people per se that they fear, it is the idea that their children might receive anything less than the best education they could possibly provide for them. There’s nothing wrong with caring so much about your kids’ education, but there is a problem with providing such opportunities to your own children at the expense of other children. There is a problem with not caring, at least not caring enough to do anything really drastic, that so many other children will attend schools and live in neighborhoods that you have deemed unacceptable for your own progeny.

I am also not speaking here of a small group of especially wealthy or especially inconsiderate people. There were literally hundreds of thousands of white families who fled urban areas and their public education systems in the wake of the Brown decision. In a particularly striking passage, Kozol describes an upscale suburb of New York City called Riverdale, where

“Dozens of college students… went south during the civil rights campaigns to fight for… desegregation…. The parents of these students often made large contributions to support the work of SNCC and CORE. One generation passes, and the cruelties they fought in Mississippi have come north to New York City. Suddenly, no doubt unwittingly, they find themselves opposed to simple things they would have died for 20 years before. Perhaps it isn’t fair to say they are ‘opposed.’ A better word might be ‘oblivious.’ They do not want poor children to be harmed. They simply want the best for their own children. To the children of the South Bronx, it is all the same.”

I’m no wishy-washy, self-esteem-promoting, “all children are beautiful” hippy. I believe in merit, I believe in special programs for gifted/talented/advanced/whatever-you-want-to-call-them students, and I am perfectly comfortable stating that some people and some kids are smarter, more capable, and all around better and more deserving than others. Higher education is not for everyone, and we need plenty of people to work low-wage, unskilled jobs in our economy. What I am not comfortable with is making those distinctions based on the test scores of a first grader, or even more troubling, based on the color of her skin or the size of her father’s salary.

Yet these factors are, implicitly and sometimes even explicitly, the basis on which a great many privileges and opportunities are distributed in America. It is profoundly troubling to me to think of how much innate talent goes unrealized and how much potential is squandered when these children who could have been great scientists, inventors, educators, and leaders instead wind up picking fruit, serving time, or pushing up daisies. As Kozol puts it:

“what is now encompassed by the one word (“school”) are two very different kinds of institutions that, in function, finance, and intention, serve entirely different roles. Both are needed for our nation’s governance. But children in one set of schools are educated to be governors; children in the other set of schools are trained for being governed….

“Societies cannot be all generals, no soldiers. But, by our schooling patterns, we assure that soldiers’ children are more likely to be soldiers and that the offspring of the generals will have at least the option to be generals.”

Nor is this a matter of free enterprise under assault from communists clamoring to drag all schools down to the lowest common denominator. On this point, Kozol quotes school reform activist John Coons to the effect that there is “no greater threat to the capitalist system than the present cyclical replacement of the ‘fittest’ of one generation by their artificially advantaged offspring. Worse, when that advantage is proffered to the children of the successful by the state, we can be sure that free enterprise has sold its birthright.” Much like a state-granted monopoly, disparities in education artificially stifle competition and enable less able, less deserving, and less competent people to fill the most powerful and important roles in society.

In response this section,

“The expanded edition does revisit one of the central premises of TPFAP: the claim that it is sometimes correct to pass up slightly profitable moves when a large portion of your chips are at stake. Surprisingly, though this premise has often been criticized, Sklansky restates it in stronger terms than ever in the Expanded Edition. Whereas he initially claimed that, “if you are one of the best players in the tournament, you should usually not risk significant money on very close decisions,” he now states that you should not take such risks unless “you are not that great a player.” The issue of whether and when to pass up edges in a tournament is far from a settled matter, and before broadening the class of players to whom this advice applies, Sklansky really ought to consider the objections raised by very strong players, often on Two Plus Two’s own tournament forum.”

Sklansky says,

“I didn’t mean to state it in stronger terms. Phrasing it differently was unintentional. And the new edition makes it VERY clear the the concept breaks down in no limit games when your stack is even moderately short, unless you are near, or in, the money.

On the other hand if hourly rate isn’t important to you, your stack is large compared to the blinds, and you are one of the best players in the tournament, anybody who would recommend that you make very small plus EV calls for a big proportion of your stack is obviously an imbecile.”

And in response to this section,

“The book alternately bills itself as containing either “Almost 100 all-new pages” (according to the front cover) or “over 100 new pages” (according to the back cover). In a sense, both of these statement are true. There are technically over 100 new pages, but nearly 30% falls under Hand Quizzes and Question &”

Malmuth says,

“While I’m sure it’s not intentional, this is a little misleading. Here are some specifics since I have access to information that no one else does.

The previous Tournament Poker for Advanced Players was 245 pages. The current Tournament Poker for Advanced Players: Expanded Edition is 346 pages.

However, word count is more accurate as to how much new material there really is. The comparison is now 53,505 words versus 80,759. That’s an increase of 27,254 words or just over 50 percent.

This includes a brand new chapter of 3,006 words titled “Additional No-Limit Hand Quizzes.” We feel this is an essential part of the text and not repetitive as the op indicates.

The “Question and Answer Section,” which is repetitive to the text, was expanded from 5,274 words to 8,047, or an increase of 2,773 words which is approximately 10 percent.

So the book has been expanded by an amount in which the “100 new pages” underestimates, and the amount of new but repetive material is more like 10 percent, not 30 percent. Also, for those who have not yet seen Tournament Poker for Advanced Players: Expanded Edition, much of the expansion occurs in the original chapters. So all the new material is not in the new chapters.”

I was flattered that both took the time to read and respond.

