[maurile]

Although it's gotten mixed reviews here, I consider Ace on the River to be one of the best poker books I've read.

The first part of the book you will enjoy if you liked Aces and Kings or similar books. It's the story of Barry's poker career, which -- while interesting -- will not make you a better poker player.

Then there are several sections that do not concern poker strategy or tactics, but should make you a better poker player if you take them seriously. Barry describes certain characteristics that are helpful for a poker player -- stuff like not pounding your fists or yelling while watching a sporting event, not getting mad when someone cuts you off in traffic (treating it instead like an obstacle in a video game), not appreciating the value of a dollar, not being responsible enough to show up to a poker game on time when you're tired (go ahead and sleep in), not wanting to win every argument, etc.

I think this will read like "fluff" to a lot of players -- but I think there are some important gems in there if you take it seriously.

Then we get to the real meat of the book -- the hand analyses. This part is fantastic. He crams a number of important concepts into each hand, so you will want to read and reread them carefully. Moreover, Barry doesn't just tell you how you should play each hand and why, but he gives you a way to do your own analysis of the hands you play. This is the most important part of the book, IMO. There's no starting hand chart or whatever that's going to turn you into a great player. All great players have thought about the game on their own, combining their playing experience with their own hard thinking about the game away from the table. That might be obvious to a lot of people, but I've never thought about hands in exactly the way Barry suggests. For a given hand, given what you know about your opponent's cards, what would have been the perfect play? (Do not base this on which cards were subsequently dealt -- i.e., a flop of 7 2 2 does not make calling an all-in bet with 72o the perfect play against AA. If your opponent has AA, the perfect play is to fold 72o before the flop.) Next, given what you can deduce about your opponent's likely range of hands, what would have been the correct play. The perfect play against AA is to fold KK. But the correct play against {AA-TT, AK-AQ} may be to reraise with KK, even if your opponent happened to have AA that time.

For each hand that you play, go back and determine both the perfect play and the correct play.

I think this, more than anything else, encourages a tight-aggressive style. When you know what your opponent had, the perfect play in hindsight is almost always either to fold or raise. There are exceptions, but they do not come up as often as you'd think based on how frequently many players call. When you think about how you should have played that hand, given what your opponent had, you will often conclude, "I should have raised the turn." (Or whatever.) Then, when you think about the range of hands your opponent was likely to have in that situation, again you will probably think "Against that range, I should have raised the turn." (Or folded, or whatever.) But against a given range, it will normally be correct to raise against some hands in that range and to fold against other hands in that range -- and a lot of people end up calling as a compromise. But compromising is wrong! Do something that has a chance of being correct. As you gain more experience and get better at putting people on a narrower and more accurate range of hands, you will make better decisions more often. But get out of the habit of compromising right now.

Using hindsight to determine the perfect play (against your opponent's actual hand) and then, more importantly, the correct play (against your opponent's likely range of hands) will get you in the habit of trying to make the correct play on future hands -- not the compromise play.

As I said, maybe this is obvious to many people, but I've never thought about it in those terms before, and I find it helpful.

Another thing that Barry emphasizes is that there's often no right or wrong play based on the cards. The right or wrong play is based on situations, and the cards are only a small part of that. Barry lists many factors that should influence your decisions -- too many to go through them all at the table, but he says that with experience you will instinctively know which factors are important in a particular situation and which are not, allowing you to focus on the important ones. (I think this is sort of like chess. The best players don't necessarily consider a wider range of moves on a particular level, but think several levels deeper by knowing which possible moves to focus on at each level. My terminology is off because I'm not a chess player, but hopefully you know what I mean.)

So in summary, the book does not give you a formula or recipe for play. There are no starting hand charts, no list of tactics and when to apply them, etc. There are other books for that. But it does give you direction in how to think about the game on your own.

A $1/$2 player trying to move up to $3/$6 might need a starting hand chart and a description of when to semi-bluff, when to do a free card play, when to check-raise, etc. Barry's book doesn't offer these things.

But a mid- or high-limit player looking to improve his game will want to think about the game more effectively on his own, to make better use of his own playing experience, and to start to think about the game in terms of situations instead of cards. As another player once put it, poker is such a dynamic and complex game, you have to learn how to learn how to learn from your own experiences. Barry's book is the best I've seen so far on that score.