Five of a Kind - Part I

Try as you might, I don't think you'll find a philosopher or a poker player out there who hasn't observed that the lessons of poker are the lessons of life, and that lessons learned at the poker table carry over into life itself just as surely as life's lessons can serve to make one a better poker player.

Life and poker lessons galore are packed into the four books and software selection that are the subjects of this two-part series. The last six months have proven to be an amazingly fertile time for gaming literature and products, with new titles appearing almost monthly. Despite this cornucopia of information, I shudder each time someone posts a message to the Internet newsgroup Rec.Gambling.Poker asking for advice on "which poker book to read," as if one book will provide all the answers and is enough to make a winning player out of a raw beginner.

If you want to become a better poker player, you have to read them all. Education, after all, seldom comes without expense or effort. It's an investment. And money spent honing your craft or trade ought to make money for you in the long run. In other words, buy 'em all and read 'em. And when you're done reading them, go to the table and put your freshly minted knowledge into practice and turn it into know-how. And when you've done that, do it again - and again. If you don't work to upgrade your game, you'll find yourself losing a step or two in relation to your opponents. The bar is continuously being raised, and if you don't grow with it, the cost will far exceed that of buying some books and software to improve your game.

The Poker MBA, by Greg Dinkin and

Jeffrey Gitomer (Crown Business)

Like professors at the Harvard Business School, Dinkin and Gitomer use the case-study method. They present poker situations and show how the lessons and strategic concepts apply to the business world. Their examples feature many famous business leaders, such as Warren Buffet, Jack Welch, Michael Dell, Donald Trump, Steve Wynn, and Sam Walton. Their book resonated with me, perhaps because I'm one of a small coterie of poker players who learned through the casebook method in business school and put it into practice as a management consultant.

The Poker MBA offers a core strategy that applies to poker as well as business: If you continually make decisions with the odds in your favor, you'll be a winner in the long run. Great business people, like great poker players, are adept at reading others and seeing things from a different perspective. They are skillful in balancing risk and reward, and sufficiently disciplined to handle adversity and recover from losses. And they are good enough actors to bluff when necessary.

Dinkin and Gitomer also use poker to explain a variety of sophisticated business concepts, such as expected value, regression to the mean, arbitrage, discounted cash flows, core competency, differential advantage, residual income, and multivariable thinking, and the reader should come away with some practical know-how that they can apply to their negotiations and other business challenges.

The authors are well qualified to write this book. Dinkin is a professional poker player, columnist for Card Player, the author of The Finance Doctor, as well as a former management consultant. Gitomer, the author of The Sales Bible and other books on sales, also consults with a number of major corporations.

The Poker MBA provides a big-picture look at strategic thinking and applies it to the boardroom as well as the poker room, and while it's a very easy read, don't sell it short. The authors have done a terrific job of melding lots of relevant concepts that apply equally in two worlds that many think are dissimilar, but are much more alike than even those of us who have had a foot in each might realize.

Middle Limit Holdem Poker, by Bob Ciaffone and

Jim Brier

What's the best way to teach poker? According to Ciaffone and Brier, one must blend the general principles of play and use specific examples to show these principles in use. And this is precisely what they've done. If The Poker MBA is a big-picture view of poker, Ciaffone and Brier get down to cases in the form of specific hand analyses. Their analysis is comprehensive, and more than 300 pages of poker hands are dissected for the reader. Factors that casual players might not include in their own assessment of hands they've played, such as the number of opponents, position, and the previous betting action, are all brought to bear on the recommended decisions. If you're familiar with Jim Brier's column in Card Player, you'll be familiar with the style of this book. But in addition to Brier, you get the thinking of Ciaffone. Ciaffone, who is expert at bridge, chess, and backgammon as well as poker, is also the author of Omaha Holdem Poker, Pot-Limit and No-Limit Poker, and Improve Your Poker (all well-regarded books in the poker community).

This book is not aimed at beginners, and is not slanted toward low-limit players. It is aimed squarely at those with some experience playing in the $10-$20 through $40-$80 range, and the authors are correct in pointing out that the differences between low-stakes and middle-limit poker are substantial and require both an adjustment in strategy and the acquisition of new skills. To assist the reader in beating a middle-limit game, the authors provide an introduction and explanation of some of the new skills necessary to move up. "Against a crowd of four or more people," they argue, "you play the same stodgy and solid poker that made you successful at low-limit hold'em. But against only one or two opponents, you must play a far more aggressive brand of poker than worked at low-limit play."

I like this book a lot. You can go back to it time and again and review the hands presented by Ciaffone and Brier and test your reasoning against theirs. I played against Ciaffone on a few occasions when he was a proposition player at Hollywood Park Casino, and I played against Brier every night for a week in Costa Rica. And guess what? They play like they write: solidly, soundly, and winningly. If you consider yourself a somewhat experienced hold'em player who wants to improve, you ought to take yourself to school on this book.

Serious Poker, by Dan Kimberg (Dan Kimberg Books)

Kimberg is a scholar and it shows in his approach to poker. In addition to being a serious poker player, he has a day job as a researcher in cognitive neuroscience at the University of Pennsylvania. His research interests include prefrontal function and functional brain imaging with a technique called BOLD fMRI, and he holds a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology from Carnegie Mellon University. He also writes extremely well, and from some of the e-mail we've shared, he holds a strong interest in literature as well as in psychology.

This book was written as an introduction to serious poker, as well as a reference that players can come back to again and again for information, analysis, explanation of technique, and even some discussion on poker's mathematical parameters. Serious Poker is divided into six sections, ranging from basic rules and cardroom etiquette to basic strategy, which covers the fundamental elements of winning poker strategy. The section entitled "Taking Poker Seriously" includes advice on how to think about poker, as well as a chapter on the critical concepts of expectation and variance. Kimberg also discusses poker math and computer simulations, and provides advice on a variety of topics (from how poker tournaments work to avoiding being cheated). A section on reference materials shows the reader where to find information on topics of particular interest.

The strength of Kimberg's book resides in a combination of his teaching technique and his ability to write in a way that makes sophisticated concepts easily understood. Reading this book is not the equivalent of taking a university course in statistics, but that's not its intent. Even so, readers should come away knowing why certain statistical concepts are important in evaluating and assessing one's poker play. And if one decides to make the effort, these calculations can be done by most anyone. More important than that, however, is this: Dan Kimberg's book can provide the serious poker player the resources necessary to monitor his or her performance, and the skills necessary to send those statistical measures moving in the right direction.

Next time we'll examine a book that promises to revolutionize tournament poker, as well as the latest release of poker's most popular software program.

Visit my web site at www.loukrieger.com. Poker for Dummies and my newest book, Gambling for Dummies, are available at major bookstores everywhere, and all of my books are available online at www.ConJelCo.com and at www.Amazon.com.