#23. Harrington on Cash Games: Volume II

Harrington on Cash Games: Volume II by Dan Harrington and Bill Robertie

Regardless of how it may seem, I didn’t actually hold back the previous review until I had read the second volume of the series, that’s just how it worked out. It does seem quite convenient though I will admit, and in many ways I am glad it was worked out this way.

Volume II carries on immediately from where Volume I left off, which is handy. It starts with chapters on tight-aggressive play on the turn and river completing the discussion of that playing style across all streets. It then continues with Harrington’s discussion of tells, a relatively brief chapter on playing the loose-aggressive style, advice for beating the weak games, a few words on bankroll management and ends with a transcript of an interview with Bobby Hoff.

There’s not a great deal to say about this book that I didn’t cover in the review for the first volume. It’s written in the same style and again is riddled with excellent hand examples designed to prove specific points.

It seems like a given that this two-volume series will come to be regarded as the bible for cash game play, much as the tournament series of books is recognised as the standard approach to tournament poker, displacing Doyle Brunson’s Super/System 2 as the book(s) of choice.

 One thing I will say though is that one must be careful about how and when Harrington’s advice is applied. Most of what he has to say applies only to games of a semi-decent standard at least. If you’re splashing around in the small- or micro-stakes games online then you can pretty much forget all the moves you learn from these books as they just won’t work. The authors assume you’re against competent, thinking players, which you won’t be at low stakes. There you just need to play solid poker and win that way. These books are aimed at players looking to beat medium-stakes games and to add some deception to their game. Don’t beat yourself by mis-applying the advice contained in these pages.

#22. Harrington on Cash Games: Volume I

Harrington on Cash Games: Volume I by Dan Harrington and Bill Robertie

‘Action’ Dan Harrington and Bill Robertie (known mostly as the bloke who co-authored all of Harrington’s books) combine again for the first in a two-volume series on winning at no-limit hold’em cash games. If you’ve read the tourney series of books (Harrington on Hold’em) then you’ve a pretty good idea what you’re getting. If you’re new to Harrington’s works then you’ve picked a sensible place to start. The book is excellently laid out and full of well-thought-out and well-presented, informative content, as most 2+2 Publishing books are (although that last book was somewhat of an exception).

This is the first of two volumes and contains a little over half of the material Harrington wishes to present on cash games, with the remainder obviously coming in the second volume. What you get here is just over 400 pages of cash game wisdom from one of poker’s best authors. Harrington starts from the beginning, introducing the basic cash games concepts without wasting space telling the reader how the game is dealt or structured; such knowledge is assumed. Next come chapters on stack sizes, hand reading and the metagame before we get on to the real meat of the work: how to play tight-aggressive cash game poker. Around three-quarters of this volume is dedicated to this playing style pre-flop, on a the flop in a heads-up pot and also in multi-way pots on the flop. If you want to know how to play the final two betting rounds you need to wait till volume II. This volume is about laying the foundations through proper understanding of the concepts and solid play on the cheaper betting rounds.

As most with 2+2 books, and with all of Harrington’s works, the text is littered with hand examples aimed at driving home the lessons Action Dan is trying to get across to his readers. He leads you through the various thought processes that should be adopted during these hands and explains why he would make the suggested move as opposed to any other.

This is very much only the first volume of the series though and as such doesn’t stand alone as a great work. The second volume ought to be read immediately following this one to get the most from it, else you’ll find that once you get to the end it just stops in the middle of a hand (effectively) and you’re left stranded on the turn with little idea where to go from here. That’s where volume II comes in…

#21. Professional No-Limit Hold’em: Volume I

Professional No-Limit Hold’em: Volume I by Matt Flynn, Sunny Mehta and Ed Miller

Now we’re on the poker book trail. This is the book I started a few days back but put down to fit in the Cheltenham Festival Guide (which was worth it as it led to a profitable few days of racing). I actually finished this book a couple of days back but with the racing on I didn’t have time to update this blog till now.

What have we got here then? It’s an insight into how the pros think about poker and how they play, apparently. It’s unusual in that it has three authors so is a collaboration of thoughts and opinions really. I have read this book before, a good while back, and thought it would be a sensible starting point for my reading list on no-limit cash games but I think I made a mistake. The games outlined in this book bear few similarities to the games I play online, unfortunately.

