[Wilco23]

Admittedly, I'm probably an intermediate casual player at best. I've really enjoyed the book. I played live this weekend at a nearby casino and found that I could focus on the hand reading and SPR initially, but it becomes more and more difficult as the night runs on due to the speed of play, the loose/horrible players in the game, etc. I play $1-2NL.

I have a question for Matt and Sunny. It seems like the book is mainly about commitment, which clearly is the crucial consideration given that an all-in move puts one's stack in jeopardy at any moment. I struggle more at the outset with hand reading. While I understand the the REM process, it seems like whenever I play live the pace moves too fast or there just are terrible players that are hard to read. Then I have to resort to playing tight and hoping to get paid off whenever I'm fortunate enough to have a big hand. I've read the "range" portion of the REM process several times. I haven't played enough to get hand reading down yet since I don't play online and haven't played thousands of hands as a result. It seems like I should be starting with questions like: who's in the pot, what position are they in, what did they do (call/raise), are they tight/loose/aggressive/passive, what is their stack size? It's the part of actually thinking, well this person could have AA-TT, non-paired big cards, suited connectors, etc., that I struggle with. So, I guess I'm wondering if there will be more of that sort of analysis. I know there is a lot of it in the book, but it seems secondary to me in that the SPR is the crux of our play, and SPR assumes we have a sound REM basis for our decisions. I'm sure the answer is probably "play more hands". That's what I'm thinking at this point.

Am I better off getting better at hand reading first before I begin seriously studying and applying the SPR and commitment concepts? Would it benefit me more to focus on hand reading and SPR together at the outset, knowing that I'm not the best hand reader, or should I really focus on hand reading and get comfortable with it first?

I've really enjoyed this book and found that my struggle is more with keeping track of the math, not understanding the rationale behind it. I had asked Matt in another thread about what concepts he was saying hadn't been in print before, and upon opening this book, I was smacked in the face with several of them. Maybe I'm to the point where my game is starting to click a little bit for me, but I really think this is going to be my favorite of all the NL books I've read, including HOH1 and HOH2 (albeit for tourneys, those are great, informative books and simple to read). While the math is complicated in PNL, the reading is not. Contrasted to NLT&P, which I felt read like a statistics book at times, I don't get off point with this book.

Thanks for any comments, and thanks for writing a great book. I'm looking forward to another volume or six.