To stay competitive in poker, you must constantly be learning and improving. Of all the things I’ve learned about poker in the last few years, I don’t think any has made me as much money as learning to pay attention to and exploit live tells, the things that people say and do at the poker table that reveal valuable information about the cards they hold. Until you learn to see it, it’s hard to believe just how much some players give away.

Zach Elwood’s books were – continue to be, in fact – almost single-handedly responsible for upping my “tell game”. I’d read other books on tells, but I don’t think any author, not even Mike Caro, has done the extensive research and study that Zach has. His materials don’t merely offer a simple “this means that” sort of guide – they provide a comprehensive framework for understanding any tell in context, and they make clear that context is key.

It’s for this reason that I’m excited to promote Zach’s books and videos as an affiliate. Even when I was a more active poker blogger, I never did much affiliate marketing. There’s a LOT of crap that gets peddled in the poker/gaming world, and most of it was junk I wouldn’t want to be affiliated with or responsible for any of my readers purchasing.

But Zach’s stuff is great, which makes it a win-win for me to get paid to tell you that. If there’s anything of his you don’t already own, please use this link to pick it up now. It’s must-read/must-watch material for any serious (live) poker player.

I’m not just a fan of Zach’s work. I actually made small contributions to his most recent books. I gave him feedback on an early draft of Verbal Poker Tells, and you’ll find an anecdote from me in Exploiting Poker Tells, recounting a hand where I used a tell to help me determine that I could bet QQ for three streets of value on a paired board.

If you’re still not convinced, check out this interview with Zach from the early days of the Thinking Poker Podcast.

Now go get cracking! You’ve got a lot to learn about poker tells.

If you haven’t yet read Volume One, well, there’s no reason you’d have to to make sense of this book, but why haven’t you?!

Pick up your copy today at www.nitcast.com (you’ll get PDF, EPUB, and Kindle versions) or in the Kindle Store (Kindle version only).

Applications is a Two Plus Two book par excellence. It’s dense, it’s thorough, it’s mathematically rigorous, and the only thing keeping it from a perfect score is that the writing and editing are sloppy at best and downright confusing at worst. There are dozens of typos, some as significant as a missing “not” which of course completely changes the meaning of the sentence. The subject matter is complicated, and the prose doesn’t do as much as it could to elucidate it. If anything, it serves to make the material seem even more overwhelming, and I can imagine many bookstore browsers getting intimidated.

If you can get past all that, though, you’ll find the most thorough and practical guide there is to playing unexploitable no-limit hold ’em. There are no toy games here; Janda gets right down to business applying game theory concepts to real no-limit hold ’em situations.

His techniques for estimating optimal pre-flop ranges are ingenious, and it only gets better from there. He emphasizes repeatedly that the goal isn’t to construct perfectly balanced ranges – that’s generally beyond human capabilities and in any event the details matter very little at the margins – but rather to build intuition and to recognize spots where you should be bluffing, value betting, calling, or folding more than you currently are.

Perhaps the most eye-opening conclusion for me was that there are many situations where the optimal strategy likely involves multiple bet sizes. Although Janda doesn’t go into a lot of depth on this, it’s certainly inspired me to investigate these situations for myself.

That’s not to say that Janda never goes into any depth. One of the highlights of the book are the hand examples at the end, where builds ranges for both players across multiple decision points in a single hand. His wise decision to shift the focus away from how to play a particular hand and towards building range-based strategies is the best illustration I’ve scene of both how one ought to think about poker and also how, specifically, to do that in a given situation.

This is not a book for the lazy or the close-minded. A quick skimming or surface-level reading won’t do much for you, and unfortunately the prose sometimes gets in the way of understanding already hard-to-grasp concepts. The effort is worth it, though.

Hot off the virtual presses, my latest e-book chronicling the 2009 WSOP Main Event is now available in the Amazon Kindle Store or from www.nitcast.com.

2009 wasn’t my best year in the Main Event – in fact it was one of my worst – but understanding the agony of defeat is even more important to appreciating the WSOP experience than is understanding the thrill of victory. As always, I take you inside of my head, to see both the strategy and the emotion, the excitement and the disappointment, the great plays and the mistakes and the we’ll-never-knows.

It’ll set you back less than three bucks, so please check it out and let me know what you think, preferably in the form of an Amazon review. Thanks and enjoy!

The latest and greatest volume in my Thinking Poker Diaries is now available at nitcast.com or in the Amazon Kindle Store. This third volume in the series follows the same format as the first two, interspersing anecdotes from the tournament with strategy essays that discuss topics that came up during my play. Longer than the first two volumes combined, this one tells the story of my 35th place finish in the 2008 WSOP Main Event. Please check it out and let me know what you think!

