Outliers

The relevance of Malcolm Gladwell's book "Outliers" to poker has been discussed at length, and I want to add my experience.

A primary theme of the book is that fortunate timing and 10,000 hours of experience in a field is often what it takes to become successful.

I often think about how I may not have ever become a profitable poker player if it weren't for lucky timing. I was lucky to be caught up in the poker boom created by hole cameras on the World Poker Tour and Chris Moneymaker; I was lucky to have friends who played in $5 buy-in home games; I was lucky to play poker in a time when frequent reload bonuses made it easy for a losing player to still turn a profit; I was lucky Neteller was still around at the time so that I could easily take advantage of those bonuses; I was lucky those good times lasted long enough for me to get the experience I needed to survive on my own.

I haven't reached 10,000 hours of poker playing time yet. I figure I've averaged about 2 hours of poker practice a day since I started playing online in spring 2004, meaning I still have seven or eight years to go before I reach that point.

But the practice I did get while clearing those bonuses in my first couple of years playing online is what gave me the time I needed to read, study, write, watch videos, listen to podcasts and think about poker enough to gain a proficiency in this great game. I'm forever thankful to have been caught up in poker during its largest expansion, which gave me the opportunity to reach my poker potential.

Calling Shenanigans

So-called poker experts do a great job of tilting me when they spread misinformation. I'm here to call them out.

1. Deuce Plays, Episode 5:

"If you do have Ace-King, four betting I don't think is going to show a profit, because it's very unlikely you're going to get it in against a range of honestly, Kings or Aces, and maybe Queens, so obviously that's a horrible range to get it in against." --Sean Nolan

The reality is that in today's games, many players' preflop all-in range includes AA, KK, QQ and AK from any position. You can feel safe shoving or 4-betting AK preflop against that range for 100BB.

If you start calling or folding AK preflop out of position, you're probably losing money against most opponents. You should fold AK against a range of AA and KK, but realistically, even most nits are shoving and calling shoves with QQ and AK too.

As an aside, I have to give Nolan credit for another point he made about six minutes later into the podcast. He challenged anyone to show him that they're making money by playing 66-22 from early position in a full ring game over a large sample. I filtered my stats and found that he's right: in my case, I'm a slight loser in that situation.

2. Two Plus Two Publishing: Mason Malmuth rips Tommy Angelo's book, "Elements of Poker," in the most recent Two Plus Two Magazine. Then he locks a thread in the Two Plus Two forums ending discussion of his critique. Hard-Boiled Poker covered it Wednesday.

First of all, I loved reading "Elements of Poker." It gave new, refreshing insight into the game from a perspective that Two Plus Two's books fail to offer. The book may not be for everyone, but the job of a critic is to evaluate a work on its merits. Just because a poker book isn't grounded in statistics doesn't mean it has little value.

Secondly, I got more out of "Elements of Poker" than any Two Plus Two book I've read in recent memory. Honestly, Two Plus Two's offerings have mostly sucked over the last couple of years. "Harrington on Cash Games," "Heads-up No-limit Hold'em" and "Professional No-limit Hold'em" all fell far short of expectations and didn't do much to improve my game.

On top of those subpar offerings, Two Plus Two is coming out with Harrington books on shorthanded games. Harrington should stick to tournaments because his cash advice is piss poor. Applying it to today's 6-max online games would be a disaster.

Finally, Malmuth's thread lock seems to show a lack of openness toward other opinions.

3. Pope Ciaffone has a problem with the advice that "You've got to give action to get action":

"Now let's look at what many of the players are actually doing who use the expression, 'You have to give action to get action.' They raise up front with the 9 7, then bet the flop into four callers when it comes A-J-3. They call a raise out of the small blind when holding the J 8 when there are five opponents who limped in and the button raised. They reraise preflop with 9-9 because now they have a 'real hand.' The game plan was to look like a wild player and then play solidly afterward, but they unfortunately got stuck so much in their advertising mode that they were emotionally unable to stick to their game plan. To me, they look like they are auditioning for the poker version of Death Wish III."

Ciaffone doesn't seem to understand what the phrase means. It's not that difficult. What it means is that if you play like a nit, no one will ever pay you off when you do hit a hand. His examples don't reflect that concept at all.

"Pot-limit Omaha Poker"

I wish more poker books were like "Pot-limit Omaha Poker: The Big Play Strategy," by Jeff Hwang.

Hwang explains fundamental concepts better than most videos. He provides a detailed outline of recognizing various wrap draws and their value. The hand quizzes are well explained and filled with practical examples.

To put it simply, this book does a great job of teaching you how to play a solid Omaha game. It also goes beyond the basics into continuation betting, bluffing, barrelling and hand reading.

