Poker Book Reviews

03/22/2009

Solid analysis on heads-up strategy that is guaranteed to improve your heads-up game even if you are already experienced and successful in this form of poker.
    My main criticism would be that it focuses heavily on exploiting opponents' weaknesses and does not give quite enough emphasis on how to mix up your game to protect yourself from being exploited, which I believe is especially important in heads-up games compared to full ring games.

An eye-opener regarding the importance of planning a hand from beginning to end. However, this book covers only a small part of a full scale poker strategy, and simplifies the concept of "stack-to-pot ratio" slightly too much in order for me to agree with it 100%.
    I have very high expectations for the 2nd volume hopefully to be published in 2009.

An old book that's written for Jacks-or-better draw poker and not for hold'em, but I included it my reviews because of the brilliant use of game theory in constructing a winning strategy for a real world poker game.
    Obviously Texas hold'em is a much more complicated game than draw poker, but still the exact same way of thinking can be used to improve your understanding poker in general and for creating better poker strategies. This book is not for practitioners, unless you happen to play draw poker.
    I would have given this book full 5/5 rating if I only happened to play draw poker myself.

Unlike the title may suggest, this is mostly a theory book that doesn't offer too much practical advice. The book covers various aspects of no limit holdem, and as always, you can count on David Sklansky to write only about topics he is very knowledgeable of.
    Unfortunately Sklansky's unwillingness to write about anything he is not 100% sure of may also be this book's biggest shortcoming. Sklansky focuses (with the exception of Sklansky-Chubukov rankings) mostly on exploitive strategies that depend on accurate assumptions on opponents' hands. This means the question of playing balanced poker when little or no information about opponents is available, is left unanswered.

Phil Gordon's Little Green Book is one of the first no-limit holdem books I read, and I thought very highly of both of these two books earlier in my poker "career".
    The books offer solid basic advice for most of the important aspects of poker, and can probably make you competitive in smaller games in relatively short amount of time. On the other hand, they also lack on the theoretical side offering very little value to more experienced players.

I think these two books might have been the first published books that contained solid advice for no-limit holdem. Unfortunately for me neither of them were dedicated to hold'em alone but covered they other forms of "big bet poker" as well. Therefore I found the content in these books to be limited in quantity, even though the quality was high.

The high quality advice from world class pros such as Chris Ferguson and Daniel Negreanu make this book good, even though I did not particularly like the author's filler text between the actual pro chapters.

Hand analysis book with an interesting twist. The last section of the book has three world-class pros independently analyze a series of hands, with often differing opinions on how they should be played.

Ace on the River deals primarily with non-strategy related aspects of being a professional poker player. It does offer some excellent hand analysis too, but that is very limited in quantity.

An interesting book that builds on David Sklansky's "system" that can be found in Sklansky's Tournament Poker for Advanced players.
    The original "system" was a simple, yet surprisingly effective strategy for no-limit hold'em tournaments that had you either fold or move all-in preflop based on certain conditions (mainly the cards held, other player's actions, and the stack size). This book takes off where Sklansky's "system" (or the "improved system") left off, and develops more complex versions of "jam or fold strategies" that lessen the advantage more skilled post-flop players can have over you.
    Reading this book will broaden your understanding of no-limit holdem dynamics even if you never plan to utilize this type of strategy in a tournament.

Best "Killer Poker" book (from the ones I've read) offering interesting analyses on topics such as continuation betting, maximizing EV after flopping a set or a draw, and more. The book contains some blunders too, like the warning to avoid playing heads-up with less than 25 big blinds if the opponent has over 100 big blinds in his stack. (Notice how the effective stacks are determined only by the smaller stack, and therefore it is irrelevant if the opponent has a bigger stack.)

Pretty solid book for beating sit'n'go tournaments with a good balance of theoretical and practical analysis. (Personally however, I am more interested in the more complex forms of poker, such as deep stack cash games for example.)