As most of you know, I’ve done a lot of work, both paid and unpaid, in the Chicago and Boston Public Schools. Racial and economic justice is very important to me, particularly in the context of education. I’ve rarely encountered anyone who articulated the importance of these issues as well as Kozol, nor anyone who could so deftly expose the most common justifications for the educational disparities that exist in US public education. The book is a lot heavier on outrage and indignation than on solutions, but from what I’ve seen, that is sadly appropriate. There is much to be outraged about in urban public education, and when it comes to systemic reform, more than 100 years of effort have not yet produced a solution to the dual problems of institutional neglect and racism.

Savage Inequalities weaves history and policy criticism with narratives of the author’s visits to urban public schools and conversations with students, teachers and administrators. Despite a century of legal and legislative action, Kozol argues, America maintains a separate and unequal public education system in which poor, largely minority children, arguably those who deserve the most resources, receive an education that is qualitatively different from that of their whiter, wealthier counterparts. These inequalities persist within urban public school systems and between urban and suburban districts, the dividing lines of which were often drawn with explicitly racialized intent.

Kozol’s narrative approach is valuable because of how much reality is lost, often deliberately obscured, by the policy debates that surround public education. One common argument that the author addresses repeatedly is the claim that urban students receive an “adequate” education and that more money is not the solution to whatever problems may plague their schools. Leaving aside for a moment the question of what “adequate” really means, Kozol’s recounting of bathrooms without stall doors or toilet paper, cafeterias that are routinely closed because of sewage overflow, asphalt playgrounds studded with broken glass, and classrooms without textbooks and in some cases even teachers fly in the face of any definition of the word. It is equally laughable to suggest that money is not a solution to these problems nor that solving these problems would not make education a more positive experience for the children who attend these schools.

This is not to say that more money is a magic-bullet solution to the problems of urban public education or that education is such a solution for larger problems such as poverty and drugs that confront these communities. It is often argued, both by amateurs and by education professionals, that family and cultural problems contribute to an environment where academic skills are not valued or nurtured. Indeed, there is little doubt that children in wealthier school districts would do better in school whether or not that wealth were directly channeled into their schools. Their parents would generally play a larger role in their education and their privilege would afford them more time for study and academic work without the distractions of a rumbling stomach or neighborhood violence.

As Kozol points out, however, “The family… differs from the school in the significant respect that government is not responsible, or at least not directly, for the inequalities of family background. It is responsible for inequalities in public education.” It violates any interpretation of justice for a public resource to be provided in greater amounts to those least in need, yet this is exactly how public education functions in the United States.

Sklansky, a brilliant theorist and mathematician, is much stronger on the first point than on the second. The Expanded Edition of his book contains a lot of very practical, helpful math, and offers some innovative suggestions with regard to how to get additional fold equity when you want it and how to keep opponents in the pot when that’s where you want them. Sklansky’s specific situations and examples, however, remain out of touch with the knowledgeable and aggressive tournament games being played today.

When at its best, Sklansky’s mathematical precision elucidates important concepts that even many very successful players tend to get wrong. For instance, the author argues that, given the prize structure of many live tournaments these days, it may actually be correct to tighten up around the bubble in order to avoid elimination just outside of the money. He also addresses the popular “stop ‘n go” technique as well as I’ve seen it covered anywhere, making it clear that the play is desirable only when you have no fold equity pre-flop and that moving all-in post-flop will only (or at least primarily) cause your opponent to fold hands that he would not fold if he could see your cards.

Naturally, his mathematical prowess comes in handy for evaluating situations where one player is, or has the option of, moving all in. Several pages of charts spell out very clearly when to move all in against the blinds of different types of players and when to call all in moves from players of varying degrees of tightness.

But Sklansky is a stronger mathematician and theorist than he is strategist, and some of his more specific playing advice rings false, or at least out of touch with the modern playing environment. For instance, although he is correct about how much profit can be made simply by stealing blinds and picking on weaker players, it does not necessarily follow from this that, “To get into a major confrontation with another expert when you are at such a table is just wrong, unless of course you are almost sure you have the best hand.” That’s all well and good if the other expert is willing to share the table with you, but the more common dynamic is for the two stronger players to compete with each other over who will get to exploit the others. By refusing to butt heads, you will often find yourself robbed of the very stealing opportunities you are supposed to be preserving.

Sklansky also seems to analyze the play of particular hands in a vaccuum, which is sometimes but not always acceptable for tournament play. During the early stages, for instance, he advises against reraising an early position raiser with KK or making a big raise against a field of limpers with AA for fear of folding out worse hands and turning one’s own face up. If your opponents really are as tight/predictable as Sklansky assumes and you are likely to be at such a table for a while, however, the better strategy would probably be to play quite a few hands in such an aggressive fashion so that you can both accumulate more chips through aggression and get more action on your biggest hands.

The expanded edition does revisit one of the central premises of TPFAP: the claim that it is sometimes correct to pass up slightly profitable moves when a large portion of your chips are at stake. Surprisingly, though this premise has often been criticized, Sklansky restates it in stronger terms than ever in the Expanded Edition. Whereas he initially claimed that, “if you are one of the best players in the tournament, you should usually not risk significant money on very close decisions,” he now states that you should not take such risks unless “you are not that great a player.” The issue of whether and when to pass up edges in a tournament is far from a settled matter, and before broadening the class of players to whom this advice applies, Sklansky really ought to consider the objections raised by very strong players, often on Two Plus Two’s own tournament forum.

On the other hand, the author’s unapologetic refusal of ground to opposing viewpoints is part of his charm, and the Expanded Edition does introduce some delightful new “Sklanskyisms”. In the introduction to the new material, he warns that, “Some of what follows is slightly repetitious or possibly placed in a spot other than where it would not have been if I had tried to integrate this information with the material already written. Too bad.” Cash game players who enter tournaments without having read Sklansky’s book are “moronic” and “illiterate”.