Hwang's book succeeds where so many fail. The hand quizzes are based on real hands and clearly convey the author's concepts. The discussion on wrap draws filled in a critical gap in my knowledge that wasn't already covered by the poker training sites. Starting hand analysis was complete but rarely redundant. The section on postflop play was sophisticated yet easy to understand.

I can't think of any part of this book that seems wrong, uninformed or misleading.

Hwang knows what he's writing about, and he does it in a way that makes you ready to start making money at PLO.

"Heads-Up No-Limit Hold 'em"

While "Heads-Up No-Limit Hold 'em" by Collin Moshman lays a solid foundation for heads-up play, it feels incomplete. I learned a few new concepts, but I wish some of the chapters had lasted more than a page or two.

One chapter discusses the "Hit-to-Win Style," in which you plan to commit more chips into the pot only if you connect with the flop.

"You should usually avoid such a passive style when facing a single opponent. ... Most flops miss most hands, and those times when you 'hit' a second-best hand can significantly offset your gains when you do connect well," Moshman writes.

He nails a key point of heads-up play, but he doesn't explain the next logical step: If you can't play hit-to-win, what kinds of flops and opponents should you be bluffing? With what frequency? How do you best disguise your play when you do hit?

In another section of the book, Moshman addresses what kind of turn cards are good to fire a second barrel on. If you're bluffing, he recommends giving up more frequently when a rag falls, and continuing to bluff when an overcard hits. If you actually connected with the flop, he suggests the opposite strategy: continue betting for value when a rag turns, but tend to check behind a turn when a dangerous overcard appears. This is a quality section of the book, but it's too limited and general. I would have preferred more hand examples.

This theme runs throughout the course of the book. Other too-short sections talk about exploiting vs. optimal play, adjusting to paired flops, floating and table selection.

Meanwhile, identifying and adjusting to your opponents is ignored for the most part.

The book also falls short in that it's mostly focused on heads-up sit-and-gos rather than cash games. I wish its emphasis on sngs had been more clearly advertised.

However, I liked the hand examples, most of which were taken from Heads-Up Championships of the past featuring big-name players. Also, the advice is generally sound, which is more than I can say about many poker strategy books.

The main difficulty of "Heads-Up No-Limit Hold 'em" is that it's written like the Boy Scout Handbook for heads-up play. It speaks in helpful generalities, but it won't ensure your survival when you're stranded in the wilderness.

For that, you need coaching videos, analysis, discussion and lots of experience.

Harrington on Cash Games: How to Win at No-Limit Hold 'em Money Games: Vol II

Like the first volume, Harrington's second cash game book was disappointing.

It avoided some of the flaws of the first book, such as overly emphasizing variation plays at the expense of value. But the book also relied too much on hand examples that didn't necessarily give me a deeper understanding of the game.

While reading the hand examples, it began to feel like I was looking over Harrington's shoulder as he played. It's useful to see how he would play a hand, but that doesn't mean I would play it the same way. The result of these exercises is that I see more hands from a different perspective, although I'm not gaining much knowledge about hand ranges, expectation and flop textures.

Instructional videos achieve much the same thing, often with deeper analysis and lessons that are easier to absorb.

Harrington breaks up the book into two parts: tight-aggressive play and loose-aggressive play. As before, it's helpful to observe the nuances of each style, but a more thorough hand analysis and decision-making techniques is lacking.

The miscellaneous chapters proved to be among the most educational: tells and observations, beating weak games and bankroll management.

The bankroll management chapter includes an argument for paying your taxes that I hadn't heard before: You can make more money in the long run if you pay your taxes because that enables you to invest it without fear of drawing government attention.

This book isn't a bad book, but it isn't what I want. I'm looking for books that get into playing against different opponents, exploiting weaknesses and using deductive reasoning to break down hands. 2+2 Publishing hasn't produced anything like that in a few years.

Harrington on Cash Games: How to Win at No-Limit Hold 'em Money Games: Vol I

I think I know what Harrington is trying to do in a large part of his first cash game book: He's demonstrating a strategy that attempts to avoid exploitation by mixing up his play.

The fundamental problem with this approach is that it's almost always better to make the highest percentage play rather than sacrifice value in a misguided effort to obfuscate your hand for potential future profits. Harrington attempts to mix up his play based on the second-hand of his watch instead of balancing his play based on the game situation.

For example: If you hold Ks Kc on a Ac Ts 4s flop, Harrington recommends checking 80 percent of the time rather than making a continuation bet.

I argue for betting the vast majority of the time. In addition, I definitely wouldn't decide whether to check because the second-hand of my watch as Harrington would. He'd have you take the 80 percent action if the second-hand is in the first 48 seconds and check if it's in the last 12 seconds. Does anyone do this in real life cash games?

