Review: Online Tournament Strategy

[Foucault]

(It's my intention to start writing reviews of poker books for my website as I read them and eventually go back and review books I've read in the past as well. As long as there's interest, I'll post the reviews here as well. Feedback on content, format, etc. is greatly appreciated. For the Full Tilt book, I'm actually going to review individual chapters, since I don't see much sense in addressing the book as a whole. I hope that won't prove tedious.)

Richard Brodie's contribution to the Full Tilt Poker Strategy Guide: Tournament Edition is a solid introduction to playing online poker tournaments. As is appropriate for the format of a relatively short chapter on the subject, he focuses on broad strategic concepts such as when implied odds, blind stealing, continuation betting, and bet sizing.

I don't want to harp too much on what he's left out, because there are inevitably going to be omissions in so short a work, and he does do a good job of providing a strategic framework that should be very useful to beginners as they work out the details for themselves. However, given his space constraints, it is a mistake to attempt to address but Sit'n'Go and Multi-Table Tournaments in the same chapter.

The result is a badly lacking SNG section that condenses bubble play, which is the crucial element of a good player's edge in these tournaments, into a single, useless sentence: "This will take all of your poker experience to decide whether to play very aggressively or very carefully depending on what the other players are doing."

Even the MTT section is better on large-scale strategic thinking than on its more specific advice and examples. For example, the implied odds section correctly suggests playing hands like pairs and suited connectors when you can see a flop for about 5% of the effective stacks and emphasizes that position is more important with the connectors than with pairs. However,Richard also says that with 6-6 and 20 BB's, "I might limp under the gun and hope the pot is unraised and that I can get a set and win some money if someone makes top pair or two pair." The confluence of these fortunate circumstances will not occur often enough to make a limp UTG for 5% of your stack profitable with 66, especially since the hands that he admits he wants to be up against, such as AA and KK, are going to raise. He claims he can call one raise, but by that time, he has put too much money into the pot to play for set value alone.

Still, this chapter generally provides a solid introduction to online tournament play and could probably shave several months off of a beginning player's development

[SuperUberBob]

This was imo the worst chapter in the book.

You could find the same material and even better stuff just by reading the MTT and STT forums here.