[Ryanb9]

I found this review on amazon.com

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

If this is poker, I quit!, January 2, 2007
Reviewer: S. Williams (Phoenix, AZ) - See all my reviews

Here is a quote from the book, "This is the general recursion that describes the relationship between successive values of Rp. To find specific values, we can use the fact that we know that Rp converges on r as P goes to infinity (since this is an approximation of the no-fold game as shown in Example 16.4). Hence, we can choose an arbitrarily large value of n, seet it equal to square root of 2 - 1, and work backwards to the desired P. As it happens, this recursive relation converges quite rapidly. Of course, we can see that for the no-fold case, Rp simply is r for all thresholds, and this game simplifies to its no-fold analogue."

Of course! Duh, who didn't know that! If you enjoyed reading that, there are 375 more pages of this stuff. Oh, and in case you get bored with such elementary level stuff, there are sections throughout the book, where the authors have "marked off the start and end of some portions of the text so that our less mathematical readers can skip more complex derivitions." I can't even give you a quote from one of these sections because I don't have those keys on my keyboard...

I have been buying poker books for a while now and I finally found my limit. While I did slug my way through this book, I doubt it will make any difference in my game. I don't see how knowing that, quote, "skew instead sums the cubes of the distances, which cause the values to have sign," will improve my game. Whatever the heck that even means!

My advice, save your money and time, unless you want to put this book on your shelf and use it to intimidate your opponents. If one of them asks for advice you could give them this book, tell that it is a "must read" if they ever want to be a good poker player, and say that you LOVED IT! If they read it, they'll never look at you the same way again, I guarantee it. And they might just quit poker all-together. Like I said above, if THIS is poker, I might quit myself!