I would bet because I know my opponent probably didn't cold call with an Ace preflop, I can bluff him off the hand if I think he did cold call with a weak Ace, and I'm just as happy to take down the pot right now. Those are all legitimate, practical reasons for betting completely dependent on what I believe to be the strongest play, and there's no reason to ever do anything different from what I think is right.

A whole chunk of the book is dedicated to these deception plays at the expense of analysis of gametime decisions. It's better to consider whether my opponent is a calling station, bluffer, check-raiser, maniac, regular, weekend warrior, squeeze player, blind stealer or blind folder than it is to try to make ambiguous fancy plays.

At least one hand example in the book illustrates an approach I'm more comfortable with. With ATo from the cutoff, Harrington supports raising a limper to 5X and then continuation betting nearly every time on a Kc Qc 4h flop.

"Given that Player D is a loose, weak player and he checked, this flop probably missed him, and in addition should look pretty scary with the king and queen out there. Make a continuation bet almost 100 percent of the time. Unless Player D caught a piece of the flop, he'll go away."

See? That wasn't so hard. Continuation bet based on the flop texture, your position, your read on your opponent and the previous action. There's no reason to do anything differently for deception or meaningless variation.

I don't think I'm overstating this point. In other hand examples, Harrington goes for variation plays preflop, with random limps as well. That's not going to work in most of today's games, both online and live.

On top of that, the ATo hand is used to make an argument for a terrible "general rule":

"The more outs you have to a big (or winning) hand, the less you want to make a continuation bet."

That rule is not true. When you have more outs, you want to bet because it gives you more ways to win. You'll either take down the pot with a continuation bet, or you build the pot while controlling the action, retaining fold equity and potentially hitting the well-disguised nuts.

I want to say something positive, so I'll say this: I enjoy learning about new styles so that I can better understand what my opponents may be thinking.

But there aren't many new tactics from this book that I'll be incorporating into my game.

"Elements of Poker"

I have made many wrong turns in my life. And I don't mean metaphorically. I mean in my car. I'll be driving along, and my mind will be elsewhere, or I'll be talking, and I'll just drive right by the place I intended to turn. And I might not notice it for a while. I have made so many wrong turns that I am no longer miffed when it happens. Passengers are surprised by how unsurprised I am after I make a wrong turn. They'll be like, "Dude, we just lost half an hour because you're an idiot. Do the right thing here and show us a little shame!"

What am I supposed to do? Act like I'm mad at myself? For the sake of others?

The same thing happens at the poker table. Like the time I was playing in a game with $10/$20 blinds, two players limped, the small blind completed, and I checked in the big blind with 72o. The flop was A-Q-J rainbow, and everyone checked. The turn was a fourth-suit king, and everyone checked again. The river was a ten, putting an ace-high straight on board that I didn't see because I was busy ordering food from the waitress. We all checked again. They checked because we all had the nuts. I checked because I thought I had seven-high. When the last guy checked on the river, that made me first to show, and with no hope to win, I just mucked. The dealer started to split the pot three ways and that's when I noticed my mistake. The total pot was $80 which means I cost myself $20 by ordering a $10 meal. A couple of guys were snickering. Oh well. Wrong turn. "Elements of Poker," by Tommy Angelo

Good stuff. Tommy's Poker Articles are classic.

"Full Tilt Poker Strategy Guide"

Anytime you have a book compiling the views of various experts, you're going to have mixed results. "The Full Tilt Poker Strategy Guide, Tournament Edition" contains some nice nuggets of advice, but it's far from a cohesive approach to tournament play.

Everyone has his own style.

I liked Howard Lederer's chapter because it expanded on the idea of leverage, something that reminded me of doubleas' book, "Pressure Poker," in which he discusses finding and exploiting the pressure point in each hand.

Lederer's idea is to push all in if you don't have a large enough stack to make leveraged bets.

To make a re-raise without pushing all-in, your stack has to be at least 30 BB deep, Lederer writes. Otherwise, if you want to squeeze or reraise, you might as well push.

It's a simple idea, but I hadn't seen the 30 BB figure explained before.

I wrote before about Chris Ferguson's bet-sizing strategy, so I won't go into that again.

I also enjoyed Ted Forrest's explanation of his bizarro style, if only for entertainment value. I don't think it's the kind of thing that can be easily incorporated into your game unless you live out that kind of game.

The rest of the no-limit chapters were a decent review of basics, such as reading flop textures, evaluating continuation bets, floating, deep-stack play and short-stack play. All good stuff, but not a lot of information that wasn't covered by Dan Harrington.