The difference between cash game and tournament skills actually makes for one of the more interesting new topics covered by the Expanded Edition. Because cash game specialists are more likely to excel during the deep-stacked early stages, Sklansky advises them to play a lot of hands during this period. Tournaments specialists, on the other hand, could almost consider not “show[ing] up at all,” or at least playing very tight in order to avoid getting fleeced. The egotistical will likely dismiss this as just another Sklansky-ism, but the truth is that even some very strong tournament players would do well to heed this advice. Their edge during deep-stacked play is not nearly what some of them seem to think it is, especially not compared to their decision-making ability during the later stages of the tournament.

The book alternately bills itself as containing either “Almost 100 all-new pages” (according to the front cover) or “over 100 new pages” (according to the back cover). In a sense, both of these statement are true. There are technically over 100 new pages, but nearly 30% falls under Hand Quizzes and Question & Answer sections that, though helpful, are largely repetitive of the other 70%. Despite its shortcomings, the Expanded Edition probably does contain enough new information to warrant its $30 cover price even for those who already own TPFAP. After all, if Sklanksy’s advice helps you make a single decision better at a major live event, and these seem to be the tournaments implicitly assumed in many sections, it will pay for itself.

Bloch assembles his strategy, however, with all the wrong considerations in mind. Although he acknowledges that “many things can change the value of the hands, including whether there will be further betting, stack sizes, and whether you are betting or calling,” he nonetheless advises giving each possible starting hand an exact ranking in a vacuum. His own ranking system consists of a few tweaks to how the various two-card combinations shake out in a game where the small blind is forced to move all in or fold. The relevance of a hand’s performance in such a contrived game to its playability in various tournament situations is never articulated.

When discussing how to use these rankings to make decisions, Bloch’s central concern is the game-theoretic aspect of stealing and re-stealing. His criterion for a successful open raising strategy is taking the blinds more than 50% of the time (assuming no antes a 3BB raise), and then he works backwards from there to determine calling and reraising frequencies “with the starting assumption that opponents are going to call or reraise with half the hands that you’re playing with [sic]. Basically, opponents are going to call when they think they can beat your average hand.”

This reasoning ignores the most critical consideration of NLHE: the money each player has behind. With sufficiently deep stacks, players need to consider what they stand to win or lose in various situations, how they might bluff or get bluffed, and generally whether they can expect to get the better of it on future streets. Even with more shallow stacks, the decision to call should be based on a hand’s equity relative to the opener’s range, not some pre-determined frequency. And there are reasons to raise pre-flop, such as improving your position, isolating a weak player, and building a pot when in position, that have nothing to do with stealing the blinds.

Bloch does make some concession by showing how each starting hand stacks up against several different ranges in his jam-or-fold game. But the absence of any consideration of implied odds is repeatedly and glaringly obvious. For instance, the author asks, “if you advertised that you were going to play A-A, K-K, and nothing else, how do you think your opponents would adjust? They would play against you only with the 50 percent best hands you are playing: A-A.”

In a deep-stacked situation, that’s one of the worst strategies one could adopt. Depending on how the advertising nit was responding to post-flop aggression, one would probably want to play any pocket pair and possibly suited connectors. Calling with any two cards could even be preferable to playing only and exactly Aces in a situation where an opponent’s range is so narrow. Yet Bloch advises against calling an UTG raiser with 66 when you are UTG+1 because this is in the bottom half of the hands that the opener is playing. Although it’s true that you wouldn’t want to play 66 for showdown value alone against a player raising his top 11% of hands, there are plenty of situations where you would want to play it for set value.

To the extent that Bloch permits post-flop considerations to affect pre-flop strategy, he does so only in a way that muddles the issue further. He seems to consider the standard flop continuation bet a liability to the pre-flop raiser, as when he says, “If you are in the big blind, you can call more rasies because… you benefit, at least for one betting round, by having quasi-position on the raiser. If you call the raise and check the flop, most players who raised before the flop will bet.” If the pre-flop raiser is particularly bad at employing continuation bets, this might be an advantage, but elsewhere the article tends to assume opponents who are playing reasonably well, especially from a game-theoretic perspective.

Calling pre-flop out of position against an opponent who will use flop bets well to apply pressure is generally going to be more, not less, costly in the long run. In fact, the discounted price of seeing the flop is rarely sufficient to compensate for positional disadvantage. Yet Bloch advises that, in order to prevent late position raisers from stealing your blinds indiscriminately, “You should play every hand that the raiser could have in that position and maybe a few more.”

Towards the end of the article, Bloch does admit that, “When there is the possibility of more betting, the percentages are just general guidelines.” This throw-away disclaimer hardly does justice to the importance of post-flop play when considering a pre-flop strategy. After all, the article is not presented as solely or even primarily a guide to very short-stacked situations where one or more players are getting all in preflop. Thus, there is almost always the possibility of more betting, and this should have been a central consideration for the preceding portion of the chapter.

When it comes to handling pre-flop all in situations, most of the chapter’s advice is quite good. In particular, the charts detailing how to push, fold, and call correctly out of the blinds is very helpful. Folding too much in late-game tournament situations is a very common and expensive mistake, and Bloch does an admirable job of explaining why and what to do about it. But his chapter purports to be about pre-flop play in general, and when there is money behind, the strategy he outlines is fundamentally flawed.

One thing upon which both players agree is the importance of the exposed cards in determining how to play on 3rd street. Obviously I knew this was a factor to consider, but their conversation really hammered home what a huge consideration they could be, in extreme cases making a three-card seven either unplayable or a favorite over A-2-3. As Forrest puts it, “When the good players get aggressive, you can put them on duplicated cards in the hole. When a beginning player gets aggressive, it’s more likely he has A-2 in the hole.” Unfortunately, the chapter examines only extreme examples. It would be interesting to know how 4-5-7 rates against A-2-3 when there are two dead 4’s and a dead 7 instead of three 4’s, three 5’s, and three 7’s.

