Books on Poker

A review of The Complete Book of Hold'em Poker

2010-02-13T14:49:00.000-08:00

An opinion of my book from a comment in a thread on Brother Ed's blog,

cyberpigeon
@ Sun May 31, 2009 05:17:13 PM
10

Sorry, I have no sympathy for any 2+2 posters who complain about being censored. They have been practicing censorship for years and you participated until the censorship hit close to you.

I will never post on their forums, and what they did to Gary Carson is a shame. Now you can buy Gary’s fantastic Texas Holdem book on Amazon for 75 cents (2+2 practically owns the amazon poker book reviews) – shows how powerful 2+2 are…

I think he was tallking about used copies. New copies of The Complete Book Of Hold 'Em Poker: A Comprehensive Guide to Playing and Winning
go for a little more.

Poker Wizards

2010-02-13T14:39:00.001-08:00

Poker Wizards
Ebook By Warwick Dunnett
Published By HTMPublishing
Rating: Not yet rated.
Published: Nov. 15, 2009
Category: Non-Fiction » Entertainment » Gambling
Words: 86499 (approximate)
Language: English

Ebook Description
In the tradition of Super System, an exclusive collection of champions and superstars have been brought together to share their strategies, insights, and tactics for winning big money at poker, specifically no-limit hold’em tournaments. This is priceless advice from players who individually have each made millions of dollars in tournaments, and collectively, have won more than 20 WSOP bracelets.

Available Ebook reading formats:

Online Reading (HTML)
Online Reading (JavaScript)
Epub (open industry format, Stanza reader)
LRF (for Sony Reader)

An old bestseller list

2008-12-22T22:07:00.000-08:00

I'd almost forgotten about this old blog that I abandoned a few years ago (2003). I had used a free service that grabbed Amazon rankings for me and emailed them to me, and I wrote a basic program to use those rankings to estimate a sales history and generate a best seller list. Then the service started charging so I gave it up.

Maybe someday I'll dig it back up and write my own spider to get the Amazon rankings once a week or something. Some Day.

Calculated Bets

2008-12-03T11:17:00.000-08:00

A review is here.

The Drunkard's Walk

2008-12-02T08:44:00.000-08:00

I noticed this book the other day on a list of notable books of 2008. Then today it popped up on Amazon's "recommended for you" list. I guess I'm going to have to read it.

One of the things I talk about a lot in my own writing is the silly idea that there's some kind of conflict between skill and luck in poker. I think that's a nonsense thought, that skill is simply the management of luck, they aren't two forces in conflict. From what the reviews suggest about this book it looks like a strong theme of the book is related to that -- luck is part of life, you don't eliminate it, you work with it.

Here's one of those reader reviews from the Amazon site.

This smart book will make you think. Academic yet easy to read, it explores how random events shape the world and how human intuition fights that fact. I found this point fascinating. It never occurred to me that our brains naturally want to see patterns and order, and life doesn't necessarily work like that.

It's comforting to think of an orderly world, with everything in its place, running according to plan. It dovetails into our yearning for meaning and control, and the need to feel that we are important. The idea of randomness is frightening. If the world is shaped without conscious decision, it's a pretty chilly prospect.

Author Leonard Mlodinow examines the importance of randomness in diverse situations, including Las Vegas roulette tables, "Let's Make a Deal," the career of Bruce Willis, and the Warsaw ghetto after Hitler invaded Poland. The author does a good job explaining how chance and luck are vital factors in how things turn out.

The cover has a nice touch. On the dust jacket, several die-cut holes reveal letters on the hardback underneath. The letters are the R and D in "Drunkard's," the A in "Walk," the N in "Randomness," the O in "Our" and the M in Mlodinow. These letters are connected by a thin red line. They spell out "RANDOM."

Here's the chapter list:

1. Peering through the Eyepiece of Randomness
2. The Laws of Truths and Half-Truths
3. Finding Your Way Through a Space of Possibilities
4. Tracking the Pathways to Success
5. The Dueling Laws of Large and Small Numbers
6. False Positives and Positive Fallacies
7. Measurement and the Law of Errors
8. The Order in Chaos
9. Illusions of Patterns and Patterns of Illusion
10. The Drunkard's Walk

The Poker Tournament Formula II

2008-12-01T13:37:00.000-08:00

The Poker Tournament Formula II: Advanced Strategies

This is a sequel to the book I mentioned yesterday.

The Poker Tournament Formula

2008-11-30T13:21:00.000-08:00

The Poker Tournament Formula, by Arnold Snyder

I havn't read this book yet but I'm going to have to get it and read it. The reviews are uniformly good, even the bad reviews don't really have anything bad to say about the book.

Every Hand Revealed

2008-05-11T08:08:00.000-07:00

A PokerNews review by Martin Harris.

Randomness

2007-08-17T13:06:00.000-07:00

A Mathematical Association of America review by Randall J. Swift.

Secrets the pros won't tell you

2007-08-06T11:36:00.000-07:00

Secrets the Pros Won't Tell You About Winning at Hold'em Poker: About Winning Hold'em Poker, by Lou Krieger and Sheree Bykofsky

Some people don't think much of it.

Recommended Poker Book List for Limit Hold em Players

2007-08-04T10:08:00.000-07:00

Start with these two books

Winning Low-Limit Hold'em by Lee Jones

The Complete Book Of Hold 'Em Poker: A Comprehensive Guide to Playing and Winning, by Gary Carson (comments and reviews)

The Jones book gives a solid introduction to the typical hold em games. The Carson book (mine) steps that up a notch and gives extensive coverage of how to deal with games that aren't so typical.

