[Zeldark]

I wasn't very wise though when I first decided to tango with poker. I didn't "need" or want a book, and figured "We all have the same chances of getting all the cards, how much would a book help?" So after blowing a few buy-ins I decided to take my professional friend's advice, and I bought SSHE. As implied, it was the first poker book I ever read, and I consider it the perfect book to start out with. It completely transformed my thinking of the game forever. Pot odds, outs, EV, tactics etc... These are things, important things that I hadn't really heard of before (I started playing for real money shortly after I started playing poker at all, so I wasn't very exposed). The book tells you the strengths and weaknesses of all the various families of hands, tells you how to assess the value of your hands. I got all excited from this awesome knowledge like a math teacher who gets overjoyed when he tells the class how a big nasty equation boils down to a 1 or 0 after teaching the class one new concept.

I don't think SSHE is too hard, and I think there was a lot of thought that went into it which just so happened to make the introductions properly inform you as to the nature of the game and gambling in general. It works excellently as a first book, and since you'll be using most of those tactics for a very very long time and some of the concepts for your entire career, I don't see any reason why anyone should put on "training wheels" before they read this book.

If poker is a swimming pool, SSHE lets you hop right into the shallow end and start swimming. If you tip toe down the stairs slowly, it's just going to take you that much longer to get comfortable with the water. Just hop on in, and if you apply what you learn correctly and consistently, someday you'll have the option to swim into the deep end too.