The Illustrated Guide to No-Limit Hold'em mini review

[jeffraider]

His solution is absolutely beyond awful.

[gusmahler]

OH. MY. GOD.

I finally took a longer look at this book in the bookstore today. It is hilariously bad. Dang, maybe I should have bought it just for the laughs. Anyway, here's some things he says:

* Blinds 25-50. PF, you make a bet of 400 and get one caller. On the flop, you check, Villain bets 300. Author wonders why he made such a "large" bet. Yep. T300 into an T800 is "large". He makes the same comment on the turn, when villain bets T400 into the T1400 pot, wondering why Villain didn't bet just 50.

* Blind 100-200. You bet T1000 before the flop and get one caller. On the flop, you get quads. He recommends you bet T100!

* Same hand, on the river. There's three to a royal on the board. Author actually goes through the reasoning as to why you should bet and seems genuinely worried about the royal.

* He loves min bets and min raises.

* There were at least a half dozen more sample hands where you end up with a full house or better. Do people really need to learn how to play monsters?

[gusmahler]

Just remembered another hand (may have been the same quad hand, but maybe not). 12 players left. Top 10 win entry to another tourney. You make a bet and three short stacks call you. On the flop, you're the biggest stack left and you get quads. On the turn, the question posed is if you should fold and let the other 3 duke it out. Huh? Does anyone really think like that? I guess the good news is that he recommended that you stay in the pot with your quads and try to eliminate the other 3 players, so you win the entry.

[udbrky]

I'd hope so. I think if you fold quads in almost 99.999999% of all possible situations, you automaticaly lose your poker license and have a couple parts of your body chopped off, cause they're already dead.

[gusmahler]

My library now has a copy of the book, so I borrowed it.

It suffers from a lot of problems. Not least of which being that a lot of the problems deal with you getting monsters. But the biggest problem is his lack of understanding of pot odds.

And that is strange. There is an entire chapter (though it is only 3-4 pages) dealing with pot odds and how to calculate them. Then he has a problem where he specifically says that you have the pot odds to call a bet on the turn (you're on a straight or flush draw), but you wouldn't have the odds if villain bet more. But repeatedly, he has you making min bets instead of forcing the Villain to have bad pot odds by betting more.

The book is aimed at beginners (it says it is for beginners and experts, but not expert will ever buy this book). If the problem of beginners is that they are too loose, maybe this book will cure them of that. But I see weak-tight more often than I see too loose (I mainly play SnGs) and they will be harmed greatly by this book.

[BigBuffet]

I tend to agree with Matt and Niediam.

In the live MTT's I play in Minnesota and Vegas (which are rated high based on the PTF tourny ranking formula, if that matters to anyone...) when there are two tables left, it's off to the races PF--literally.

If you have a good hand (by your definition) you will probably be heads up or 3 handed tops, somehow. You can get there by pushing or by getting raised.

So if you have a small or medium stack, you just push or fold. If you have a big stack and raise, a small stack will call you trying to double up.

With the blinds increasing and stack sizes fluctuating rapidly, there's no 'playing poker' with two tables. And sometimes, a 'first in vigorish' push might win the blinds and antes if you have a good table image, but don't count on it.