Review: No-Limit Hold'em Hand by Hand by Neil Myers

[avatar77]

Hello All,

I just finished this book and as promised, I wanted to give you my review. All in all, I believe that this book is geared towards late beginners to intermediate play - there are some concepts here that are well beyond the scope of absolute beginners. The author has chosen to skip all the preambles about rules/blind structures of hold'em (and correctly so) and delves right into concepts regarding No-Limit that new NL players (coming from tournament and limit hold'em) should be aware of. The contents of this book is geared almost exclusively to the low buy in structure ($1/$2 and $2/$5) that is similar to the game that Angel Largay discusses.

Here is a summary of the book:
Chapter 1 - Cash Games vs. Tournaments - discussion on how the two forms are different
Chapter 2 - Limit vs. Nl Hold'em - discussion on how the two forms are different
Chapter 3 - New NL vs. Old NL Holdem - this is a brief chapter but a fairly good discussion on how the NL cardroom games have changed from unlimited buy in to maximum buy ins (to help keep the games going by not busting out the live ones too soon) and how the game evolved in the past few years. He also provides a discussion on why Doyle's SS advice is not applicable to the $1/2 game because Doyle plays in the big games where the stacks are very deep.
Chapter 4 - Tale of Two Games - discussion on short stack vs. deep stack play - author advocates short stack for beginner players and a lot of concepts discussed are already covered in Miller's book (Miller is referenced and given credit for his book in this section)
Chapter 5 - Starting hands and playing styles in NL Hold'em - brief discussion on the different types of players (as covered in HOH Vol. 1 - conservative, aggressive and super aggressive) and brief but concise discussion on what starting hands to play by position (very easy guidelines and much easier to follow than in Harker's Mastering NL Hold'em book)
The first 5 chapters do a pretty good job at summarizing some key concepts without belaboring very obvious ideas. Author makes a lot of references to Mason and David on how their work has influenced and improved the overall quality of limit players and how that impacted some early NL players.
Chapter 6 - The Problems - This is really the 'meat' of the book. This section contains about 70 pages of 30 hold'em problems. Problems cover concepts such as preflop hands, playing the flop and turn in different situations such as overcards, sets, playing from late position, blinds, calling/raising for value,bluffing, slowplaying, etc...
Each problem is posed in a quiz format similiar to the DB "How good is your .." books with answers and scores to follow. The major difference is that Neil provides a much more thorough discussion on each choice (i.e. check/call, raise (by how much) or fold) and evaluate on how good the play is (points range from -5 to +5).
Chapter 7 - conclusion and quiz scores (what your score meant).
Glossary

Going through the questions, most of answers would not be earth shattering to advanced players but I believe it is a worthwhile book to beginners to early intermediate players. The lessons just mean more because of the hand examples. A lot of the examples are situations that are common in a low limit NL game. Author also describes the situation quite well in the quizes (stack sizes of all players, opponents tendencies, position, etc..).

Overall, I think this would be an excellent prequel to Largay's book and would be a much easier book to tackle before delving into PNLH and NLTP. Definitely a better book than Harker's.

Overall, I think the advice is quite good and it really advocates a tight but aggressive strategy that would help most players stay out of trouble.

What this book does not cover are concepts on post flop play. There is some coverage on flop and turn but almost no discussion on the River.

I would like to see author write a follow up book that builds on this one and see more coverage on turn and river play.


Given the price includes both the book and DVD, it is pretty good value and would make a good gift for a beginning player or an intermediate player to help reinforce/plug some leaks.
DVD:
I have no viewed the DVD entirely yet but I presume it covers more or less the same concept as the book. I did skim the DVD enough to acknowledge that it is well above average in production quality - much better than Annie Duke's or Howard Lederer's DVD series and the Poker Insight Series but not as good as Phil Gordon's DVD.