I didn't get much out of Andy Bloch's discourse on preflop play. His long starting hand charts didn't convince me of anything, but I'll have to go back and give it another chance. I was immediately turned off to Bloch's ideas when he listed A5s as his No. 10 two-card hand combination because "it is a good semi-bluffing hand because it cuts in half the chance you will get called by A-A or by A-X and run into an ace on the board. You can make straights and flushes with it." Those are true points, but I have a hard time believing that such a dominated hand deserves such a high spot in the rankings.

I haven't read the non-no limit chapters yet, mostly because when I do play other game types, it's rarely in a tournament format. I'll come back to these chapters when I'm ready to play my next HORSE tourney.

Overall I give this book a B. It's useful and practical, but its 12-author approach comes off as more disjointed than collaborative. It's handy as a reference book, and I'll definitely come back to it from time to time.

Response to 'Poker is About ...'

Quite a few poker players weighed in with their thoughts on the goal of poker. My favorite response came from Drizz:

I just trying to avoid sucking.

People that suck don't normally win.

That seems like great advice to me. Poker doesn't have to be narrowed down into one of three choices I listed in the previous post. Players can win simply by concentrating on playing well, although that means different things for different players.

I was glad to hear a diversity of viewpoints from players who prefer to manage risk, adapt varying styles depending on the game format or avoid tough decisions.

Others suggested their own approaches.

The largest group echoed the idea that poker is about decision-making, which is what I was trying to emphasize in the original post. The way to win the most money is to reason through the hand, analyze your opponents, identify patterns, evaluate the likely outcome and make the best choice given the facts at hand.

Plenty of winning players simply fold in tough situations or forgo small edges in exchange for a better spot. These strategies are OK, but they're not always ideal (at least in a cash game).

My underlying thought is you should always make the play that you think is best, whether it's easy or marginal. I know I'm in trouble when I dodge tough situations because I'm afraid of losing.

---

Recommended Reading: Are you kidding me, Full Tilt?

Poker is about ...

Which of these statements is most true?

1) Expert poker players win money because they plan ahead to avoid having to make tough decisions.

2) Poker players win money by avoiding mistakes.

3) Solid players win by making correct decisions, whether they're simple or complicated.

The first statement comes from Ed Miller, and I wrote about it previously.

The second was written by Gary Carson in December, although I didn't see the post until recently.

The third reflects my belief.

Carson says that both Miller and I are wrong:

You do not make money in poker by being smart. You make money by the other guy not being smart. You simply want to avoid mistakes.

The decisions you want to focus on are the ones with big potential payoffs and small risk, it doesn't matter whether they're easy ones are hard ones, it doesn't matter whether you make most decisions correctly. It matters that you make the important ones correctly.

I disagree. If you "simply ... avoid mistakes" rather than actively try to induce them, that's a poor way to try to win money in poker.

Avoiding mistakes suggests to me that players should be dodging a minefield of obstacles rather than creating hurdles for your opponents yourself.

I also take issue with the idea that poker players should focus on the decisions that have "big potential payoffs and small risk." Properly bankrolled players should not be concerned about how risky a play is. All they're interested in is making the play that nets them the most money in the long run.

Do you think the goal of poker is to make correct decisions, avoid mistakes or avoid tough decisions? I'd like to hear comments.

MTT Preflop Bet Sizing

Tournament poker. Sigh.

It's all these donkeys fighting for the longshot chance that they'll hit it big, but few of them will ever get there. What's worse is that multi-accounters/account traders/teamers and other cheaters may be gaining an unfair edge that they wouldn't be able to exploit in cash games.

Knowing this, of course I had to throw some money at the FTOPS Main Event. I don't play many tourneys at all, but I'll take a shot every once in a while. I went out midway through the field.

Shortly before the tourney, I started reading "The Full Tilt Poker Strategy Guide, Tournament Edition" to get ready. I quickly learned something new that I'm sure many of you MTT specialists know already:

Raise small amounts from early position, medium amounts from middle position and larger amounts from late position preflop, according to Chris Ferguson.

"Here is the reasoning: I want to make my opponents' decisions as difficult as possible. If you make a big raise, you make your opponents' decisions easy: they can simply fold most of their hands, only playing their very biggest hands. Now, if you bluff with a big bet, you win very little most of the time, but when you get reraised, you lose big," Ferguson writes.

This reasoning makes sense to me, and it seemed to work fairly effectively for me in the FTOPS. Another selling point for this strategy is that I saw many solid players in the tournament doing the same thing, which makes me think there's something to it at least.

I haven't seen similar bet-sizing tactics from hardly any players in cash games, which makes me believe this strategy is more effective in tournaments. I'm guessing the reasoning is that your preflop raise in a tournament commits more of your stack in proportion to the blinds, meaning that you have to be more careful with your raises.

