HOW TO DOMINATE $1 and $2 No-Limit Hold’Em
by Sam O’Connor
407pp
ISBN 978-1-4343-0289-2
Publisher: Author House 2007
I must start out by saying that it’s only a few weeks ago that I first started playing No-Limit. That was at the start of my summer holiday so I’ve had plenty of time to do some reading around the subject and this was one of the books I chose.
I’ve got mixed feelings about the book and FWIW thought I’d share them. Maybe some other noobs might find this review useful.
I’ll do my review in three parts: the good, the not so good, and general comments.
<u>The good</u>
There’s a lot of hand analysis, which I found interesting. And you’re taken through each hand a number of times, assuming that your position at the table is different each time. I found that useful for ramming home how important position is in no-limit.
There’s some discussion of different types of player, although I’m not sure there was anything in that part of the book that hasn’t been said many times before.
I thought the section on bluffing was interesting.
For live play, the section on tells would probably be useful too.
<u>The not so good</u>
I understand that the author essentially self-published the book and I can only commend him for getting his book out there, but I really do feel it suffers from the lack of a good editor.
Throughout the book are tales from the ‘old days’ of Vegas. I see the link with his basic premise that poker is a people game, and these tales are about the people who used to populate that city, and the first couple of stories were kind of interesting but after that I found they just got in the way and it felt like they were slowing down my poker-learning.
I really wasn’t sure that I needed the first sixty-or-so pages, all about Limit Hold’Em, or the repeated warning that I should read the introductory ‘discussion’, or the constant repetition, throughout the early part of the book, of a table showing the fifty best pairs of pocket cards.
My real concern with the book though is that the basic message – unless I’m missing something – is, you need to mix up your play and not just be tight-aggressive the whole time. Well, OK, that’s true, I’m sure, but I guess I was hoping for more from this book of more than 400 pages.
The other concern is the author’s advice about not sitting in games that are too loose. I’ve always been taught that those are the most profitable games of them all and against players who are going to limp in with ATo from UTG, just a basic understanding of position is going to be enough to take their money.
<u>General comments</u>
I’m sure this is a book I’ll read again, and maybe I’ll get more out of it on second reading, but at the moment I can’t help but compare it to two of the other books I read recently – No Limit Hold Em, Theory and Practice and Professional No-Limit Hold Em vol 1. Each of those is three-quarters the length of HOW TO DOMINATE but to this noob they both contain a lot more useful material.
If I’ve misrepresented anything in HOW TO DOMINATE then I apologise, and please, flame away, but I just wanted to share the thoughts of a noob in case it helps anybody else just starting out in No-Limit.