The pair consider other 3rd street decisions such as how to defend the bring-in and how to adjust to larger or smaller antes. To my surprise, they both contradicts Sklansky’s well-known advice to never open limp in Razz and suggest open limping for a variety of reasons: to trap an aggressive player, to cut down on variance, to set up a cheap steal on 4th street, or to see what the other low cards do before getting overly involved.

The question of courting variance by pushing edges on early streets versus playing cautiously and passing up favorable odds in order to maintain a stack proves a contentious one. Seed recalls some tournaments where he was able to steal his way to the final table with no big confrontations and argues that when the stealing is good, “I don’t want to gamble with a certain percentage of my stack.” He even claims he would pitch a live A-2-3 on 3rd with a raise and reraise in front of him simply to avoid playing a big pot, even as a substantial favorite.

Forrest clearly disagrees and insists that even good players need to gamble when they have big odds in their favor. Craig quotes a longish conversation on the subject, but it is disappointingly lacking in substance. Instead of delving into the details of how an edge might be won back later or what situations, if any, might be passed, the two ask each other loaded questions and repeat tired tournament cliches. Forrest gets in a good last word, though: “I think I could make money playing Huck’s discards.”

The entire passage proves misleading because they never mention that only an exceptional player like Seed should even consider passing on a profitable spot in any kind of tournament. There’s a very real danger that inexperienced readers may take Seed’s advice out of context and make some atrocious folds as a result.

Their discussion is much more productive on the subject of playing a short stack. Both ask and answer some good questions about how short is short and how one should play with stacks of various sizes.

Overall, however, there are a lot more questions than answers, in no small part because the two men never explore in-depth their disagreements with each other and with other authors on the subject. There’s insufficient discussion, for instance, of the survival versus accumulation debate and no mention of Sklanky’s well-known objection to open-limping, despite the affinity of both pros for the play. Given how well suited the dialectic format is for investigating differences of opinion, these are particularly glaring omissions

Also absent is almost any discussion of how to play after 3rd street, even how to handle such common situations as a strong starting hand that bricks on 4th, what to do when you appear to catch well but actually pair a hole card, what to do when both players brick 4th in a heads up pot, how to handle various draws on 5th and 6th streets, and how to play the river. It might be argued that this chapter is just a glimpse into an interesting conversation between two top pros and not intended as a comprehensive introduction to tournament razz. That would be fine if there were another chapter that covered the game in a more traditional way.

Still, this chapter does contain a lot of interesting material, and despite its shortcomings, it does provide a glimpse into how two different players approach a Razz tournament. Once again, Forrest gets in a resounding last word:

“[T]he average player in these razz tournaments is pretty weak. So playing by the book should be good enough to build up your chips. But when you match up against good readers, good razz players who have a little speed to their game, you will be at the mercy of getting good starting cards.

Razz in one of the purest forms of poker, because the good players will make the money and the bad players will lose the money. It’s a beautiful, beautiful form of poker.”

Forrest starts by laying out an overall framework for approaching tournament Stud/8 play, which I appreciate. He advocates fundamentally tight play, as you are likely to be against skilled competition, split a lot of pots, and feel less pressure from the antes than you would in a cash game. It would be helpful to get a stronger sense of where a winning player finds his edges and what kinds of situations he seeks to create. Still, keeping this framework in mind helps readers to orient themselves towards the rest of his advice and understand its context and motivation.

The reader actually gets a more detailed and helpful framework after Forrest begins his discussion of third street starting hands. We learn that the goal in a split pot game will be to ‘scoop’, or win both the high and the low. When play is loose, this often translates into the occasional scoop with half the pot serving as a consolation prize more frequently. However, in late-game tournament situations, he argues that you are somewhat more likely to scoop a pot through sheer aggression or with a high-only hand when no one makes a low.

This leads into another central Stud/8 concept that Forrest cleverly terms the “push” and “pull” factor. Even moreso than in many other poker games, you cannot play your hand in a vaccuum. From the moment you enter the pot, you must consider others’ possible holdings and decide whether you will be better served by trying to pull them into a multi-way pot where even half could mean a juicy score or push them out and increase the likelihood that you will scoop a smaller pot.

This is such a fundamental decision, in fact, that more time ought to have been devoted to it. Some explication is forthcoming when Forrest examines how to play each type of starting hand, but I would have appreciated even more, particularly with regard to how the actions of others might influence whether you enter the pot with a raise or a call. Still, he summarizes this important difference from NLHE when he says, “aggression plays a different role than in… hold ’em tournaments. I am not looking to be aggressive for the same of aggression. I will be aggressive in two main situations: when I can push out opponents when my hand plays best heads-up, or when I have a hand for which I want to create a big pot and several other playrs have already put in a bet.”

The third street section also hints at the importance of reverse implied odds, which play a far larger role in Stud/8 than in any other fixed limit game. Forrest has much more to say about this later, but he makes clear that big mistakes begin on third street. “For opponents to outplay you, you have to become an accomplice by taking hands into situations where that can happen.”

This segues well into the first point about playing later streets, which is to get away cheaply when you brick. It’s rare to see a pot get capped on a late street in seven card stud or fixed limit hold ’em. Because of Stud/8’s split pots, however, a player who isn’t careful can find himself caught in what Forrest terms ‘the gas pipe’, where the reigning high and low hands trap an unfortunate third player into calling multiple bets to try to hit his draw on the next card.

He goes on to outline the kind of hand you need to take the gas pipe yourself (a strong two-way draw) or to give it to a third player (often trips or better or a made low with at least some gut shot outs to a high). Especially in a tournament, getting the gas pipe can be “excruciatingly expensive” and avoiding it may require some tight folds simply because of the risk that there will be one or more raises behind you.

