Poker Authors Analyzed

Editor's note: Former Card Player Europe Bureau Chief Rolf Slotboom has read just about every poker book available, and in this series of columns, he analyzes one poker strategist at a time. He looks at the strengths and weaknesses of both the person and his products - whether it's books, DVDs, or just articles. Extensive reviews and ratings of individual books and DVDs can be found on Rolf's site, www.rolfslotboom.com.

One of the most controversial authors in the poker industry is yours truly. Very few poker authors have received as much criticism as I have. For the most part, this is simply because I tend to come up with nonstandard strategies, and I usually like to focus only on matters that are new, strange, or unconventional. And, as always, when analyzing things from a different perspective, this means that you are opening yourself up to a lot of criticism from those who are either conservative or skeptical.

But, focusing on nonstandard strategies also carries the risk of simply being wrong at times. For instance, seven years ago I had a limit hold'em quiz that recommended some extremely tight folds. Even under the game circumstances assumed for that quiz (10-handed game and less "crazy" play than is the standard nowadays), these recommendations were rather questionable. Because this quiz is still available online, some of the young guys who have just started playing and who don't even know how different the games were back then now use this quiz from the old days in order to show how terribly wrong I must be. Still, this doesn't mean that I am perfect in this respect, because a poker author should hold on to two important issues: His advice should always be spot on, and this advice should not be easy to misinterpret. And in regard to both of these issues, especially the early work, my writings could clearly use improvement.

Also, my first book, Hold'em on the Come: Limit Hold'em Strategy for Drawing Hands, is not flawless. Using a script written by a highly intelligent mathematician (Dew Mason), the book offers a line of thinking that is not 100 percent me. And even though the advice is interesting, renewing, and in-depth, there are a bit too many sloppy mistakes that should not have made it into our final printing. It was not the best of choices for a first book, because it focuses on limit hold'em (just when the no-limit boom had begun) and on just one specific issue (the play of drawing hands), and the analysis is sometimes quite hard to digest even for experienced players. This may make Hold'em on the Come a bit too difficult for inexperienced players, while for experienced players, it will be hard to change their line of thinking as drastically as we want them to. Despite all of this, I still think the book is a valuable addition to the poker literature canon. Yet, I do acknowledge that it has a few too many flaws that should have been spotted had I looked at the book in a more critical or analytical manner.

My second book is a 100 percent Rolf product. And without a doubt, Secrets of Professional Pot-Limit Omaha has had a tremendous impact on the way pot-limit Omaha is being played. By introducing a highly controversial short-stack system that is especially useful in online full-ring games, but that I have also been using for many years in brick-and-mortar casinos, I basically gave away for free some highly advanced, though easy-to-implement strategies. And this made some of the accomplished pros furious, because suddenly every table had a bunch of short-stacking or ratholing "Little Rolfs" - clearly cutting into the hourly rates of the good but too loose-aggressive pros. What I didn't like much was that (amid all of the praise and recognition that I got for this book) some of my critics tried to make it seem that Secrets of Professional Pot-Limit Omaha was just short-stacking - when in fact it had some of the best big-stack high-level thinking on pot-limit Omaha that has ever appeared in print. Anyway, for a large part because of the presence of this book, pot-limit Omaha full-ring games have mostly disappeared, and have been replaced by six-max games. In a bit more than a year from now, my publisher D&B will release Secrets of Professional Pot-Limit Omaha II, in which I will focus specifically on six-max games. I take my time here, quite simply because I want this second book to be as influential and as good as the first.

In the past two years, I have also started focusing more on tournament play - and also in my writings. Again using a few tactics that clearly go against common wisdom, and that on many occasions have been referred to as "donk plays," I am in the process of completing an overall game plan that differs significantly from the norm. I have written no books about tournament play just yet, for the simple reason that I have not yet finished experimenting, and, quite simply, because my current tournament strategy is not yet as flawless as, for instance, my pot-limit Omaha short-stack approach.

All in all, if you look at my works critically, you probably will notice the following things:

• There's rarely any kind of rehash of what other authors have written; I clearly have the courage and the desire to go against common wisdom.

• My books and columns often discuss new strategies that are good only for specific games, specific situations, or against specific types of players.

• This makes my advice easy to misinterpret, and if game circumstances change, the advice may instantly become "dated" or even wrong.

• My advice is aimed mostly at full-ring cash games (as opposed to shorthanded or tournament play).

• My writing style is not appreciated by all, and, despite a huge amount of self-critical analysis, is sometimes judged as "arrogant."

In addition to my books and many articles, I also have created a four-DVD set on limit and no-limit hold'em cash games, and on how to make a successful transfer to and from either one of them. Even though I am not the best of presenters, and am clearly not a native speaker when it comes to the English language, I am quite pleased with the quality of the information. However, the release of the Sklansky/Miller book No Limit Hold'em - Theory and Practice that followed a few months after my DVDs has made them somewhat less relevant, even more so because the DVDs assume full-ring games, not the six-max games that have become so popular.

Next issue: Mike Caro.