In amongst the grand strategic concerns of poker, there are some small things you can do that will improve your game and keep you out of trouble. Little “good habits” that usually don’t make a difference, but every once in a while save your butt. These things take almost no effort once you form the habit, so adopting them is essentially a freeroll. No cost and potentially substantial gain.
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Bankroll management is a controversial topic, because the term means different things to different people. For a long time, the term has been used to describe fad systems that claim (incorrectly) to beat various house banked negative expectation games like craps. These methods, such as variations on the Martingale system, are of no real use for any purpose. The reason is simple - no amount of varying your bet size will change a negative expectation into a positive one. If the odds are against you, they will still be against you no matter how much or how little you bet.
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Unfortunately, like any activity where money changes hands, poker attracts its fair share of cheats. While today’s casino games are almost certainly cleaner than at any time in the past, players and the house need to understand cheating methods and the rules and dealing procedures were developed specifically to counteract them. Below I outline some common cheating methods, and describe how they can be counteracted. It’s important to understand that these rules exist for a reason, not just as tradition.
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Author: Doyle Brunson + numerous collaborators
Publisher: Cardoza
Part update to the original Supersystem and part add-on, Super System 2 follows the same structure as the previous book. Doyle recruited a groups of fellow high-stakes pros to write about various games while he tackled NL holdem. The games covered are NL holdem, limit holdem, Omaha 8, pot limit Omaha, Stud 8, and lowball triple draw. In addition, there is some general material provided by Mike Caro & others that replaces the general poker section of Super System 1. I didn’t find this additional material particularly valuable, but most of it wasn’t bad. The exception is the internet poker material, which is out of date and essentially a sales pitch for Doyle’s site. Annoying to say the least, but easily avoided. The real important stuff is the game-specific chapters
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Author: Dan Harrington & Bill Robertie
Publisher: 2+2
These two volumes round out the excellent Harrington on Holdem series. Like the previous volume, the cover no limit holdem tournament play exclusively. Volume 2 begins with a section on making moves and bluffing that belonged in Volume 1 but was moved for space constraints. Then it moves on to the heart of the series - Harrington’s system for handling rising blinds and antes and shorthanded tables. Those are the conditions found in the later stages of a tournament, and are the place where many players fall down.
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Author: Mason Malmuth
Publisher: 2+2
In a similar vein to his previous Poker Essays, Poker Essays Volume 2 is a collection of columns that Mason Malmuth wrote for Card Player magazine. Indeed, you might confuse them for the same columns found in the original Poker Essays, because many of the topics are the same and a small amount of the material is even directly reprinted from the previous work.
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All cash games played in reputable casinos, and any reputable cash game played elsewhere for that matter, follows a set of rules for putting money on the table and taking it off. These rules, collectively, are known as “table stakes”, are something every player needs to understand and every house needs to correctly implement.
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One thing I hope to accomplish at CardSharp is to provide a high quality set of poker rules for use both in casino settings and home games. This is a fairly daunting task because of the complexity of the rules of poker and the number of unique games that can be spread. Luckily, most aspects of poker rules are shared between many of the games. So to simplify the task of publishing rules, I’ve split out those common aspects. Every individual poker game is defined by its basic game structure, the betting structure, the hand ranking system used, and in some cases additional special rules. I’ll publish rules sets for each of these aspects, as well as how to combine them to form specific popular games, as time permits.
You’ll often hear poker players discussing “the nuts”, but what is it? The simple definition is that the nuts is the highest ranking hand that anyone can hold at a given time. The concept applies to all forms of poker, but is most meaningful in community card games like holdem and especially Omaha. It turns out the nuts are a more complicated subject than you might think at first glance.
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In this series I discuss topics that are well known within the gambling community, but that may be new to players who come to the game of poker from a non-gambling background.
Previously I’ve written on the topic of odds. I want to expand on some of the concepts presented there and introduce the important concepts “risk & win”, “expectation” and “price”.
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Author: Barry Greenstein
Publisher: Last Knight
There’s a lot of debate on the internet as to the value of this book. The Amazon reviews, for example, are less positive than for most poker books. However, I feel this book is more valuable than it initially appears for the audience that it targets, as I’ll explain shortly. Ace On The River contains an odd mix of material - a short memoir of Barry Greenstein’s playing career, discussion of a large number of poker topics outside the play of actual hands, and some example hands from a variety of games with commentary from Barry about why he played them the way he did. There is also substantial filler material - full color glossy pictures of various Vegas landmarks (without captions) and some tables in the back that appear correct, but not necessarily that useful. The book, if published in a more conventional format and with only the main text, would be about 150 pages long instead of 300+. The price of the book is also somewhat inflated by the expensive printing.
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Author: Mason Malmuth
Publisher: 2+2
Poker essays is a book that I like very much in concept. Mason’s introduction is to my mind spot on: the most important thing a serious player should do is think about the game. Poker Essays consists of a series of short to medium length essays by Malmuth that encourage the reader to do just that, namely think about areas of the game they may not have considered. These essays cover a broad range of topics and are connected in only the loosest fashion, so the reader is free to read in chunks or out of order.