In cash games, I'm still a believer in raising a standard amount preflop, regardless of your position (except in the blinds, where I'll sometimes overbet). With 100 BB stacks, it makes more sense to raise a uniform amount because the blinds are a smaller proportion of your stack size, making them less relevant. If you're playing a short stack, perhaps there's more of a reason to vary preflop raises, but I wonder.

---

On a separate topic, I've been trying to figure out if there's a way to budget hands preflop. For example, should I be saying to myself, "I'm not going to lose more than half my stack with pocket Tens," and plan my hand accordingly? What about AQ or AJ, 99 or JJ?

Of course pocket Tens are worth calling 20 BB all-in preflop. But are they worth 40 BB? Or 50 BB? At some point, you don't want to be putting in half your stack with a hand that's usually either a coinflip or dominated.

I don't know what the appropriate stack sizes are though, nor do I know how to do the math to find it out. I imagine I could run equity comparisons against each stack sizes' likely pushing range, but that doesn't seem like it would be very accurate because each player is different.

Maybe this is a wasted effort though.

When I asked Kuro about it, he said pros would likely go with their hand if they think it's strong, and they might not worry so much about borderline calls against short stacks.

The Poker Mindset

"The Poker Mindset," by Ian Taylor and Matthew Hilger, outlines an approach for poker players to take once they have a good idea of the game's strategy. The book goes beyond gametime tactics to examine the mental skill set that top players possess: emotional control, making correct decisions, balancing poker with real life, and managing a bankroll.

This book is practical, readable and doesn't contain any incorrect information that I could find. It's like a users manual for how to approach the game. Many of the concepts are familiar, but they're more clearly defined and explained within the text. I won't dwell on the specifics except for a couple of ideas I particularly liked.

The book talks about how a poker player is more at war with himself than with his opponents at the table.

You are your own worst enemy. If you know how to adjust to game conditions and respond to your opponents maneuvers, the primary obstacle to beating the game is overcoming your own tendencies that may lead you astray. These tendencies include poor self-control, a failure to execute even when you know what's right, complacency and lack of observation.

It reminds me of how my mom used to tell me not to worry about what other people were doing, and to only be concerned with myself.

At the table, I play better when I'm concentrating on making the best play in each situation rather than fearing the worst.

The book also calls attention to a couple of tilty flaws I have where I'll sometimes play shorter sessions to "secure my win" and longer sessions when trying to get even. Obviously chasing isn't a good idea, nor is leaving a profitable table just because I'm ahead. I've rededicated myself to a two-hour-per-session time limit so I can stay fresh and better detach myself from the money involved.

Everyone tilts sometimes, and anyone who says he doesn't is either lying to you or lying to himself. "The Poker Mindset" helps identify mental errors and suggests ways to counter them. I recommend it as an essential book for any studious poker player.

Chip Reese

From My 50 Most Memorable Hands, by Doyle Brunson.

My Achilles heel in poker has always been Chip Reese. I know Chip is a great player but it seems he wins 80 or 90 percent of the pots I play against him. no player in my lifetime has ever intimidated me except Chip. I'm not really superstitious, but I've done everything I know to do against him. I've varied my game to where I know it is impossible for him to get a read on how I'm playing.

This was one of the first hands I remember playing against him when he first came to Las Vegas from Dartmouth College. We were playing no-limit hold 'em and Chip and I were left alone. I held the Ad Jd in a raised pot.

The flop was 9d 7h 2s.

I checked and Chip checked. The next card was the Qd giving me the nut-flush draw. I checked. Chip bet and I thought he was weak so I raised. He called and the river was the 3s.

I moved in and he called me. It was a very big pot for the game we were playing and he turned over the 5d 2d. He had called me with two deuces!

He made the call because he put me on a busted flush draw and figured I had nothing. I asked him later what he would have done if a diamond had come, which would have given him a flush but me a bigger one. he told me he would have thrown his hand away. How do you handle that?

That was thirty years ago and I'm still trying to find the answer.

Picking on Ed Miller

I hope Ed Miller and his co-authors can consider themselves a success based on the amount of discussion and criticism they generate, because I can't resist pointing out their flaws.

Here's another passage from "Professional No-Limit Hold 'em" that didn't seem right to me:

Many players think experts win because they make these tough decisions well. They miss the point. Good players plan ahead to avoid tough decisions, and so should you.

It would be nice if poker were so easy to play that players could simply avoid all tough decisions by planning better. But that simply isn't the case.

Yes, it's true that avoiding tough decisions by planning your hands can help improve your game. But money isn't made by dodging difficult situations. Profits come from making correct decisions, whether they're simple or complicated. If you avoid all tricky circumstances, you'll forgo countless dollars that could be made when you have an edge.

