How I Made My First Million From Poker is all over the map. It’s a memoir, it’s a strategy book, it’s a poker lifestyle book. This jack of all trades is a master of none, though readers who can get past Tri Nguyen’s off-putting persona are likely to find enough helpful advice to warrant a modest sticker price of $47 for paperback or e-book. All in all it’s a 6/10.

You can read the full review here. If you read the book, please let me know what you think. By the way, using my affiliate link will save you 10%, so be sure to do that if you buy it!

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.