The book tries to teach the reader to plan their hands from the outset, which is not a bad approach admittedly. It’s better to know what you are going to do in response to a bet on the turn, even if it is conditional on the action beforehand and the cards on the board, rather than panic when faced with such action. It’s better to think “OK, I’m likely to flop an overpair here so if the board isn’t too co-ordinated by the turn and he leads into me I will raise him unless I have seen signs that he has hit a bigger hand than me” from the outset rather than think “Argh! He’s just called my flop bet and then bet into me. Now what do I do? Help!” That much should be obvious. The book then goes on to introduce some more questionable concepts such as commitment thresholds, REM and SPR.

Commitment thresholds may have some value, I’ll say that now. The basic idea is once you have put a certain percentage of your stack in the middle you are committed to a hand and are almost certain to get the rest in and hope. It helps if you don’t cross this threshold without a solid hand or at least a solid draw with relevant odds. The authors try to get you to think about how easy it can be to cross this commitment threshold and warns of folding too easily once you have done so. As I say, there is some value in this but it’s more in the thinking behind it rather than the application of the idea. Being aware of how easy it is to get committed to a hand is one thing but having these rules in place about where the threshold lies and what have you doesn’t work for me I’m afraid. I can’t really put my finger on why but my experience of low/micro-stakes cash games just doesn’t fit with what they are saying. Maybe their ideas apply to higher stakes games, especially live games. Who knows.

REM stands for “Range, Equity, Maximise” and is a process they espouse for playing any hand. The idea is to put your opponent(s) on a range of hands, calculate your equity against that range and then work out how to maximise your return. It could be you realise you are likely way ahead of your opponent but a big raise will scare him off so you look to sucker him in with smaller bets and raises. You may realise you’re way behind your opponent’s likely range in which case you’ll probably want to fold to maximise your earnings (minimise your losses) on this hand. That’s the basic idea and it’s billed as the guiding process behind all no-limit decisions. Is this stating the obvious somewhat? Surely anyone who has played a bit of poker does this automatically don’t they? OK, there are still some people out there who will bullishly bet and raise with a pair of Aces when the board has straights and flushes all over it but most people will at least think about what hands they could be up against and act accordingly. Don’t they? Even in the games I play most of the player pool at least shows some awareness of hands they might be up against which means you can represent hands they fear and push them off a hand. All part of poker. So what the authors are covering here is just a formalisation, albeit in a slightly odd manner, of standard playing techniques. There’s nothing new here.

Then we come to Stack-to-Pot Ratios or SPR. Oh dear. This is about playing hands in pots to maximise your return on the hand by manipulating the size of the pot pre-flop. Some hands play better when the pot is small compared to the effective stacks, others need a comparatively big pot. This section is perhaps one of the weakest I have ever read when it comes to professional no-limit poker as so many of the assumptions made are way off relative to the games I am splashing about it. Let me give you an example. You have pocket Kings and a stack of 100 big blinds (BB). This hand plays best with an SPR of around 4 apparently. The SPR is defined as the ratio of the effective stacks to the pot after the pre-flop betting. If you make a standard raise to 3xBB and get one caller with the blinds folding you have created a pot of 7.5xBB (your 3xBB bet, the 3xBB call, a 0.5xBB small blind and the 1xBB big blind) and have 97xBB in your stack. That gives an SPR of 12.93 which is apparently really bad for this hand and the book explains why. So rather than making a standard raise to 3xBB which results in an SPR of around 13 you should try to get to an SPR of 4ish, and the way you do that is with a bigger pre-flop raise. You raise to 10xBB, get a single caller again and the blinds fold. Now the pot is 21.5xBB and your stack is 90xBB for an SPR of 4.19 – much better. Hang on! Who is calling to call a 10xBB pre-flop raise? Almost no-one. You waste a great hand to win 1.5xBB in blinds. Whoop-de-doo. You could take a guy off his whole stack with that sort of hand rather than just win the blinds. And so it goes. The authors have numerous examples where you make crazy raises like that pre-flop and get called. They assume you make pot-sized bets and overbets and get called all the way. If that happens you’re either up against a muppet who won’t be in the game long or someone has you beaten. SPR is all about getting it all in too. This doesn’t happen very often. You’ll hopefully win a decent pot with a hand like pocket Kings and you may stack someone with it but it doesn’t happen anywhere near as often as this book would suggest. And if you’re not getting it all in then SPRs are basically worthless. A hundred or more pages on something that affects probably less than 5% of hands. Why bother?