One of my favorite things about Stud/8 is that it all but requires third-level thinking: what does my opponent think I have? Depending on what your opponent is showing and what you have represented, you may find yourself betting a small pair for value or checking and folding a pair of Aces on the end. Forrest explores how to save and make these extra bets on the river based on your opponent’s possible holdings and his likely perception of your hand. He even brushes on some advanced bluffs and ‘semi-bluffs’ where you attempt to ‘promote’ your weak hand into a winner for half the pot by knocking out a better one with a well-timed raise on the river.

Tournament strategy is clearly in the background of the entire chapter, but it comes to the fore at the conclusion with a dedicated section. Late in a tournament, there will be fewer multi-way pots and more opportunities to steal. Conversely, when a player, especially one on a short stack, does get involved in a pot, you need to back off of your steals quickly. These players are looking to double up or bust.

Forrest provides some helpful guidelines for recognizing when you are short or in danger of becoming short. With 7 BB’s, you can afford to see fourth and maybe fifth streets without tying yourself to the pot, provided you can get there cheaply. He offers a series of questions to help you handle these difficult decisions. With 3-5 BB’s, you’ll almost always be going to showdown and can start valuing medium pairs, ordinarily tricky hands to play, over even some strong low hands.

Playing to scoop and the dangers of the ‘gas pipe’ are such important concepts that they influence almost every decision a Stud/8 player makes and for this reason probably should have been introduced sooner and perhaps even given more explanation. Aside from these largely organizational quibbles, however, I must admit that Ted Forrest’s Stud Eight-or-Better chapter provides a clear and helpful summary of an extraordinarily complicated game. It should help NLHE players to succeed at Stud/8 in its own right and also to access quickly the Stud/8 skills that could end up improving their NLHE games in the long run.

In the early rounds of a stud tournament, where stacks are deep relative to the stakes, Gray advises nothing more than a “good, normal, solid strategy” akin to what would be appropriate in a cash game. I appreciate that he doesn’t elaborate overly much on what exactly that is, since there are other, presumably better resources for learning the game of Seven Card Stud.

As its name implies, this compact chapter sets its sights on tournament stud, his approach to which Gray sums up as follows: “After the first few levels, you can’t afford to lose a full pot in a tournament and still have relative chip strength. You are definitely looking to play a top hand and move on people you think have nothing.” His point is that you can’t afford to play from behind. Even when getting the right pot odds, the price is too high to chase a likely big pair with a flush draw or an underpair and an overcard or two, since you end up crippled all too frequently.

But doesn’t one also lose money by folding when the odds are good? Gray does his best to mitigate this effect by advising extreme selectiveness on third street (you can’t make a four-flush if you fold your three-flush) and again on fifth street, when the bets double and calling is likely to price yourself in until seventh.

Intuitively, this cautiousness makes sense, and I’m inclined to say that it’s good advice. What concerns me is Gray’s occasional resort to weak-tight tournament platitudes such as, “a tournament… is about losing the least, especially because losing hurts you more than winning helps–when you’re out, you’re out.” I’ve just heard this from too many old nits at live tournaments to accept it as gospel in a stud tournament with no further analysis. I’d like to know that Gray is aware of this principle’s flawed application in NLHE tournaments and nonetheless believes it relevant in a stud setting.

It is also hard to say when exactly one ought to switch from cash game to tournament strategy. Gray advises that, “Until you are very close to the money, you should play your normal strategy.” However, his warrants for especially cautious play relate more to stack depth than to the divergence between chip equity and cash equity.

Presumably it is acceptable and maybe necessary to take some gambles when your stack gets small relative to the stakes. As he cautions, “If you play too tight, you can become so low on chips that even winning with your last chips doesn’t improve your position.” But in lieu of advice about how to navigate between these extremes, the reader gets only an acknowledgment of the challenge: “Weighing proper strategy… against your survival is difficult, and though I recommend you place a very high value on your survival, you sometimes have to risk going broke.”

This tight strategy works, Gray believes, because other players tend to be overly loose and because stud poker is not a game of implied odds. It is difficult to make a killing with a concealed monster the way one can in NLHE by flopping a set or an unlikely two pair. Thus, his goal is to stay out of trouble, play mostly big pairs and rolled up trips, and take advantage of others’ loose play. As Gray puts it, “I don’t ever want to enter a pot where I don’t think I’m a favorite.”

Gray addresses some other unique elements of tournament poker, such as the fact that the ratio of ante:big bet will change from level to level, necessitating an adaptation in hand selection that few players recognize. He also considers short and big stack play, arguing that the former need to pick a hand and stick to it, whereas the latter ought to splash around a bit more but get out of the way quickly when a shorter stack shows interest, since that player can probably not be bluffed out.

David Gray’s tournament stud strategy seems like a useful one, particularly for those new to the game, ie the majority of his readers. It is designed to keep you alive, keep you out of trouble, and put you in position to win some money. With a good table draw and a bit of luck, it might even win you a tournament or two.

The central difference between the two games, of course, is that in Omaha everyone gets two more hole cards. As Ferguson explains, however, this actually translates into five more two-card combinations for each player in Omaha. He goes on to explain how this difference should affect your pre-flop hand selection and your post-flop play. You should play your hands straight-forwardly, betting hard even with your monsters since drawing hands may have many outs and rarely bluffing since your opponents will connect with the board more often. And following from that, your position becomes more important, since you have more information to gain from your opponents’ actions.

Ferguson addresses all of these concepts in more depth when he moves into the nuts and bolts of post-flop play. His theoretical approach to post-flop play is captured well when he says, “I like playing in a way that minimizes the number of difficult decisions I have to make, and maximize the number of difficult decisions my opponents have to make.”