Money is made by capitalizing on good values when you see them -- not by shying away from hands because they might be too hard to play. Solid poker players evaluate the circumstances and take the best action they can to maximize earnings.

Sacrificing EV to minimize risk makes little sense to me.

Here's another link to a post critical of the authors' claims about the benefits of buying in short: The availability error and short stack strategy.

Relative position

It really irks me when I see bad advice passed off as the truth, especially when it comes from a so-called "Noted Poker Authority." I'll comment on an excerpt from the pretentiously titled of "Professional No-Limit Hold 'Em: Volume One." Volume two hasn't been written yet.

Relative position means being to the right of the likely bettor, so you get to see how everyone else responds before you act. Sometimes having relative position can be more useful than having absolute position. For instance:

A player in a 9-handed $1-$2 game with a $100 capped buy-in has been going all-in every other hand for the last 20 hands. No one is standing up to him without a premium hand. He now has $268. You are first on the list to get into the game, and you will buy in for $100. You decide you should call the frequent all-in player for all your chips with ace-ten or better, and any pair of sixes or better. Two seats open up, one on his immediate right and the other on his immediate left. Which seat do you take?

Consider your worst all-in hand, ace-ten offsuit. If you sit to this person's immediate left and call all-in, any of the other players could play as well. If one of them has AA, KK, QQ, JJ, AK, AQ, or AJ, you take the worst of it. However, if you sit to the immediate right of the slider, you see what everyone else does before you commit. You can limp with ace-ten offsuit, then get all-in if no one else calls him. If instead someone plays, you can fold.

With relative position, you will often get to check to the likely bettor, then see how every other opponent reacts before committing your chips. That is why, contrary to conventional wisdom, it can sometimes be better to be on the right of a very aggressive player. Most of the time, however, absolute position is more important than relative position.

First of all, relative position does not mean being to the right of the likely bettor. Relative position is your position in relation to the preflop raiser. Whether you would rather have a relative position to the right or left of the likely bettor is debatable. I would prefer to be to the left of the likely bettor in most situations.

Then the book gives a contrived example of a situation in which it would be better to be sitting to the right of the likely bettor. The argument is that you can limp or check to the raiser to see how he and the remaining players act before deciding how to proceed with your hand. Presumably, you would check-raise with stronger hands and fold weaker hands.

This reasoning may work in the example, but how often are you going to be sitting to the right of a player who goes all in every hand? How often will you cold-call out of position preflop and then check when you hit your hand? How often will you make more money from a check-raise or a limp-raise than you would have made from playing your hand straightforwardly?

The example portrays a false reality that doesn't frequently occur in actual play. It's poor strategy to sacrifice absolute position, give up control of the hand and open yourself up to re-raises unless you have a premium hand. We all know how rarely the combination of being dealt a premium hand, getting action and having it hold up happens.

I would much rather be to the left of the maniac. I could frequently reraise him for isolation, bet for value when I hit my hand, bluff him with greater accuracy and get it all in with more information than I would have out of position. The exception comes in multiway pots where you gain more information by letting the maniac bet and waiting to see how others will react.

But most pots are contested heads-up, especially in games where there's lots of raising preflop. In heads-up hands, I want to control the action and pot size, which is much more easily accomplished from the maniac's left.

Limping and checking is usually weak poker. While there are extreme circumstances where a maniac is so aggressive and predictable that you want him to your left, those scenarios are rare.

Top 10 Hold 'em Books

10. No Limit Hold 'em: Theory and Practice: I just didn't get much out of it.









9. Little Blue Book: This book isn't revolutionary, but I enjoyed reading the hand histories. I agree with most of Gordon's analysis, which is more than I can say for plenty of other hold 'em books.







8. Theory of Poker: Everyone says this book is one of the very best, but it didn't stand out to me except for the Fundamental Theorem of Poker.










7. Super/System: Gotta give it up for the classics.











6. Hold 'em Poker for Advanced Players: These fundamentals of hold 'em gave me a solid foundation to learn from.










5. Harrington on Hold 'em (Vols. 1-3): Probably the most important book since the poker boom based on M alone.









4. Professional No-Limit Hold 'em: While this book has its flaws, it breaks some new ground on no limit. Its concepts on hand planning are useful and understandable.









3. Winning in Tough Hold 'em Games: Short-Handed and High-Stakes Concepts and Theory for Limit Hold 'em: This book is the real deal. It preaches aggressive tactics for difficult games. While this is a limit book, many of its ideas are applicable to other forms of poker as well.








2. Ace on the River: If you judge books by whether they help you make money, this one gets an A in my book. It's light on strategy but puts me in a winning mindset. I've read through it twice, and I went on crazy winning streaks both times afterward.








