Book Reviews

by Lou Krieger | Published: May 03, 2005

The burgeoning interest in poker has yielded scads of new books on the subject. The question, "I'm a beginning player; which book should I read?" has been asked more times than I can remember. Although each player has his or her favorite book, my advice is to read them all. Picking up only one or two insights from a book should easily return the cost of one's investment. And if your goal is to better your poker game, mere improvement is not really enough. What matters most is improving at a faster rate than your opponents. Do so, and you'll catch and pass them; but if you don't, you'll find yourself either running in place or falling off the pace altogether. Here are two new books that I'm happy to recommend: One is from someone who is familiar to everyone in the poker world, and the other is by a newcomer. Each is well worth the read, and well worth the investment.

52 Tips for Texas Hold'em Poker, by Barry Shulman with Mark Gregorich: Back when I was taking journalism courses in college, a professor suggested that when stuck for an idea to fill a column, make a list and write about it. It was good advice then and it's good advice now. Barry Shulman, along with Mark Gregorich and a nice editing job by Michael Wiesenberg, has done just that, and done it very well.

Card Player Publisher Barry Shulman, a fine tournament player in his own right, and Mark Gregorich, the associate editor at Card Player, a TV poker commentator, and the supplier of some very valuable insights to Winning Omaha/8 Poker , the book Mark Tenner and I wrote, did a nice job of organizing and casting these 52 tips – one for each card in the deck – into an easily read, extremely well-organized, 154-page book that's long on tips, short on filler, and easily understood.

The book is organized, for the most part, around the play of a hand. Following a section explaining how to play hold'em that's targeted specifically at beginning players, and a comprehensive discussion of three universal hold'em concepts, tips are arranged in order of play: before the flop, on the flop, on the turn, on the river, more hold'em concepts you should know, and a bonus section describing the differences between limit and no-limit poker. The book also contains an odds chart and glossary.

Eight pages are devoted to the first three tips, which are universal hold'em concepts. They include a discussion of playing style – with the admonition that some ways of playing are profitable while others are not – as well as a discussion of position's importance in hold'em, and the significance of pot odds on decision-making.

Some of the tips in this book are aimed at beginners, while others are quite sophisticated in their application – as one would expect, coming from players with the reputations of Shulman and Gregorich – and still others are tips all experienced players should know but sometimes forget, or ignore entirely, in the heat of battle. "Raise or fold when you are first to enter a pot" is a good example of the latter, as is the suggestion that if no one has bet on the flop, you should bet if you think you have the best hand. Simple? Yes. Something many players ignore all too often? Absolutely. Another tip, designed to keep players out of trouble, is that you should stick to the raise-or-fold philosophy if someone has already raised and it has been folded around to you.

Tip 16 discusses reraising from the big blind against a late-position blind thief, while other tips discuss calling with good draws, playing medium-strength hands such as A-6 suited and 7-7, and playing when the pot is heads up. Shulman and Gregorich also provide guidelines for play against one opponent and for play in multiway pots, as well as tips for play when the flop contains a straight or flush draw. They also provide a checklist that outlines the kinds of things to observe when sitting out of a hand.

52 Tips concludes with a discussion of some of the differences between limit hold'em and its no-limit cousin. According to the authors, it is rarely correct to limp in if no one has yet entered a pot in limit hold'em, but because of the need to provide some cover for your very strong hands, and because no-limit hold'em is really a game of implied odds, there are many opportunities to see a flop cheaply with a somewhat weak hand that has the potential to turn into a very big hand.

I like 52 Tips a lot. It's well-written, well-edited, and extremely well-organized. Although it's an easy read, it's anything but simplistic. In fact, it's chock-full of the kinds of tips that will help a new player quickly raise his game, while serving as a refresher – almost as a set of flash cards or study aids – for anyone seeking a quick review of his game.

Real Poker Night: Taking Your Game to a New Level, by Henry Stephenson: Approximately 80 percent of 60 million poker-playing Americans engage solely in popularized variations of the game that bear little resemblance to authentic poker. "Kiddie poker," as U.S. Naval Academy graduate, avid poker player, and gifted writer Henry Stephenson calls it, endears itself to players through improvisational rules, multitudes of wild cards defined by rhymes, and small-change bets of metallic currency.

If you're one of the millions of poker devotees now playing kiddie poker, Henry Stephenson is the man to break you of that habit. Real Poker Night: Taking Your Home Game to a New Level is the first book I've seen that's designed to take serious poker and plop it right down in the lap of casual players. Henry hopes his book will do for poker what Starbuck's did for coffee: bring style and sophistication to something that many of us already do routinely.

Real Poker Night does not attempt to recruit readers into the ranks of professional gamblers or bully them into high-stakes games. Instead, it shows readers how – and more importantly, why – to play real low-stakes poker at their social home games.

The book gently explains the differences between kiddie cards and the real thing; provides advice on establishing real poker among groups of players who may be reluctant to try it; codifies the formal rules of the game; and uses a lucid, coherent, authoritative explanation of basic strategy and tactics to illuminate the magical complexity of pure poker. The end product is an enlightened poker player who loves the game and is pretty good at it, too.

Henry not only has a missionary's zeal about real poker, he's good at his craft, with a unique gift for breaking down complex issues into easily digested, bite-sized parts, and explaining them all in a way that's easily understood. That speeds learning along. Believe me, if you've always seen poker as sort of a gamble – a lark, as it were, to be played with the guys (and the gals, too) for small change – you owe it to yourself to give this book a read, and in the process, learn something about poker that you didn't know before. And that's a good thing. In poker, as in life, knowledge is power.

Stephenson's book is informative, and a good and easy read, too. Henry writes in a very lucid style that's always spot on. The author's metaphorical influences run deep and feature quotes from Clausewitz in the chapter on tactics, and the Gospel in the chapter on converting reluctant players. The technical sections are inviting and stimulating, too. They're braced by tables, figures, sidebars, and even mathematical derivations where appropriate, but they are never off-putting or too demanding of the reader.

If you want to improve your poker game beyond the bounds of kiddie poker, pick up this book and read it. I promise that you will enjoy it and learn from it, and will close the back cover knowing significantly more about the game of poker than you did before you picked it up – and all for the price of a few measly bets at the poker table.