*Official STTF SnG Book Review Thread*

[Slim Pickens]

Part 2: Mid Blind Play

The section on re-stealing was full of really marginal examples presented as obvious black-and-white decisions. I went through one (Hand 2-32) with PokerStove and an ICM spreadsheet and watched the numbers jump all over the place as I changed people's ranges slightly. There were definitely sensible ranges that could justify either pushing or folding in the example I worked out and his advice was basically just "obvious push since there are a lot of chips in there." My feeling is that one could uncover some pretty glaring inconsistencies by assuming the same opponent description in one hand implies a certain range that then makes another hand not work when the same ranges are applied. In other words, I think he has similar players doing something like limp-calling with vastly different fractions of their ranges in order to make all the decisions he's advocating look clear. This is just my suspicion and I haven't tried to put hard numbers into more than one example yet. DevinLake went through two other hands and found pretty much the same thing.

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His postflop advice ranges from OK to disastrous, and most of the time he explains his reasoning for a play, it's wrong. A number of times he came up with the right play, it was for some very wrong reasons. I feel like I could make a solid living off the chips he wants people to waste bet/folding flops. Hand 2-4 is pretty bad.

I was disappointed the ICM section didn't go much of anywhere. I was hoping for some really clear examples of how obvious +cEV plays can be -$EV and how the payout structure affects this. Maybe it will show up later in the book, but it does surprise me that an author with such a solid background in mathematical theory wouldn't do much explaining of ICM from a theoretical standpoint, since in my experience most theoreticians can't shut up about various theories and how they think they can expand and improve them. Anyway, the stuff that is there is plenty good for the scope of the book.