This is the sort of vague poker advice that can be either right or wrong depending on how it is interpreted, and in fact Ferguson finds himself on both sides of the line at various times. Avoid reverse implied odds situations where you are likely to get outplayed or to find yourself with no good options is important, but sometimes the easiest decisions isn’t the most profitable one. After all, good players profit by making better decisions than their opponents.

For example, Ferguson describes situations “where I am confident I am ahead but I won’t know if I’m ahead after the turn” and suggests that he likes to get as much money as he can in on the flop in these spots. Against tricky opponents, that’s wise, but as he points out, many people play very straightforwardly in PLO. It’s hard to say for sure, because he doesn’t give a specific example of such a situation, but particurly when in position, he might be better off keeping the pot smaller on the flop and relying on his hand-reading skill to make a good decision on a future street.

He returns to this discussion when in the section “Playing the Turn and River”, suggesting that, “If you have one of those hands where you don’t know if you are ahead or behind, you might want to try betting out on the turn. Especially if this pot commits you, betting eliminates your opponent’s positional advantage and puts him to a tough decision.” I fail to see how this results in a tough decision for your opponent: most likely, he’ll fold his worse hands and call or raise with his better ones, particularly if you make a pot committing bet. Even if it does result in a more difficult decision for you, checking and calling (or making a read if the turn checks through), ought to be more profitable.

At other times, Ferguson’s advice seems to contradict his “keep it simple stupid” mentality when such thinking really does make sense. For instance, he argues that because hand values aren’t sharply divergent pre-flop, “you should usually call a raise and see the flop when you are in the big blind.” Deliberately playing a lot of marginal hands out of position for the sake of immediate pre-flop pot odds seems like just the sort of thing one ought to be avoiding, particularly when stacks are deep.

Oddly, in the “Tournament Strategy” section (which gets a mere two and a half pages in a thirty page article), he seems to argue just the opposite, that when on the bubble “You lose very little value by folding marginal hands because a lot of hands are close in value.” It seems backwards to me that you would make more marginal calls out of position with deep money than you would when stacks are shallow simply to avoid bubbling.

Aside from these caveats, Ferguson’s chapter is a comprehensive and reliable introduction to the game of Pot Limit Omaha. There are so many unique situations that can arise in PLO hat writing a practical guide in the form of a book chapter is a real challenge, but he does a good job of focusing on the strategic considerations that ought to guide you while also examining a fair number of common and tricky situations in detail. The result is a piece that makes PLO both comprehensible and enticing to a NLHE player looking for a change of pace.

Wisely forgoing any introduction to the rules of the game, Matusow dives right into O/8 tournament strategy, theorizing that there are really two distinct phases of tournament play: the early levels, where stacks are deep and you will play a lot of multi-way limped pots, and the later levels, where stacks are shallow and most pots are contested heads up. Though he doesn’t say so, this distinction will be familiar to NLHE tournaments players, who are accustomed to focusing on implied odds early in a tournament and on immediate odds and showdown value during the later stages.

During the early stages, stacks are deep and there are likely to be many inexperienced O/8 players at the table. Consequently, play will be much too loose, making for good opportunities to win big pots.

Matusow correctly advises, “You can and should play a lot of marginal hands.” What’s a marginal hand? He permits you to play high-only hands as long as the pot is multi-way and you have or are drawing to the nut high hand. When in late position, you can open up even more. “Any suited ace with a low card.” OK. “Any three low cards.” Fine. “Anything double-suited.” Huh?

If implied odds are the defining consideration for the early stages, why aren’t reverse implied odds a concern? Matusow admits in the same paragraph that, “The goal is to see a flop for one bet and release the hand unless you catch the nuts or are drawing to them.” That’s not going to happen when you play hands like Ks 9s 6d 2d, but this tension is never addressed by the author.

Another fundamental implication of overly loose opponents is that you need to bet more hands for value, but Matusow actually suggests just the opposite: “Regardless of your position or your cards, you shouldn’t be raising early in the tournament.” It’s true that in O8 you’re often limping very strong hands because you want to invite in dominated hands and play multi-way pots with them. But with a strong multi-way hand and a few limpers in front of you, it’s generally correct to raise for value.

Besides, Matusow’s reasoning is just the opposite of this: no one is going to fold anyway and you might miss the flop. If you miss the flop, you can re-evaluate, but with deep stacks, this is no reason not to push an edge pre-flop. This is what I mean by taking tournament considerations too far: it’s as though he doesn’t even realize that there are reasons to raise besides increasing your chances of winning the pot. In actuality, I’m sure Matusow does realize this, and for all I know he’s thought it through and still thinks his advice makes sense, but it’s too obvious of an objection for him to leave unaddressed in the article.

The late-game strategy Matusow outlines is more useful. He advocates a tight aggressive game, backing off of marginal stuff like high-only hands and coming in for a raise or reraise pretty much whenever you enter the pot. This is very consistent with Sklansky’s Gap Concept, as is the advice to pitch even seemingly strong but easily dominated hands like A2xx facing an early position raise.

Even though you’re upping the aggression with shallower stacks, you still need to catch cards to win. Matusow is very clear that “you are mostly going to make a lot off players who aren’t patient or who think they can outplay you. You aren’t going to win an Omaha tournament outplaying anyone.” It’s very hard to win pots without a showdown in a split-pot gamed with fixed limit betting, so while you need to play aggressively to take advantage of situations where you can scoop in this way, you need to back off quickly if you miss and encounter resistance.

