CardSharp

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. Read the rest of this entry »

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. Read the rest of this entry »

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. Read the rest of this entry »

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. Read the rest of this entry »

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”. Read the rest of this entry »

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. Read the rest of this entry »

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. Read the rest of this entry »

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. Read the rest of this entry »

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. Read the rest of this entry »

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. Read the rest of this entry »

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. Read the rest of this entry »

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. Read the rest of this entry »

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. Read the rest of this entry »

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. Read the rest of this entry »

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. Read the rest of this entry »

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?

Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s a concept from economics that should be near and dear to the heart of ever poker player – opportunity cost. Read the rest of this entry »

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: Read the rest of this entry »

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. Read the rest of this entry »

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. Read the rest of this entry »

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. Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Imagine a race between two horses. Horse A is a remarkably reliable horse, and will always complete the race in essentially the same time. Horse B, on the other hand, is remarkably inconsistent. Sometimes it runs a very fast race, far faster than A, and sometimes it runs a very slow race, far slower than A. Which behavior horse B exhibits is random, and P(fast race) is 0.3 or the odds are 7:3 against horse B running a fast race. Read the rest of this entry »

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.

A freeroll is a gambling situation in which you cannot lose money, but have a possibility of winning money. As you might imagine, such situations are usually quite attractive, and they come up in gambling and poker surprisingly frequently. Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Gamblers have a funny way of talking about how likely it is that something will occur. Instead of citing the percentage chance that some event will occur, they cite the “odds” that it will occur. Odds notation works as follows: the odds that something will happen is the ratio between how many times it will happen and how many times it won’t. The bigger side of the ratio is always stated first, so you have to specify whether the odds are “in favor of” or “against” the event occurring. For example, if you have a race with 6 horses, and each is equally likely to win the race, then you could say the odds are 5:1 against horse #3 winning the race. On the other hand, if you had a race with 6 horses, and 4 of them were black, and all had an equal chance of winning, you could say the odds were 4:2 in favor of a black horse winning.

Read the rest of this entry »

So, Wil Wheaton’s hanging up his poker spurs. Not just getting canned from pokerstars (which was inevitable), but giving up poker. And he explains pretty clearly why: Read the rest of this entry »

Author: Bob Ciaffone

Publisher: Self Published

Authors of poker manuals face a bit of a conundrum. The readers are presumably reading poker books because their poker game is not what it should be. In other words, the readers have some misconceptions about the game that need to be fixed. This makes it very hard to write an advanced poker book, because to do so you have to assume your readers already know basic material (or else write a monster book that contains everything) yet you KNOW that the readers are confused on some points. Perhaps parts of the basic material you’re assuming they know. Read the rest of this entry »

Authors: David Sklansky & Mason Malmuth

Publisher: 2+2

Hold’em Poker for Advanced Players has been the single most recommended book for mid-stakes limit holdem play since it came out. It has substantial strengths and weaknesses, and the prospective buyer needs to take these into account before deciding whether to purchase it. Read the rest of this entry »

Author: Bill Chen & Jerrod Ankenman

Publisher: Conjelco

This book attempts a fundamental methodological shift in the way scholarly players approach the game of poker.
Read the rest of this entry »

Author: Mark Blade

Publisher: Brownfield Publishing

This is the best starting point in the poker literature for the aspiring poker pro. I don’t mean amateur. I mean aspiring pro. It lays out, in very direct fashion, how to go about getting a long lasting, stable poker career. This book could be considered a much-needed compilation and reorganization of the career related information from various 2+2 and Caro books plus additional insights from the author’s career. While much of the information could be found elsewhere, you would have to pay 10x the cover price to get it in pieces. So this book provides a very reasonable service. Read the rest of this entry »

Author: Doyle Brunson

Publisher: Cardoza

This book is a collection of Doyle’s writings about life on the road playing poker, written over a quarter century ago. They have an autobiographical bent, but this is not a memoir. The stories are entertaining and well written (not in the bizarre style of Super System, I smell ghost writer…) and I got some entertainment value out of them solely as stories. Read the rest of this entry »

Author: Arnold Snyder (beware this site contains quite a bit of misinformation)

Publisher: Cardoza

Sadly this book contains a lot of misinformation in terms of the poker strategies presented. Read the rest of this entry »

Author: Dan Harrington & Bill Robertie

Publisher: 2+2

This book focuses on the fundamentals of playing no limit holdem in a tournament setting (although much of the information is also applicable to cash games). The book covers starting hand selection & various topics in postflop play at a full table. It doesn’t assume the reader has a particularly deep poker background. Those who have more experience with the game may find the book a little “beginnerish” but it sets a solid foundation for the more advanced material in the next two volumes. Read the rest of this entry »

Author: Mike Caro

Publisher: Cardoza

This book has been the definitive work on poker tells (physical and vocal mannerisms that indicate the strength of a player’s hand) since in came out. It catalogs numerous tells, provides pictures of players exhibiting the tell, and discusses strategies to exploit a given tell when it appears. In addition, Caro develops a more general theory of tells, explaining why players exhibit tells and classifying them into categories. Read the rest of this entry »

Author: Doyle Brunson + numerous collaborators

Publisher: Cardoza

Doyle Brunson and a group of fellow high limit pros wrote “Super/System” in the late 70’s after Doyle won his second world series of poker main event title. The book contains general poker advice from Doyle followed by specific strategies for all the games commonly played a the time. It was a complete revelation when it came out – far and away the best poker book ever published up to that point on each of those games. For years it retained its status as the “bible” for casino poker play. Read the rest of this entry »

If you haven’t read up on what a rho is, first familiarize yourself here.

Now, I said that I would eventually explain what that experiment has to do with poker, but that’s still one post away. Before I get to that I need to discuss rhos in the context of game play in general, namely the types of strategies that a player can adopt when playing a game. Read the rest of this entry »

Got nothing better to do? Here’s something to keep you entertained. I promise this will get to the subject of poker strategy in a future post, but for now I’m hoping your love of mathematics will keep you riveted. This works OK as a thought experiment, but if you’ve got time on your hands I suggest you actually try it. Here we go! Read the rest of this entry »

OK, here’s a top shelf piece of nonsense: poker numerology. Namely, the believe that meaningful patterns appears in poker shuffles. There’s a classic example here. Read the rest of this entry »

Author: David Sklansky & Ed Miller

Publisher: 2 + 2

There aren’t a lot of books written about cash game no limit holdem. For a long time, the Supersystem chapter has been the definitive source of information on the subject. This book is the first meaningful publication on the topic in several years. However, it’s a real mixed bag. Read the rest of this entry »

Author: David Sklansky

Publisher: 2+2 Publishing

The Theory of Poker is far and away the best of the 2+2 poker books, and indeed is likely the best poker book ever published. Instead of providing instruction on a particular poker game, it explains the mathematics and logic behind all forms of poker. It teaches you how to think about poker, so that when you encounter a new situation you haven’t previously studied, you can reason out the right play on the spot. It’s the “why” to every other book’s “how”. Read the rest of this entry »