1. Small Stakes Hold 'em: No other poker book is so complete from start to finish, with page after page of practical ideas about how to analyze and execute hands. I didn't win the most money immediately after reading "Small Stakes Hold 'em," but it paid off in the long run.

"Professional No-Limit Hold 'Em"

Ed Miller and company drive me crazy -- they come up with compelling new concepts and then ignore the reality of how today's no limit games play.

"Professional No-Limit Hold 'em" by Matt Flynn, Sunny Mehta and Miller shows off the best and worst of 2+2 publishing. The book makes you think about pot commitment, bet sizing and stack adjustment ideas while misapplying them to practical situations. Many parts of the book come off as anything but professional, from the constant typos to the faulty hand examples and sometimes awful advice about preflop raising. It repeats some of the same problems that I pointed out about "No Limit Hold 'em: Theory and Practice."

I'll start with the book's strengths.

It is focused throughout on the idea of quickly planning your hand and bets to avoid messy situations. I like this approach because the authors develop new terminology to more clearly define existing stratagems that experienced no limit players know from thousands of hands of practice. It's similar to when David Sklansky came up with the term "semibluffing" to clarify the existing term "bluffing with outs."

Here's a sampling of the book's vocabulary:

_ Commitment threshold: You reach the commitment threshold when you have invested more than 10 percent of your effective stack size. This means that one more largish bet will get you pot committed in many situations.

_ Commitment: Players are usually pot committed if they have invested more than one-third of their effective stack into the pot. At first, this appears to be a low proportion, but it makes sense because after betting a third of your stack, you're only one pot-sized bet away from being all-in.

_ The REM Process: REM stands for Range, Equity and Maximize -- three steps you should take when evaluating your place in a hand. No shit, Sherlock.

_ SPR: SPR stands for stack-to-pot ratio, which is a number used to plan your hand from the flop onward based on whether it's a top pair hand, overpair or drawing hand. The meat of the book is spent on SPR, which I believe to be a useful but inherently flawed metric.

I won't delve into the details of SPR here because the book does that well enough over about 150 pages. Suffice it to say that SPR fails to accurately account for multiway pots and adjust to differing playing styles. Above all, its chief shortcoming is that the authors use it to rationalize weak play that simply won't fly in many of the 2/5 and 5/10 games that are used in the hand examples.

This is where we get to the book's problems. Although it does a good job of introducing new ways of thinking about hand planning, it falls short when it comes to practical application. I think of it as the difference between a graduate student and a working professional. The graduate student might write a solid thesis, but there's often a reason he can't cut it in the real world.

I can see how thinking about SPR can be a useful practice, but it's more of a means to an end than the end itself. By that I mean that I will use SPR to observe and evaluate likely outcomes, but I won't tailor my preflop play to achieve a certain SPR number. My reasoning is that favorable SPRs only serve to make hands easier to play; they do not necessarily result in higher expected value.

For example, the book suggests limping or minraising with AA or KK for pot control purposes. That misses the point that strong raises with premium hands gets more money in the pot when you have the best of it.

Here's another example: The book recommends occasional raises with suited one-gappers if it will result in an unfavorable SPR for your opponent. But I don't think it really matters to most opponents whether they have an unfavorable SPR or not because they're going to play the hand in the best way they know how, even if their stack size might not be just right for that hand type.

A few of the hand examples in the book are a mess. They place too high of a value on pot control while ignoring that solid players will simply destroy you with overbets and river bluffs if you consistently play hands in a style that's afraid to commit too many chips.

It makes me wonder if the authors of this book are truly professionals. Do they really play in 2/4 and up NL games online? Do they win? Do they practice what they preach? I don't believe it for two reasons: their advice frequently won't stand up to aggression, and I've never seen even one winning player in any of the games I play effectively use this style.

I have a few other complaints. In one of the hand examples, the blinds are incorrectly listed at 50/100 instead of 2/5. Another hand example is from a hypothetical online 2/5 NL game, which isn't even spread at any of the sites open to U.S. players (that I know of). In one paragraph, the authors call a raise from $20 to $75 a "huge overbet," which is just plain wrong because the raise to $75 was exactly a pot-sized raise.

These kinds of things make me seriously question the book's credibility. It should have some peer review, or at least decent copy editing.

Despite all these problems, I would recommend "Professional No-Limit Hold 'em" (I guess no-limit is hyphenated these days?) for players who can separate its strengths from its weaknesses. I wouldn't suggest it for players who are looking to replicate the style advocated within because they'd get run over.

I measure poker books based on whether they make me a better player. By that standard, I have to admit this book is a winner. It introduced me to alternate playing styles and new ideas that give me additional perspective when playing hands. It forced me to think harder about commitment and planning of my plays.

I'll treat it more like a work of untested theory than a textbook based on fact.