The most useful advice Matusow offers involves hand-reading and learning to recognize situations where an opponent is likely to bluff or allow himself to be bluffed. For instance, the pre-flop raiser, especially if he’s in early position, almost certainly has low cards, as do the players who call him. Thus, if he gets a lot of callers, you can call with a high-only hand figuring to be ahead for at least that half of the pot. Also, if the flop comes high, you can often steal from the pre-flop raiser. Similarly, if you make even a marginal hand on a high-card flop, players may attempt to steal from you, and you should call down light. As the author puts it, “A lot of post-flop play later in the tournament comes from knowing your opponents and comparing the hands they play with the board.”

The chapter concludes with a discussion of other key tournament concepts such as how to play the bubble and how to play as a short stack. Overcall, it’s a good tournament article, largely because Matusow wisely chooses to focus on tournament strategy rather than the fundamentals of the game. I say ‘wisely’ because his advice for the early stages, which play more like an O/8 ring game, is fundamentally weak.

When feeling my way around a new game, I like to know where a winning player’s edge comes from, what situations he seeks to create. I am trying to figure out what I will need to do well, what concepts I will need to master in order to win. Oddly, it takes a while for Lederer to answer this question, and he doesn’t do in the section called, “The Starting Framework for Limit Hold ‘Em Tournament Play”. Eventually, however, he does tell me very clearly what I’ve been waiting to hear: “It’s not about winning pots. It’s about winning bets in limit hold ’em. Being in position… is where you earn your bets.”

Although it isn’t articulated clearly until the middle of the chapter, this is clearly the organizing principle of the strategy Lederer outlines. Street-by-street, he explains both how to take advantage of position when you have it and how to minimize your opponents’ ability to profit from their position. His advice ranges from the very specific, in the form of charts for which hands to play from which position with which action in front of you, to the very general, in the form of an overarching strategy that will keep your opponents guessing, prevent them from taking free cards when they want them, and enable you to get free cards when you need them.

As strong as Lederer’s chapter is as an introduction to the fundamentals of Fixed Limit Hold ‘Em, it is a bit lacking in tournament-specific advice given the context in which it is published. One can infer from his introduction that he believes tight aggressive play to be even more important in a tournament format, where all players are working with a limited number of bets. He warns that, “If you build a loose image, it undercuts your ability to steal.”

The fundamental idea, never articulated as clearly as it could be, seems to be that in tournament Fixed Limit Hold ‘Em, you need to be able to do a lot with a little. As he puts it, “The beauty of my strategy is that you don’t need a big stack to execute it. If you have enough chips to comfortably bet through the hand, that is enough for it to work.” The cut-off, in other words, is four big bets, equivalent to a pre-flop raise, a flop raise, a turn bet, and a river bet.

This makes a lot of sense, since below this critical stack size, you will not have all of your tools at your disposal and probably will not be able to generate the fold equity you need to stay alive. It would have been nice to see more advice about how to maintain this minimum workable stack size. Should I tighten my pre-flop raising standards when I have a six bet stack? Bluff the flop less often? Be more inclined to fold my blinds?

Similarly, should I target the blinds of players hovering just above this critical stack size, on the assumption that they will be playing tighter than usual? Although Lederer suggests that a check-raise bluff on a dry Ace-high flop might have more fold equity in a shallow tournament setting than in a ring game, he never integrates this very specific suggestion into a larger strategy, something that does so well elsewhere in the chapter.

To his credit, he does address other aspects of tournament play, such as adapting to the bubble, adapting to the payout structure of the final table, playing short-handed, and playing short stacked. But ultimately, the tournament advice feels less coherent than the rest of the otherwise very enlightening article.

Howard Lederer’s “Limit Hold ‘Em” chapter is a very helpful introduction to a complex game. He argues that players of no limit hold ’em have a lot to gain from learning this game, and I would add that they have a lot to gain from reading this chapter. Players already confident in their Fixed Limit Hold ‘Em game and looking for advice about adapting to a tournament format would do well to look elsewhere, though. David Sklansky’s Tournament Poker for Advanced Players remains the best resource for them.

Most successful online poker players already possess a level of poker knowledge well beyond that of the target audience for most poker books, particularly with regard to the strategic and mathematical elements of the game. It is in the realm of psychology and reading people where most of us are lacking, and so studying tells is one of the best things the average internet player can do to improve his success in a live setting.

Mike Caro has already written a seminal text on the subject, Caro’s Book of Poker Tells, and I was slow to read Navarro’s book on the mistaken assumption that much of it would be old hat. I was pleasantly surprised to find that Navarro has in fact managed to take both a fundamentally different approach to thinking about tells and to examine many new categories of tells that receive little if any treatment in Caro’s book. These include tells related to feet, hand, mouth, and eye movement.

Whereas Caro draws an important distinction between tells from actors and tells from non-actors and devotes more of his book to the former, Navarro focuses almost exclusively on the latter. He begins by establishing the physiological foundation of unconscious tells in what he calls the limbic brain. As he describes it, the limbic brain “react[s] to things that are heard, seen, sensed, or felt. It does so instantaneously, in real time, without thought; and, for that reason, it gives off an honest reponse to information from the environment.”

When confronted with stressful situations, such as those in a high stakes poker game, the limbic brain prepares the body to freeze, fight, or flee. In later chapters, Navarro goes on to detail how these limbic responses manifest themselves in instinctive body movements. These chapters, which form the core of the book, contain numerous photographs and written descriptions of the tells he has in mind.

Perhaps more importantly, Navarro always returns to the physiological motivation for a particular tell, which presumably will aid in interpreting not only that exact movement but also others of a similar kind. Thus, he has a chapter on “Gravity-Defying Tells” which gives examples of how raised eyebrows, hands, nostrils, or feet all indicate strength, whereas a decline of any of these body parts indicates the opposite. As a result of Navarro’s thorough explanation of the reason for his interpretations, one can easily imagine similar tells coming from the knees or shoulders that are not explicitly considered in the chapter. The insights he offers promise to pay off well beyond the specific information he provides in the book.

