Poker Book Reviews

03/22/2009

Play Poker to Win is a very entertaining book of Amarillo Slim's stories from his old road gambling days.
    Despite the fact that I enjoyed reading this book, I had to rate it a 1/5 based on it's lack of strategic advice. Contrary to it's subtitle "Million Dollar Strategies from the Legendary World Series of Poker Winner", it's content was more for pleasure reading than for teaching poker strategy. However, I do recommend it if you have any interest in reading stories from a true road gambler.

I don't remember learning much from this book. It may have had some descent advice on strategy, but overall, it's superstitious and non-analytical claims just turned me off.

In my opinion this book is highly overrated. After studying the book and trying to put it's teachings into action, I found that tells are an unreliable way of trying to win at poker.
    Even if I was wrong at recognizing certain tells pointed out in this book, I still believe "tell reading", is a very poor foundation to base your poker game on. Instead, I would strongly suggest learning good poker strategy and focusing on that as your means to winning at poker.

The thing that saved this book from getting a 0/5 rating from me, was simply the fact that it was written by Phil Hellmuth. Phil is an 11-time World Series of Poker bracelet winner and he has been a profitable tournament player for decades.
    Despite the over-simplified analysis Hellmuth's Play Poker Like the Pros is known for, hearing what he has to say about how the game should be played must be worth something...

This book lists off 101 "winning moves", that many might consider just "moves" rather than "winning moves". It appears to pull it's advice from many different books giving the impression that the author himself does not have a very deep understanding of poker.
    The result is a collection of questionable advice that cannot be taken literally, but may be worth reading if taken as food for thought.

Playing the players instead of focusing on the cards (in low buy-in live cash games), is the theme of this book. There is no question about the benefits of properly deviating from a balanced strategy based on opponents' tendencies, but the problem with this book is that there is no balanced strategy to begin with. As a result the author's style of play, as described in the book, is possibly further from the optimal cash game strategy than any other strategy I've ever seen in print.

Some of the weirdest strategy advice I've ever read from any book, and without a doubt it's not very close to the optimal way of playing poker tournaments.
    In practice Myer's strategies might even work to some degree due to the low quality of play in many of the lower buy-in live tournaments he is talking about. In other words, his strategy may be an attempt to exploit the player type he assumes is populating the low stakes live tournaments.
    The book contains numerous references to Arnold Snyder's Poker Tournament Formula (a book which I have not read) making the originality of Myers' work questionable.

This book demonstrates numerous "typical" bluffing scenarios that look interesting at first glance.
    The pitfall of this book is that it attempts to explain bluffs in a vacuum without properly teaching the theory of bluffing. (By "theory of bluffing" I am refering to game theory, of course.)

I found this book on bet sizing in no-limit Hold'em, relatively useless. Had this book been a chapter in another book I might have given it some value, but it simply did not hold up as a book on it's own.
    In case you had never thought about the different reasons behind most of the generally accepted bet sizes, then you might find something useful from this book. Just don't think that Winning Strategies for No-Limit Hold'em would "solve" the question of optimal bet sizing, but rather take it as an introduction to the various reasons that are all part of the puzzle.

I was gravely disappointed with this book, especially after I had liked Guerrera's first "Killer Poker by the Numbers".
    The book has hardly any practical advice and is filled with "pseudo-theory" that is over-simplified and for many parts irrelevant. Appendices with various pre-calculated tables take about one half of the book.
    It is obvious this book wasn't published because of the quality of the book, but because of the prior success of the "Killer Poker" series.

Another disappointing "Killer Poker" book that contains nothing that indicates the authors have any confidence in what they are writing about.
    In all it's vagueness, this book contains very little information that has any practical value. The final straw for me, was the excessive "humor" that actually makes you think the authors were drunk while writing this book. That alone was enough for me to practically vow never to buy another "Killer Poker" book ever again!

Worthless rewrite of tournament poker related ideas the author has collected from other authors and poker players. Contains nothing original.

Possibly the worst poker book in my library.
    I didn't expect to find any good strategic advice in it, of course, and ignored the author's views about tight-aggressive being the right way to play poker. But what really disappointed me was that I didn't find any useful advice at all regarding the psychological issues that negatively affect the level of play for most of us (e.g. being on tilt).