You’d be well within your rights to think that by explicitly calling this book Volume I that it is one of several volumes. So where is Volume II? This book was written in 2007 and there is still no sign of the follow up. A few of the footnotes and some of the main body of the text state that various concepts are covered in more detail in Volume II so one assumes that the authors at least had a plan for a second volume so where is it? Two Plus Two published this book and they are a well-known and respected poker publishing house who are still putting out work so they haven’t gone under. Ed Miller has written and co-authored a number of respected works (I don’t include this in there, however) but have his co-authors let him down? Has the happy team crumbled? I’ll be honest, I’m not that bothered about whether a second volume eventually appears on the market or not as it’s unlikely I’d buy it unless it is significantly better than this one. Also the rug has been pulled out from under this team somewhat by the fact that Dan Harrington has published a two-volume cash game series to follow up his massively successful three-volume series on tournament play and his books are rapidly becoming regarded as the bible for whatever discipline they cover.

Sorry, but this is not a good book for cash game players but fortunately there are good books out there, including the Harrington books but we’ll be coming to those very shortly…

#20. Racing Post Cheltenham Festival Guide 2010

Racing Post Cheltenham Festival Guide 2010 edited by Nick Pulford

Hang on, this isn’t a poker book. No, but it came into my possession on Saturday afternoon and was marked urgent. I had to read it before the Cheltenham festival started (this afternoon) so I put down the book I was reading at the time and slogged through this one instead.

If you’re not a horse racing fan, or at least a gambler, you may not really appreciate what the Cheltenham festival is all about. It’s four days of top class national hunt (jumps) racing on a very testing course. For the huge Irish contingent that come over it’s also four days of top class drinking and high stakes punting. As jumps racing goes I tend to think the Grand National in April gets more coverage in the mainstream media but this meeting is massive in racing circles.

This book covers all the main punting angles including the records of the main trainers, pedigree hints, key trends for all the races and comments on all the main fancies. The idea is that for a tenner you can get all you need to know to make a profit from the meeting.

Of course, this book has a very limited shelf-life and no re-read value. Once the festival is over the book basically has no value whatsoever which is why I needed to get it read ASAP and why it couldn’t wait till I had finished the other book I had on the go. By late Friday afternoon the races will have been run and the trends will need to be updated with date for the new winners. Stable records will have changed and there is no point talking up the potential of various horses – they’ve either delivered on their promise or let you down.

Was it worth taking the time out to blitz-read this? It’s still only day one of the festival so a little early to tell but using the information in here I managed to pick out Sizing Europe (winner at 6/1) plus Get Me Out Of Here and The Package, both of whom were beaten by a head at 9/2 along with Another Jewel (fourth at 16/1) which isn’t a bad return from the first five races. The big winner of the day, Chief Dan George (33/1), was on my shortlist based on the trends in this guide but I rejected him near the end of my form study as I didn’t think he’d perform too well in a big field and wasn’t sure about his form before his last run.

I’ve been betting on the horses for years but using system bets rather than my own form-reading skills. I don’t think I’d have picked out anything that would have got anywhere near winning had I not had this handy guide. There are still three more days for it all to go wrong though…

#19. Grave Matters (CSI: Crime Scene Investigation)

Grave Matters (CSI: Crime Scene Investigation) by Max Allan Collins

Everyone’s allowed a trashy novel now and then, right?

This is an original novel based on the hit US TV series, the original one based in Las Vegas rather than any of the spin-offs. And back when it was good, with Gil Grissom and Warrick Brown in rather than Laurence Fishburne reminding me way too much of Morpheus at times that it is hard to take him seriously.

I should say that recently CSI has become one of my guilty pleasures. I blame the missus; she started watching a few of them and got hooked and has since got me addicted too. With Five and it’s sister channel Five USA pumping out at least one episode an evening and Living chipping in with a few more at the weekends I’ve been watching quite a lot of it recently. Unfortunately, the episodes don’t seem to be shown in any sort of order so I am jumping around both within and between series. Fortunately there are few storylines that continue from episode to the next so it’s not as bad as it could be. I still don’t know what has drawn me in though – the storylines, the characters or the setting. I can be a sucker for anything with Vegas in it.

Anyway, the book. It’s fairly standard CSI fare with a couple of cases that become more complicated than they seem initially and the obligatory links between them that emerge throughout the story. The author has managed to capture the essence of the main characters and the structure of a CSI episode really well, to the extent that it is a bit hard to distinguish it as an original tale rather than actually being the book of one of the episodes in fact. That’s the author’s credit too, a job well done.

I’m not going to cover the storyline in any sort of detail. Catherine and Warrick are investigating a sudden death at an old folks’ home while Grissom, Sara and Nick investigate the death of a wealthy businesswoman at the sheriff’s behest. The fact that this woman was one of the sheriff’s major benefactors has nothing to do with it, oh no. All is not what it seems in either case and the forensic investigators have to work lots of overtime to get the evidence to reveal the truth. Nothing different there to any other CSI story really.