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

For shopping in the US

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If you’re looking for gift ideas, consider the books that we’ve featured on the show:

Ed Miller’s Playing the Player

Tommy Angelo’s Elements of Poker

Zach Ellwood’s Reading Poker Tells

Jared Tendler’s The Mental Game of Poker 2

Whenever you do your Amazon shopping, you can find these links under the “Support the Podcast” tab in the upper right hand corner of the site.

Thanks and happy holidays from Nate and Andrew!

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.

May 1 – None
May 8 – Chapters 1 and 2, pages 1 – 55
May 15 – The book as a whole, with guest Jared Tendler
May 22 – Chapters 3 and 4, pages 57 – 117
May 29 – Chapters 5 – 7, pages 119 – 171

If you’ve got questions for us or for Jared, you can post them as comments here, you can email us, or you can tweet them @ThinkingPoker.

For those who don’t know, the Thinking Poker Bookclub is a new segment of the show during which we discuss a different book each month. We just wrapped up discussion of our March book, Playing the Player, with a guest appearance by author Ed Miller. Each week, we discuss a different part of the book and answer listener questions and comments.

Here’s the schedule for this month

Episode 26 (April 3) – Part I: Universal Elements, p. 1 – 84
Episode 27 (April 10) – Parts II – V, p. 85 – 174
Episode 28 (April 17) – Parts VI – IX, .p 175 – 250
Episode 29 (April 24) – The whole book with guest Tommy Angelo!

So pick up a copy, get reading, and send us your questions via @ThinkingPoker on Twitter or podcast@thinkingpoker.net.

Ellwood covers his subject clearly and thoroughly, and his book is well-organized and easy for a player of any ability level to follow. The material isn’t earth-shattering, so if you already consider yourself adept at reading your opponents, you might not have a lot to gain. For relatively inexperienced live players like myself, though, there’s no better resource for learning to decipher your opponents’ behavior.

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

Click here to read my full review!

This is why Onika’s lack of poker expertise is such a problem: it’s the only thing he’s really bringing to the table. You’d probably be better off learning memorization tricks from one of the original experts and then using your own judgment about how to apply them at the poker table. At least you wouldn’t have someone consistently pointing you in the wrong direction. I could go on and on about Unleash Your Hidden Poker Memory‘s misguided poker advice, but frankly it got exhausting keeping track of the book’s many errors, and I gave up trying. Guess I need to improve my memory.

Have you read it? What did you think? I’m particularly curious to hear from anyone who’s actually done all the work the author recommends to train your memory, and how that worked for you.

Edit: Inserted link to the full review. Sorry for the oversight. It’s at https://www.thinkingpoker.net/poker-book-reviews/book-review-unleash-your-hidden-poker-memory/

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.

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!

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?

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 Two Minute Review: Given the choice between Travis Steffen’s Peak Performance Poker and Eric Beck’s Poker Mindfulness, Steffen’s is the better book by far. Whereas the latter consists mostly of uncontroversial platitudes and little practical advice, the former is a helpful book packed with practical, actionable advice for how and why to integrate health and fitness with a poker lifestyle.

I still remember my mandatory 7th grade Wellness class. I remember a perky female teacher who wore frumpy sweaters with oversized ceramic lapel pins. I remember videos of energetic, multi-ethnic teens proudly proclaiming by song the “Smoke Free Class of 2000” (“two zero zero zero, everyone’s a hero!”, though of course by 7th grade quite a few of my peers were no longer heroes in this regard). I remember grades determined by attendance and fill-in-the-blank worksheets. What I don’t remember is learning anything remotely useful or interesting.

This was my concern about the recent batch of what might be called poker lifestyle books. Their authors, who tend to have graduate degrees in fields like wellness, nutrition, and physical fitness, promise to increase your profits at the table by sharing insights from these disciplines that are applicable to poker. Consequently I had no intention of spending money on these books, but two of these authors offered me free review copies, so I agreed to have a look.

Eric Beck’s Poker Mindfulness lived up to my expectations, which is to say that… Read the full review in our book reviews section.

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.

Here’s where you come in, target audience: what do you want to see in Foucault on Poker (other than a better title?) Without revealing too much at this nascent stage, I’ll say that this not going to be a catch-all book. There are plenty of those on the market, most of them suck, and doing it right would take thousands of pages and hours.

I want to focus on ten discrete topics, big picture stuff that tends to trip up or hold back players from being successful at small- and mid-stakes cash games. I’ve got my own ideas, but I don’t have ten yet, and in any event I want to know which topics you would like to see covered.

So… comment away!

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.”

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.

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.