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Review: Winning in Tough Hold \'em Games by Stox/Zobags

This is a repost that originally went up Sunday and apparently got lost in the re-migration back to the original forum format...

Cliff Notes: Winning in Tough Hold ‘em Games is very well done and will prove indispensable reading to limit hold ‘em players who play shorthanded and/or high stakes games. WTHEG describes the most modern incarnation of hold ‘em, primarily shorthanded internet hold ‘em better than any book currently on the market. While WTHEG is written in a recognizable 2+2 form, the content and style of play recommended is very much original. This is a book that needed to be written.

For some time there has been a significant gap in the vintage of limit hold ‘em literature. Titles that may have served a player well in 1985 became less optimal in 2003 as new, inexperienced players were drawn to the game. Four year later those new inexperienced players generally either got very good, went broke or switched games. What’s left is not a game where players are “literally giving their money away” as Miller and Sklansky once described but games in which a player can assume the competition is quite tough and skilled.

This book fills the gap and addresses the evolution of the game from that of primarily full ring to games that are shorthanded or play in a style not dissimilar to shorthanded games. While there are hands and lessons drawn from full ring games, most of the focus is on shorthanded play, and specifically, BSB and/or blind steal type situations

A major focus of the book is hand ranges and equity. The conclusions drawn are heavily indebted to the playing environment created by tools such as Poker Tracker and PokerStove (both of which are credited in the book). As such the authors present less a mathematical approach but a purely statistical one. Hand reading is assigned to ranges and correct play is a response to those ranges. There are none of the equations that one would find in “NLHET&P” or “Mathematics of Poker”.

A large portion of the book’s early pages is devoted to Poker Tracker type data from winning players and the advice derived is then fit into an equity model. The authors offer both hand ranges to steal and to defend and make suggestions as to the adjustments to be made against certain player profiles.

For players (like myself) who are primarily rooted in full ring play and considers themselves to play a tight and aggressive style, the opening and defending ranges may be much wider than that derived from cobbling advice from the currently available (full ring) oriented literature.

A major strength of the book is the “Hands with Stox” section where the author covers the play of 55 different hands. The author(s)(?) choose hand that have been played well and those that have been played poorly. There’s no attempt to hide the times their teeth got kicked in. There is a good amount of blunt honesty and the exploration of alterative lines. There are hands where the authors make some very questionable plays and some very sublime moves. The authors’ willingness to keep the hands in very gray areas is highly instructive and should provide for some outstanding discussion.

The authors leave very few loose strands. They take stands on their lines while allowing for the possibility of other ways to play a hand. They do a good job of anticipating a reader’s thoughts. The book is written in a style where the authors give the reader a lot of credit for understanding concepts. Stox and Zobags treat the reader like a peer.

The authors bring several concepts into the body of limit hold’ em literature. Weighted implied odds and implied fold equity might be concepts that are known to 2+2 strategy forum readers. The authors put the concepts into context for the rest of the poker playing world. The book covers limp the arcane art of limp rereaising in full ring, giving examples when and when not to do it with hands like 88, QJs or AA.

It is both refreshing and sobering to see the actual win rates of the authors. Stox winrate is described as .82BB/100 over his last 300,000 hands. The other databases from which numbers are derived feature even more modest success. This book is devoted to recognizing and exploiting very thin edges while passing on very thin deficits. In order to understand that importance it is helpful to recognize that even expert, even world class players may not be beating tough games for 1BB/100. The implication for the degree of profit to be made in limit hold ‘em is fairly grim. The playing styles and action described is of the sort to put a traditional ABC type TAG to the test constantly. The content would suggest that a non-statistically oriented player will have a very difficult time in today’s tougher games. The authors indirectly suggest that a player not well steeped in PT, HUDs or PokerStove will be at a significant quantitative disadvantage to opponents with these tools.

In terms of criticisms, the authors don’t do a good job of addressing in a quantifiable way what they consider to be loose, passive, tight or aggressive play until profiles are mentioned almost in an offhanded way starting on page 309. A reader may want to go right to page 309-310 to get a sense of terminology before starting the book. As the book is heavily dependent on PT type profiles and descriptions and the advice is built on very fine shadings of range, a more comprehensive discussion of player profiles at an early stage of the book may have made for richer content. The use of PT profile/stereotypes could have been incorporated for clarity of description.

Also, there’s a certain lack of definition regarding playing environments during the course of the book. There’s not much of an attempt to clearly delineate between, live, online, full ring or six max specific conditions. This isn’t necessarily a criticism as much as a question as to how much a player can reliably overlay range assumptions in these very different conditions. The reader is left to do a certain degree of playing condition extrapolation.

Certain topics/chapters like “Making thin Value Bets” and “Knowing when Ace High is No Good” each get less than a page and a half of attention. To be fair, these lessons are reinforced and reexamined with the hand examples and quizzes, but a greater fleshing out of the subject may have been merited.

There’s also the occasional erratum that wrecks a lesson. The lesson in Hand 25 becomes useless because the authors (or editors) lost track of the suitedness of the board.

The writing in the book is generally quite good. It is miles ahead of the era of poker lit. which produced TOP or HEFAP but it still isn’t up to the standards of the HOH series. There are spots where the reader may have to reread the occasional paragraph or section because the writing is not entirely clear.

For purposes of background and the way it may color this review, my shorthanded experience is somewhat limited. I’m probably in the neighborhood of 10,000 hands and am a faint loser in these games. I prefer full ring and wind up playing shorthanded for purposes of game preservation or game selection. 95+% of my shorthanded play has been at limits between 5/10 and 50/100. I regularly play full ring in limits from 5/10 to 30/60, both online and live. I have not been living under a rock and know who Stox and Zobags are but I’m not a member of their site and have spent almost no time even lurking there. Bear in mind also, that I’ve had this book for about 24 hours so there are things I’ve undoubtedly missed. For instance, I did not pore over the PT charts at the beginning of the book (but have done so with my own numbers).

It has been said that this is not a book for beginners and that is true to a degree. The authors assume that the reader has a great deal of experience and some playing exposure to these tough games. That being said, a beginning player can still get a lot out of this book. There are starting hand outlines and a step by step discussion of play. A beginner, or a player who plays at lower stakes will challenged by the material but not overwhelmed.

Lastly, a book like this makes a player very thankful for the strategy forums at this site. While Stox and Zobags present a very organized, well considered collection of comprehensive thoughts, and while their content can’t be found in other books, there are plenty of regulars in the strat forums who provide the same level of quality instruction for free on a daily basis.

If you play limit hold ‘em you should read this book. It may not be a revelation to the best of the higher stakes and shorthanded player base, but the majority of readers will find much in it that will help their games. Most importantly this book is the first to address the very different nature of current limit hold ‘em games and the authors have made a very worthy addition to the body of poker knowledge.