What struck me most about this book though was not that it was a trashy novel that one could easily read in a couple of sittings and then move on as though nothing had happened, the book had left no real impression on the reader, although that was the case. No, it was the author notes that got me. Max Allan Collins wrote the movie tie-in book for Saving Private Ryan and also wrote the graphic novel on which Road To Perdition was based. And now he’s writing books like this. Or he was writing books like this, back in 2003/4 when this was released.

Why do I find this surprising? Because I don’t expect authors of books like this one to have written other stuff I have heard of, basically. I always think of these TV tie-in books as a bit naff, other people cashing in on the success of the TV show (albeit with the approval of the producers of said TV show). I love Star Wars but haven’t read any of the novels based in the Star Wars universe as to me they are not the true story, they’re not from the pen of George Lucas. Other authors are taking on these characters and making them do and think what this new author wants rather than developing the character as it ‘should’ be developed. I’m not sure I agree with that.

Incidentally, I’ve never watched Road to Perdition and haven’t managed to get all the way through Saving Private Ryan. Should I?

With a book on footballing prisoners being followed by one on crime scene investigators (which I only read because I found it in amongst a pile of books the missus had forgotten she bought when Borders was closing down and it seemed like a nice easy read, a quick win if you will) I feel that’s the levity out the way somewhat and it’s time for another chance of tack. I am playing an increasing amount of poker at the minute so it’s probably time to go back over some poker texts. If you’re not interested in the game I suggest you look away for the next few posts…

#18. Manslaughter United

Manslaughter United by Chris Hulme

This is the story of a season spent with the football team at a Portsmouth prison, HMP Kingston. The prison mainly (and I think exclusively at the time the book was written) houses prisoners serving a life sentence, many of the inmates being murderers. Chris Hulme gained access to the prison over the course of a year to speak with staff and prisoners alike as he researched this tale of a prison football team.

Obviously when a football team is made up of prisoners (and a couple of prison guards), as Kingston Arrows are, they can only play home games. They are part of the Portsmouth North End League though and as with all other teams they have to play everyone home and away although all their games are held on the football pitch within the walls of HMP Kingston. The team is managed by Nigel, a former semi-professional footballer who just happens to be one of the prison officers who also plays centre-back. Another warder plays in goal but the rest of the squad are inmates, most of whom have committed at least one murder and have been sentenced to life imprisonment. Unlike a normal football team, a manager can’t court players he would like to have in his squad; he is limited to the talent he has at his disposal. Similarly any players who have a disagreement with the way the team is run or with another player are stuck here; they can’t leave and go play for another side. What’s more these players are living with one another 24 hours a day, seven days a week and each has a history of violence. Comments made during the heat of a football match could easily blow up into something much bigger off the pitch.

For most of the characters in the book, HMP Kingston is somewhere they are (relatively) happy to be. As well as the football pitch the inmates have access to a gym with weights room, a hockey pitch, pool tables, televisions including Sky channels, video recorders and so on. Inmates can attend courses on subjects such as anger management, assertiveness and relationships. Some prisoners have pets, such as a budgie. Others are studying for degrees. It’s a category B prison meaning the prisoners do not require maximum security but escape should be made difficult for them. These men are killers, do they deserve privileges such as these?

That is something Hulme tries to address in this book and he handles it very well. There are interviews with most of the squad, covering their background, their crime and their general attitude and outlook. Many of them understand that in the eyes of the public these men are scum who don’t deserve any luxuries. They see it differently. Yes, they killed but not a day goes by when most of them don’t regret what they have done. They know there is nothing they can do to change what happened and that they have to come to terms with what they have done and pay the penalty but they also know that one day they will be released and in order to better serve society they need to be treated as human beings. Most of them went in as immature, aggressive young men who fought the system, and other prisoners for a few years. Now most of them have settled down and learned to deal with their lives and with their sentences.

Through various courses they have come to accept what they did, they know it was wrong but mostly they take responsibility for their actions. The prison system teaches these men not to blame the victim or circumstances. Maybe they did have a rough childhood but that doesn’t give you the right to kick a woman to death. Maybe that fella was giving you grief but does that mean you can kill him? No, and these prisoners have had to learn that. Most have done so at other jails before coming to Kingston. You get the impression that Kingston is unusual and that being an inmate here is somewhat of a treat rather than being in Wormwood Scrubs and the like. If you can keep your nose clean and do your time in a proper fashion maybe you’ll do a few years at Kingston.