Still, it would have been nice to see more individual tells covered in detail in a 213-page book. Some of the other content, such as the section of physiology and the section on how to avoid giving off tells of your own, is well worth including. Indeed, much of the value of this book comes from the perspective from outside of poker that Navarro is able to bring to his interpretation of tells. He establishes context for the phenomena he discusses by drawing connections to such disparate subjects as the behavior of juries during courtroom trials, the responses of Mission Control to the Apollo 13 crisis, and his own experience interrogating witnesses and suspects.

Other chapters, most notably “What You Should Know to Vanquish a Pro,” contain advice that is irrelevant to the subject of the book and sometimes downright bad. For example, should you find yourself playing with Phil Hellmuth or Lyle Berman (Navarro’s examples, not mine), he assures you that “you’re going to be in awe of this player…. Don’t be afraid to exhibit a bit of hero worship and even deferential behavior to this living legend when you first meet him or her.”

Read ‘Em and Reap certainly does not shy away from hero worship. It is peppered with references to the greatness of Annie Duke, TJ Cloutier, and of course Phil Hellmuth, who is allowed to conclude nearly every chapter with a self-absorbed rant about some amazing laydown he made based on a recently analyzed tell. Moreover, the index shows Camp Hellmuth referenced on no fewer than 13 pages, almost always in a shamelessly promotional context about how great the staff is or how quickly attendees were able “to win back their seminar costs and much more.”

Navarro also spends much of his clunky introduction (what I consider to me the real meat of the book doesn’t start until page 79) overselling the value of the information he’s about to present. The most blatant example of this is the “Hellmuth Tournament Poker 70-30 Rule”, which states that 70% of tournament poker is tells. I’m not even certain what exactly that is supposed to mean, but I’m sure it’s wrong. There’s no getting around the fact that, Hellmuth’s anecdotes aside, tells are almost exclusively useful as a tie-breaker when facing a close decision.

Still, it’s by far the most underexploited aspect of the game by the average internet donkey, and I found the meat of Navarro’s book very valuable for this reason. It’s well worth working through the corny packaging and shameless self-promotion to find smart analysis of dozens of new tells that, to my knowledge, have not been discussed elsewhere in print.

They correctly identify the inability to overbet the pot as the central difference between pot limit and no limit hold ’em and go on to enumerate some of the implications of this limitation. Specifically, they address the Gap Concept, the stop-and-go, slowplaying, how short stack play changes, and some unique opportunities for restealing.

Unfortunately, their explanations and advice are overly cursory and sometimes questionable. Their discussion of short stack play, for instance, mentions neither the go-and-go, in which you make a raise or re-raise from out of position with the intention of moving all in on most flops, nor the limp-re-raise, which are both much more important plays as a short stack in pot limit than in no limit hold ’em given the inability to overbet shove pre-flop.

More troublingly, they suggest that with 200-400 blinds, 4000 chips, and a pair of T’s UTG, you might open to 1400 and fold to a reraise. Similarly, they argue that with the same stack “you are in a position to possibly take the pot from the initial raiser without a showdown. If the raiser makes it 1400, you can move in your entire 4000” as a re-steal. Although it’s true that you may sometimes find yourself making more folds and resteals because one raise is less likely to commit a player to the pot, the raiser in both of these examples is getting well over 2:1 on a call and shouldn’t be folding anything.

When discussing starting hand requirements, they suggest playing tighter than in no limit hold ’em for two reasons: the lack of antes and less emphasis on implied odds. This is good advice, but could use some elaboration, particularly the part about implied odds. Although the inability to overbet the pot makes it a bit more difficult to play for stacks, there is still plenty of room to play big pots in pot limit hold ’em, particularly after the first few levels of a tournament.

Moreover, the fact that the pre-flop raiser cannot open for more than three and a half times the big blind makes it a bit easier to take a flop with a speculative hand like a suited connector, especially when you have position. In fact, TJ Cloutier and Tom McEvoy argue in Championship No Limit and Pot Limit Hold ‘Em that small pairs and suited connectors are ideal pot limit hold ’em hands, even more valuable than in no limit hold ’em.

“Pot Limit Hold ‘Em” is the second shortest chapter in the book (after Furst’s solo chapter on Roshambo), and it shows. Although the general strategy that Bloch and Furst outline is on point, a lot of the important details are either missing or misleading.

I don’t want to harp too much on what he’s left out, because there are inevitably going to be omissions in so short a work, and he does do a good job of providing a strategic framework that should be very useful to beginners as they work out the details for themselves. However, given his space constraints, it is a mistake to attempt to address but Sit’n’Go and Multi-Table Tournaments in the same chapter.

The result is a badly lacking SNG section that condenses bubble play, which is the crucial element of a good player’s edge in these tournaments, into a single, useless sentence: “This will take all of your poker experience to decide whether to play very aggressively or very carefully depending on what the other players are doing.”

Even the MTT section is better on large-scale strategic thinking than on its more specific advice and examples. For example, the implied odds section correctly suggests playing hands like pairs and suited connectors when you can see a flop for about 5% of the effective stacks and emphasizes that position is more important with the connectors than with pairs. However,
Richard also says that with 6-6 and 20 BB’s, “I might limp under the gun and hope the pot is unraised and that I can get a set and win some money if someone makes top pair or two pair.” The confluence of these fortunate circumstances will not occur often enough to make a limp UTG for 5% of your stack profitable with 66, especially since the hands that he admits he wants to be up against, such as AA and KK, are going to raise. He claims he can call one raise, but by that time, he has put too much money into the pot to play for set value alone.

Still, this chapter generally provides a solid introduction to online tournament play and could probably shave several months off of a beginning player’s development.