Professional No-Limit Hold 'em Volume 1 Review Thread

[SuperUberBob]

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Mmmmmm, chicken.

Put another way, instead of planning hands around commitment, you should plan them around stealing.

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Firstly, I think this is a really excellent and ground breaking book. That said, it should have been even better. It actually feels like half a book. Half a book that's far and away better than any other NL book out there, but still half a book.

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It's volume 1. Obviously, there will be a volume 2.

So in a sense, it is like half a book.

[crookdimwit]

I'm about a third of the way into the book, and so far, it's one of the best poker books I've read in a while...

No disrespect to Sklansky or Mason, but this trio of writers just do a much better job at writing about poker strategy in clear, readable language. And its refreshing to have a book that's focused on cash games, not donkaments...

It also has a lot of ideas I haven't seen laid out in most books I've read. There's a lot of interesting, new ground being covered that I just haven't seen explained in any of the poker books I've read. I'm already impressed with the first 100 or so page, and looking forward to the rest...

I do agree with tagWAG, though... why does the book have to look so awful? Maybe it bothers me since I work as a designer in my day job, but the layout is so clunky and outdated... I think it does a disservice to the quality of the content. I'd love to see a 2+2 book that didn't look like it had been printed directly from a Word document...

[Jeff76]

First trip report using SPR- won 150BBs single tabling.

Turns out, though, committing is a pretty easy decision when KK pushes into your AA all in PF [img]/images/graemlins/tongue.gif[/img]

However, SPR did allow me to maximize against a terrible player who liked to bluff "weakness". I think that was responsible for 40 of the remaining 50BBs that I didn't get from the AA vs KK. It was an interesting exercise since watching his patterns allowed me to accurately determine what my hand would be worth if I hit, and then get him to commit when I did. It also helped that he was playing a 40BB stack.

[Matt Flynn]

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Firstly, I think this is a really excellent and ground breaking book. That said, it should have been even better. It actually feels like half a book. Half a book that's far and away better than any other NL book out there, but still half a book.

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thank you tagWAG. yeah, it's def. half a book in some ways. but really it's like 1/8 a book. or like a graduate thesis: you can always improve it, but at some point it's time to publish and move on. plus it started as Small Stakes No-Limit, so there were many growing pains.


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Matt, I can't help feeling you have so much more to say but weren't allowed the space to say it.

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well Mason would've probably preferred 10K more words. so that's our fault. just want to say it's a fairly natural division point that we settled on. and we will flesh out more of SPR vs. stealing and so forth.


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I'm sure you have lots of great ideas on how to play 'chicken', how to plan hands for stealing, in fact how to plan all sorts of things unmentioned to manipulate opponents into awkward situations. It just seems that the book is a bit 'TPTK and suhweet news the flop hit me...' lop sided.

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SPR was a very hard topic to present clearly. you have the fifth and final major iteration. in the end we emphasized top pair b/c those are the hands that mess everyone up in 100bb online games. to give balanced treatment to small cards et al. you must flesh out some other stuff, and we didn't have the space to do it all justice.

[Matt Flynn]

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So this SPR thing - it sounds like it's something the authors thought up for the book rather than something they actually used as part of their daily professional play. Is that correct?

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have you played with Sunny? he's an SPR machine.

[Matt Flynn]

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The book lays [SPR] out (IMHO) very nicely and explains why the ratio is useful. I'd hazard a guess that the concept (though maybe not specifically expressed the way it is in the book) is probably used by all top players, even if for some they use intuition to gauge the relation of stack sizes to the pot rather than hard numbers. Certainly you cannot make solid NL decisions without considering risk vs. reward, including implied odds, and that is really the heart of what SPR is.

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absolutely - the strong players in msnl and hsnl play great. SPR formalizes a big chunk of what people have been doing intuitively. for example, it is hugely beneficial to call behind on the button and wreck havoc stealing in 100bb games, but not against a tight raiser with a 40bb stack. you can learn that in a few thousand hands if you pay attention and have a good memory, or you can just read SPR and find it completely obvious. the guys who play a lot also find it completely obvious, but most learned through pain rather than figuring out a formal framework for planning hands around implied odds and leveraging commitment.

[Jeff76]

Matt,
You guys have been great about answering questions thus far; is there an appropriate place to post questions about concepts in the book (since this is the review thread)?

Since this is the only place I know of to post about the book, I'll go ahead and fire away- but if there is a better place please let me know.

This is a situation I was unsure about in my last session: it is low stakes FR on poker stars, but we are playing short handed. FR at this level tends to be full of set miners and weak/tight play, so often playing short handed at tables that are just getting started can be quite profitable. Villain in the hand hasn't really gotten involved too much so no real reads- I therefore assume he is an average FR player for this level. He is probably capable of playing "chicken" on the flop, but not much beyond. He has 74BBs and I have a covering stack.

He min raises UTG (we are 5 handed) and it is folded to me in the BB- I have 77. I was trying to decide between calling (SPR of 20.5) or min-raising (SPR 8.75). Obviously calling is profitable here, but given that this is a short handed game and villain tends to fold too much, I felt like I could get more value adding some fold equity to my hand by putting in a raise. He likely has a top pair kind of hand, so an SPR of ~9 isn't really great for him, and it's not bad for me- especially if I have some fold equity to my hand. However, I AM OOP and he can easily float me on the flop (players at this level are at least capable of that), so I think I'll likely have to fire two barrels to effectively use my fold equity. Also, while an SPR of 9 isn't great for his hand, it could be worse, so I don't know how much of an advantage I'm gaining by forcing him to play at that SPR rather than 20 (at which both of our hands will play fine).

So I guess my question is, does min raising here to put my opponent enough of an uncomfortable spot that it is worth doing OOP, or should I just call and play "make a hand" poker?

[Splossy]

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Ciaffone's 5-10 rule example is that you have 98s on the button


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Is it? I've never read Ciaffone's book but the only time I've heard about the 5/10 rule was in respect to calling raises with a pocket pair being played for set value. I didn't realise it applied to suited connectors. How come the the same rule applies? The odds of flopping a set are different to flopping a flush or straight. Also it's arguably easier to stack someone with a set as it's hidden, compared to a flush.

I'm glad to hear that SPR is being used by the authors. I think we all want to read about how winning pros really play rather than how they think they ought to play.

[jeffnc]

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Just read the section on "Commitment Threshold."

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Which one :-)

[jeffnc]

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So this SPR thing - it sounds like it's something the authors thought up for the book rather than something they actually used as part of their daily professional play. Is that correct?

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I think it's just the opposite. It's already been "thought up" and used for a long time by good players, albeit probably just intuitively. What they've done is explain it, organize it, mathemitize it and put a name on it so that you can apply it to your play in a logical though not formulaic way.