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

[Michael Davis]

adanthar,

I don't think that "error" is minor. In fact, the river play by stox is very debatable and very close as to whether he should bet out on the river or not, whereas it is fairly obvious to check the river against a slightly overaggro opponent who will bluff the fourth diamond and potentially valuebet worse hands than AK. The entire description of the hand afterwards is problematic until the reader figures out that the board is not supposed to contain four diamonds. And that Stox is advocating a checkcall on this river is much, much more important (and controversial) than if the fourth diamond hits, thus it is possible that some dullard readers may not be thinking appropriately when analyzing this hand.

All things considered, this book is extremely good and extremely valuable. The one thing I would caution is to make sure much of the advice applies in your games. Specifically, if you are playing a lot of live midlimits, while much of this advice is going to be valuable playing against maybe 2-3 players at your table, many of your opponents will be considerably tighter than the opponents stox plays against. Especially consider your opponents preflop raising standards and how they relate to defending something like A3s against an UTG raise. Or pay attention to your opponents who don't steal from late position without a premium hand. Also, you should pay special attention to defending your blind when a bad player coldcalls in the small blind.

These situations are covered by the book, and the authors very clearly state their target audience. Just be very careful to apply the information in the right spots, and that may mean for those of you playing in soft live games, the types of blind defense situations described in the book only occur 5 or so times per session.

I don't think Stox would disagree with anything I wrote, and I think the book explains that, so perhaps I am an unnecessary Cassandra.

-Michael