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
I really enjoyed Vol 1 by Little. Vol 2 however was a bit of a disappointment. I found the section on sunglasses to be particularly suspicious considering his association with Blue Shark optics. I agree with your overall assessment, and honestly the wait between Vols 1 and 2 probably raised my expectations too high.
This book review isn’t listed on the reviews page. That leads me to ask are there any other reviews which aren’t listed? I swing by here every 3 months or so, so I might have missed some good stuff. Have you reviewed Little’s Vol 1, for example?
Yeah I haven’t updated that page in a while. It’s something by girlfriend created and used to do for me back when she was managing the website, which she doesn’t have time for anymore, so now it’s just whatever my lazy ass gets around to doing. Anyway here are all the blog posts I’ve tagged as book reviews. I didn’t review SPTP V1 because V2 is all the publisher sent me for review. My guess is that it’s probably a lot better, if it’s actually about how to play cards.
“Assume you can make $200/hour playing poker online,”
😀 easy game
Where do I sign up to make $200 an hour playing poker online?
Haven’t read the book but it’s good that you call Little out on stuff that he doesn’t really know enough about. The comments about $200 an hour and the gentle staircase up to high stakes HU sngs are ridiculous.
You should probably go a bit further and advocate that people don’t buy the book, despite it being OK in parts. Readers deserve a better product and won’t get it unless mediocre poker books get justly harsh reviews.
To have any chance of making a lot of money at online poker you need to be young (not always, but usually), very intelligent and totally committed. It’s possible to be all three of those things, read all of the good books, and still not be up to the task in 2012. In 2013, things are only going to get harder and silly notions about an average Joe crushing mid/high stakes just encourages the deluded and foolhardy to lose a lot of money.
Then again, the games are now so dry perhaps that’s what Little is hoping for!
Being young has nothing to do with it. It’s true that young people or more likely to be in a situation where they can be fully committed, but that doesn’t mean if you find yourself in a situation to be fully committed you can’t because you’re young. So the more accurate statement is intelligence and commitment are the 2 criteria. Not living in the US could be a criteria in today’s world too.
It’s just far more likely that you have the capacity to learn when you are younger, though, and there is a lot to learn. You aren’t going to find many guys in their mid-50s who can start playing poker as a beginner and work their way up to mid and high stakes. Certainly not online, anyway. I doubt that one in ten could be taught to beat 6-max 100nl, anymore.