Once you've read these two books a couple of times I suggest a copy of

The Theory of Poker, by David Sklansky

Sklansky doesn't really add much to what you'll find in the Jones and Carson books, but it's a concise summary of the general poker tools you need to keep in your arsenal at all times. In fact, until you've been playing a few years I'd suggest going back through this Sklansky book every 6 months or so.

Then a couple of books that are loaded with more specific, tough hold 'em situations are

Inside the Poker Mind: Essays on Hold 'em and General Poker Concepts, by John Feeney

Middle Limit Holdem Poker, by Bob Ciaffone and Jim Brier.

Inside the Poker Mind

2007-08-04T10:06:00.002-07:00

Middle Limit Hold em Poker

2007-08-04T10:06:00.001-07:00

Winning Low Limit Hold em

2007-08-04T09:52:00.001-07:00

Complete Book of Casino Poker

2007-08-04T08:28:00.001-07:00

Complete Book of Hold em Poker

2007-08-04T06:59:00.000-07:00

Harrington on hold em V3

2007-08-04T06:54:00.001-07:00

A list of poker books

2007-08-04T06:34:00.000-07:00

The Complete Book Of Hold 'Em Poker: A Comprehensive Guide to Playing and Winning, by Gary Carson (comments and reviews)

The Complete Book Of Casino Poker, by Gary Carson

Winning Low-Limit Hold'em

The Theory of Poker

Inside the Poker Mind: Essays on Hold 'em and General Poker Concepts

Middle Limit Holdem Poker, by Bob Ciaffone and Jim Brier.

Harrington on Hold 'em Expert Strategy for No Limit Tournaments, Vol. 1: Strategic Play (comments and reviews)

Harrington on Hold 'em Expert Strategy for No Limit Tournaments, Vol. 2: Endgame (comments and reviews)

Harrington on Hold 'em: Expert Strategies for No Limit Tournaments, Vol. III--The Workbook (Harrington on Hold'em) (comments and reviews)

Poker Culture Blog

2007-07-21T03:58:00.000-07:00

Poker Culture Blog is a blog of mostly opinion about poker, poker strategy, the poker industry, and the poker world.

Professional No-Limit Hold'em

2007-07-16T18:11:00.000-07:00

The book hasn't been published yet, but what I've seen in advance doesn't impress me. It will sell well though, it has a lot of focus on leaning cut phrases to attach to superficial concepts. That's a feature that tends to be very popular among buyers of poker books.

Bigger Deal

2007-06-01T13:37:00.000-07:00

A comment

Weighing the Odds in Hold'em Poker

2007-05-30T07:57:00.000-07:00

Readers seem to like this book. I haven't read it yet, but I should.

The Eudaemonic Pie

2007-05-18T13:47:00.000-07:00

I mention the book in a mathandpoker blog post about roulette.

Bigger Deal

2007-05-18T08:05:00.000-07:00

Bigger Deal, by Anthony Holden

Mean Gene has a review of this book. He liked it.

2007-05-09T07:02:00.001-07:00

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Gambling Theory and Other Topics

2007-05-07T10:14:00.000-07:00

Here's what I said about Mason's book in my Complete Book of Hold'em Poker
Mason Malmouth, Gambling Theory and Other Topics, Two plus Two publishing, 1987.

Most reviews of this book have been favorable, although I don't particularly like the book. I include it here because Malmuth has a nice introduction to statistical analysis of poker results in the book. His coverage of the topic is not complete but does provide a good introduction to the interpretation of sample variance.

Hunting Fish

2007-05-06T15:28:00.001-07:00

The Theory of Poker

2007-05-06T12:15:00.000-07:00

It's hard to go wrong with a classic, and this one is a classic.

A must read for beginning poker players, it's an interesting read to experienced players also.

It's overpriced, but only by a little and the over pricing is typical for this books publisher. It doesn't seem to hurt their sales, so I guess good hype combined with overpricing can pay off.

Randomness

2007-05-05T22:33:00.001-07:00

Not about poker, but certainly very related.

Mathematics of Games and Gambling

2007-05-04T18:18:00.000-07:00

Harrington on hold'em V 2

2007-04-21T08:36:00.000-07:00

Review by Ashley Adams

Harrington on hold'em V 1

2007-04-21T08:30:00.000-07:00

A review by Ashley Adams

This and other books in Harrington's series aren't well written, they aren't well put together. I'm a fan of concise, to the point work. Harrington doesn't even attempt that quality.

I've seen Harrington's books called a Bible For Tournament Players, but no matter what your personal religion is, I think a new player is better off with a solid work on concepts of no-limit poker than a rambling work on no limit poker tournaments. The Ciaffone and Rueben works fills that requirement. The Harrington books do not.

For example, Harrington doesn't get around to pot odds until 1/3 of the way into Vol I and then he doesn't get it right with respect to tournaments. He's got a whole chapter on pot odds as they related to the number of chips, never bothering to mention the little glitch about tournament chips having a value mismatch.

Earlier in the book he talks about "playing style" without even discussing how "style" is effected by the relationships between antes/blinds/stack sizes.

It's no where near a solid book and it's overwritten.

Biggest Game in Town

2007-04-20T17:43:00.000-07:00

Started out as an article in The New Yorker and is probably the best book written on poker.

If the upcoming World Series of Poker is getting you interested in poker this book is the place to start to learn about the history and culture of the game.

The Mathematics of Poker

2007-04-15T10:25:00.001-07:00

____________________________

See Here.

Reviewed by Mathematical Bits

Book of Bluffs

2007-02-05T15:17:00.000-08:00

See my comments elsewhere.

Caro's Book of Tells

2007-01-27T17:40:00.000-08:00

I commented on this book here