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Sunk costs are a concept from economics that applies directly to poker. A “sunk” cost is a cost that has already been paid, and that you can’t get back. For example, if you ran a restaurant, your city licensing for the year is a sunk cost. Even if you stopped running the restaurant, you couldn’t get that money back.
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I’ve just returned from Vegas, and spent a lot of time in poker rooms. This resulted in some inevitable comparisons on how they were run, and the effect it had on the rooms. So here’s some (admittedly player-centric) advice on how to run a good room.
I believe that the tables a poker room installs have a lot more to do with the room’s success or failure than most people think. Poker tables are definitely not created equal in terms of the comfort they afford the players and dealers. While professional players (and of course the the dealers) are unlikely to quit a game simply because the table is uncomfortable, recreational players will. And if the recreational players stop playing, a game eventually dies. Here are my thoughts on what makes a good and bad table.
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Author: John Feeney
Publisher: 2+2
This book is pretty good. It may surprise a lot of readers, however, because despite the fact that Feeney is a degreed psychologist he takes an approach to poker psychology that more poker and less psychology. The book is a collection of essays by Feeney with only limited connections between them.
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This strategy “rule” is a key concept in NL holdem preflop play. It was originally published by Bob Ciaffone in Pot Limit & No Limit Poker. The rule is as follows:
Any time you’re considering calling a preflop bet on the basis of a combination of implied odds and position, the size of the bet relative to the effective stack size is the primary factor in whether or not you call. If it is less than 5% of the effective stacks, you have an easy call. If it’s more than 10%, you have an easy fold. Anything in between is a judgment call.
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On the way back from Vegas last Thursday I grabbed a copy of the Poker Player newspaper as airline reading. Much to my horror, it contained numerous obvious pieces of nonsense, as if the editors had gone out of their way to collect bottom rung poker writing.
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Author: Stewart Ruben & Bob Ciaffone
Publisher: self published
This is an interesting book. For a long time it was the second most recommended NL book after Supersystem. Of late, it’s fallen into obscurity somewhat, but I believe it’s still worth talking about.
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Full Tilt Poker has a commercial where their sponsored players declare “We play above the rail. We play the man, not just the cards.” It’s an admirable sentiment - there’s no question that poker played at the highest levels is a game of people rather than a game of cards. However, I think there’s something wrong with the idea when applied to online play, and I think an example hand will illustrate the point.
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Author: Larry W. Phillips (if you have website/contact info for Larry, please let me know)
Publisher Plume/Penguin
Ok, I’ll admit I was more than a little suspicious when I saw the title of this book. It certainly smacks of a quickly written attempt to cash in. So I was somewhat relieved to find that the author did in fact put substantial effort into trying to draw a prallel between Zen philosophy and poker play. However, I don’t believe he was particularly successful from the poker perspective. I have no idea what the zen guys think of this book. It would be unfair to the author to wholly criticize him for this, however, because he does point out that there are substantial limits to the parallel, but i feel that there are problems even in the areas he felt were harmonious.
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Here’s something to ponder: imagine that you are suddenly transformed into an incredibly skilled poker player. Specifically, you have a positive expectation at any fair game you could sit at. Let’s further assume you play in a poker town like Las Vegas, LA, or Atlantic City where you had numerous different games & stakes available to you. Now, what game would you play?
Here’s a concept from economics that should be near and dear to the heart of ever poker player - opportunity cost.
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I’ve just returned from Vegas, and spent a lot of time in poker rooms. This resulted in some inevitable comparisons on how they were run, and the effect it had on the rooms. So here’s some (admittedly player-centric) advice on how to run a good room.
For those not familiar, the “board” is the system a poker room uses to keep track of what games are running, assign people to games, maintain waiting lists and seat change lists, and decide if new games should be started. A well run board provides numerous benefits to both players and the room by:
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I just got back from Vegas last night after 5 profitable days of mid-stakes poker. I stayed at the MGM grand at a very reasonable price from travelocity. For the price, the room was excellent - clean, very comfortable bed, no evidence the room had ever been smoked in, and well cooled. The location was also reasonably good as the farthest north I intended to play was Caesar’s, although I did ended up walking up to the Mirage one night.
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In a previous post I discussed the use of rho structures to describe game strategies. Now it’s time to apply that theory to the practical subject of poker strategy. Unlike the previous post, I’m now going to describe strategies in a more general sense rather than the formal definition I provided earlier. This doesn’t change the basic fact that strategies form rho structures.
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Author: Alan Schoonmaker
Publisher: 2+2
This is a book likely to surprise a lot of readers. I wouldn’t say title is misleading per se, but the book might be better titled The Self-Psychology of Poker because the book’s entire approach is essentially self-help in nature.
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