We are not fish

Many losing poker players can choose not to be fish. They could decide to win, if they had the motivation to work at it. There's an incredible amount of dead money in the poker world, and I have several friends who could get a piece of it if they would listen and learn.

Poker is a game of skill in the long run, and good players will always win over a significant enough stretch of hands. There are many simple ways to become a winner. The problem most players have is that they're unwilling to take the steps necessary to guarantee victory. Of course, some people just don't "get it," but I believe most people with average or better intelligence have the capability to do what it takes.

I know a few players who simply refuse to do what it takes to win. Here are their biggest failings:

They won't learn how to play a tight-aggressive style, which I've found to be profitable even in shorthanded games. Sure, a loose-aggressive style may be more profitable for strong players, but TAG players make money because they don't put their money in without a quality hand, and they don't call bets unless they think they're going to win.

Perhaps the biggest leak losers have is that they won't play limits appropriate to their bankroll. If they would follow Chris Ferguson's bankroll requirements, they would have a much better chance of minimizing losses while slowly building up their savings.

The third common failing of bad players is that they lack discipline. They won't read books, blogs and magazines. They won't watch videos. They won't read 2+2. They won't learn from their losing hands. They won't use PokerTracker and PokerAce. They won't stop playing when they're tired or take a break during a losing streak. They can't stop chasing losses when behind or be satisfied with a small win when ahead.

This is pretty straightforward stuff, and I'm sure most people reading this know these basics already. But the vast majority of poker players are career losers, and I hope one or two of them will wake up and realize it doesn't have to be this way.

"Winning in Tough Hold 'em Games"

I don't know what it was exactly that made me think limit hold 'em would be more profitable than no limit. Part of it was the allure of make 2 BB/hr at 15/30, which I thought would be an incredible winrate. It seemed like it would be easy to win one decent pot per hour at those full-ring donkfests back in the Party Poker days, when there were plenty of tables and they all seemed loose.

When I finally got to 15/30, I got smacked. I lost 2/3 of my bankroll and spent five months rebuilding it. Shortly afterward I began focusing on no limit, but I'm glad I spent time learning limit because it made me a stronger, more analytical player.

Two of the biggest leaks in my limit game were that I couldn't figure out how to play well from the blinds, and I didn't know how to handle loose-aggressive players.

"Winning in Tough Hold 'em Games: Short handed and High-Stakes Concepts and Theory for Limit Hold 'em," by Nick "Stoxtrader" Grudzien and Geoff "Zobags" Herzog is the book that I wish I had back then.

This is easily the best limit hold 'em book I've read, better than "Small Stakes Hold 'em," "Winning Low-Limit Hold 'em" and "Hold 'em for Advanced Players." That's saying a lot.

The great thing about this book is that it's practical, and it reflects the reality of today's online limit games. It's written by experts who know what the 6-max tables are like -- often with table VP$IPs around 40 and filled with aggressive players who will see showdowns at a rate that would quickly break no limit players. And the reason the games are filled with those kinds of players is that they're not very wrong to be playing like that.

For example, according to the book:

If you're not seeing showdown near 37 percent of the time you see a flop, you're probably folding too much. If you don't 3-bet preflop from the small blind around 90 percent of the time you're going to play a hand against a steal raise, you're making a big mistake. If you fold Axo or Qxs in the big blind vs. a steal, you're giving away money.

From reading board texture to adjusting for different styles to determining when it's safe to fold for one more bet on the river, this book covers a lot of ground.

It starts out with several hand charts, PokerTracker records and equity values in the first chunk of the book. These form the reference material that the rest of the book is based on, but I didn't spend a lot of time trying to memorize any of these data.

Then the book moves on to stealing, blind defense, semibluffing, betting lines, modernized bankroll advice and hand quizzes. This is great stuff.

I like to evaluate books based on whether they make me a better player when I sit at the tables. Unlike some poker books I've read, I notice the difference in my play on many hands. I've been winning more often and stealing more pots.

Online limit has died down over the last couple of years, but the shorthanded games especially are still wild. I've seen some god-awful play at all limits. Everyone wants to be an aggressive force who can control the action and get in with the best of it. "Winning in Tough Hold 'em Games" tells you how to do it.

"The Children of Hurin"

"The Children of Hurin," which was released last week, is supposedly the last of J.R.R. Tolkien's works to be edited and published by his son Christopher.

Check out the trailer.

It's pretty damn good, but the people who are going to like it the most are those who have read "The Silmarillion."

I liked that it was a standalone narrative of one of Tolkien's core legends. I was disappointed that it ended somewhat abruptly, without even summarizing the Wanderings of Hurin, in which he kills Mim, unintentionally tips off the secret location of Gondolin and sets in motion the fall of Doriath.