The language throughout the book is colourful to say the least. But then what do you expect from a wholly masculine environment where testosterone will be pumping hard through the veins of many a man. They didn’t back down on the outside so why should they do so in here? The c-bomb is dropped a lot so if you’re not comfortable with it don’t read this book as it’s littered throughout.

There are some genuinely interesting stories in Manslaughter United. Some of the players will happily discuss their crimes and there is a sense of the macabre at times as the facts are passed to the reader, often in great detail. These aren’t men talking up past exploits but men who have been trained to relay the facts of their past so they can get them out in the open and deal with them. Of course, many a men in here is innocent, or at least not as guilty as the court found him. It was manslaughter, not murder. Who can say whether that is the truth or denial? Some players honestly they are innocent of all charges though.

HMP Kingston held Raphael Rowe, one of the M25 Three, during the season Hulme covered. Rowe is apparently a very capable footballer so Nigel was pleased to have him on the team. Rowe also maintained throughout that he is innocent of murder, despite his original trial and appeal declaring otherwise. The book ends before Rowe’s successful appeal against his conviction. Of course, the case is covered in some detail in this book and many of the inconsistencies in the evidence are highlighted making it hard to understand how the court convicted the three for murder. We weren’t at the trial though so it’s hard to assess these things without some bias. It does highlight some of the issues surrounding various convictions though and cites the Birmingham Six and Guildford Four as other examples of the British justice system imprisoning the wrong suspects.

Manslaughter United offers an insight into life in prison through the eyes of some of the more tame inmates the penal system has to offer. The author reports on games, training and various conflicts between players on and off the pitch. It’s a somewhat sympathetic tale, as much about the team off the field as on it. There is obviously some footballing talent here and one wonders what these fellas could have made of that under different circumstances.

#17. Taming the Infinite

Taming the Infinite by Ian Stewart

The author makes it clear in the introduction that this is a history of mathematics and not the history of mathematics. It may seem like semantics to some but the author is keen to point out that maths is such a wide-ranging subject that to provide a full history would require many more pages than this volume comprises. He is also quick to point out that here the past is often viewed through the eyes of the present, something most historians would object to.

Let’s be clear about one thing: this book is not easy reading if you want to understand every concept. I wanted to learn more about the birth of mathematics and things like where we get our counting systems from etc. That’s all covered in the first few chapters. The Babylonians used a base 60 number system which is why we have 360 degrees in a circle, 60 minutes in an hour and 60 seconds in a minute, apparently. The Mayans used base 20 and because of that it is believed they counted on their fingers and toes, rather than just fingers as we would in our base 10 system today. I was interested to learn that maths was initially part of astronomy rather than a subject in its own right. I enjoyed discovering more about the (a) history of algebra and the influence of the Arabic mathematicians, indeed the word ‘algebra’ is Arabic in origin. Then we skip forward into much more modern times and I start to lose some of the firm grasp I had on things.

I did maths and further maths at A-level plus a fair amount of maths as part of my degree (physics with theoretical physics) so I consider myself to have an above-average mathematical education. Stuff like imaginary numbers I hadn’t forgotten about so that was all OK. As soon as I read the sections on logarithms that all came flooding back. Ditto all the bits on calculus and exponentials like e^ia = sin a + i cos a. I’m using a rather than theta because I’m buggered if I can work out how to get the proper theta symbol going in here. You get my point anyway. I know all that stuff, or at least knew enough of it that when I read what Professor Stewart wrote it all made sense. It’s some of the sections on Euclidean and non-Euclidean geometries I got a bit confused by. I didn’t quite get some of the stuff on sets either. In fact there were several chunks of the book that left me scratching my head a bit.

But does it matter?

I don’t think it does. I understood a lot of this book and it was the early history of maths that interested me most. It still does in fact. But I was reminded of plenty of things I had forgotten, including Fourier analysis, polynomial expansions and so on. It’s refreshing to realise that while I may not have had to use these mathematical techniques for more than a decade they are still in there somewhere and after a quick refresher I could throw back the years and turn it on again. If I haven’t needed that sort of information in that time then I certainly haven’t needed to know more about the bits I didn’t understand so well. And at the end of the day it’s just a book I have read for pleasure; it’s not like I am going to have to sit an exam based on what I have read is it?

If you are genuinely interested in lots of complicated mathematical theory then this is probably a decent book for you but I will warn you now, if you don’t have a solid mathematical education extending beyond GCSE (high-school) level then you’re probably going to struggle with some of this one.

After books on quantum physics and the history of maths I think it’s time for something a bit lighter…