Closure

So far all I have given you is excuses. I’ve tried to explain why this blog dried up but not really what happened in the meantime, at least not in terms of the books I read. The blog updates may have stopped but the reading didn’t. It slowed down because of the drugs but it certainly didn’t stop. Anyway, the blog was at least a couple of weeks behind the curve anyway as I had read a bunch of books I hadn’t blogged about by the time I stopped updates. So without (too much) further ado I want to list all the books I read in 2010 but didn’t blog about, including brief review comments as appropriate.

#71. Twitchhiker by Paul Smith – one man’s attempt to get halfway around the world relying only on offers of help from Twitter. Interesting idea, less interesting book as I recall. I did learn that Pete McCarthy of McCarthy’s Bar fame was dead though while reading this book, which made it a little more interesting.

#72. Marching Powder by Rusty Young – much more like it! A fascinating insight into one of South America’s toughest jails and a great story that is well told to boot.

#73. The Ice Man by Philip Carlo – OK, it’s an American book about an American contract killer in America written by an American. But burglarised? Seriously? Someone needs to beat that word out of them. Also I recall this book ending rather suddenly, when it could have gone on and been so much better. We get the full story of this Mafia hitman while he’s a free man but don’t get much of his story when he gets caught and banged up. How did he feel? How did he cope? More on the arrest, on the hunt for him and on his capture would have rounded it off much better.

#74. Around the World in Eighty Days by Jules Verne – before I read this I was convinced I knew the basic premise and that in involved a hot air balloon somewhere along the way. Err, nope. Was that a mis-remembered image from the Steve Coogan film or something from the Willy Fogg cartoon? And if you have clicked that link and watched the YouTube video try getting the theme tune out of your head now. Anyway, no balloon but not a bad little story really even if Passepartout mes across as a complete dick.

#75. Bringing Down the House by Ben Mezrich – one of the many books about the MIT blackjack gang that is supposed to have taking the Las Vegas casinos for a fortune and forced numerous rule changes as a result. It was adapted into a film too, 21, but that was a steaming pile of crap. The book is better, but that’s not too difficult. In fact 21 is one of the reasons I haven’t seen The Social Network yet. Not being on Facebook is one reason but quite enjoying the Ben Mezrich book (The Accidental Billionaires) and fearing another shitty film adaptation is the main one. But then The Social Network is supposed to be alright isn’t it?

#76. Ugly Americans by Ben Mezrich – another ‘true’ story, this one about American traders getting rich off the Asian markets but I can’t help but wonder how many of these people are composites of several individuals and how many of the events truly happened. Mezrich seems to go in for these so-called true stories but I can’t help but think they are rather sensationalised. Most true stories don’t sell because they are dull and need sexing up a bit.

#77. Breaking Vegas by Ben Mezrich – I think this was called Busting Vegas in the US but it seems to be Breaking Vegas over here. Certainly my copy is Breaking. Another MIT blackjack story, this one supposedly more true than the other as it mainly revolves around Semyon Dukatch (although the spelling of his name changes a couple of times) and the second of the blackjack gangs. Dukatch even offers a bit up himself at the end of the book, a short chapter on the techniques used, to add an air of authenticity. The same doubts about how true the tale is come to the fore though. It has the pub story vibe. Imagine you’re in the pub with a few mates and you’re telling a tale. How accurate are the main points of this story? Are any of them embellished for effect or to make you look better in this tale? Yeah, right!

#78. Playing the Moldovans at Tennis by Tony Hawks – another supposedly true story and ever the cynic I am left wondering whether the little twist in the tale really happened. Tony Hawks sets out to play the Moldovan football team at tennis. We follow him on his journey trying to track down the players and get various parties to agree to let him play them at tennis but there are a few bits in there that just make you think “my, that’s convenient and makes for a better story to recount when you get home”. Or at least they made me think that, you may be more forgiving.

#79. Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson – I’m not 100% sure why the book I have says Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde on the front when the story itself seems to be called The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Does anyone know what this book is actually called? I have the Wordsworth Classics edition and like a lot of these old classics the publisher seems to have gone all out to make it hard to read. Some of it is the author’s fault, such as the  excessively long paragraphs,  but the publishers haven’t helped by using a small font and really packing in the text. It doesn’t say so on the cover but this volume includes a few other of Stevenson’s short stories too. I wasn’t too bothered about The Merry Men, Will O’ The Mill (throughout which I was thinking of Evil Edna for some reason), Thrawn Janet and Olalla but Markheim and The Treasure of Franchard were rather enjoyable.

#80. Cat Confidential by Vicky Halls – it was shortly after Cat had died and I felt I owed it to the new cat(s) we were getting to make their lives with us as comfortable as possible so I thought I’d try to get inside the mind of a cat a bit more by reading this book I bought for the missus a few years back. It made me think about a few things from a cat’s perspective, things I might not have considered otherwise so it served a purpose I guess.

#81. Cityboy by Geraint Anderson – I used to read the Cityboy columns in one of the free London evening papers so when this book came out I bought it in an airport for a bit of light holiday reading. And that’s what it is really. It’s supposed to be a true account of one man’s career in the city, lifting the lid on the excesses and cityboy lifestyle but once more the cynic in me throws a massive shadow of doubt over bits of it which somewhat spoils it. Without that suspension of disbelief books like these don’t really work. I really object to books dressing themselves up as true stories when many of the characters and events are composites. But then as I said earlier, unless it is sexed up a true story won’t sell.

It is now the end of October, and with Cityboy in the bag I have exceeded my target for the year and I still have two months left. Yes! But with the side effects of the drugs cranking up things were to slow down rather.

#82. Hold’em Poker by David Sklansky – I was in one of my limit hold’em phases and wanted to take things back to basics.

#83. Any Utterly Impartial History of Britain by John O’Farrell – this is a chunky volume, as one would expect bearing in mind it covers two thousand years of British history, so it took a while to get through. This is the ideal sort of book for me though as it is educational without being dry. John O’Farrell is amusing at times (the material doesn’t allow for too much comedy) but has also taken the time to get his facts straight which obviously helps with a book like this. The missus got the sequel (An Utterly Exasperated History of Modern Britain) for Christmas but I am doing the decent thing and letting her read it before I pinch it. I might be waiting a while though as she reads much more slowly than I do.

#84. Witch and Wizard by James Patterson – I had taken a rare trip into town, going round the shops with the missus for reasons that currently elude me when we came across people giving away hundreds of copies of this book to passers-by. A free book – I’m having that! It seems it was being given away partly to promote the new book in the series but I was willing to give it a go as James Patterson is a renowned thriller writer. This series is more aimed at teenage kids but overall the book’s not bad. It’s mainly setting the scene for a long series of books but the writing is decent, the main characters develop at a decent pace and I reckon tweens would rather enjoy it.

#85. Definitive Guide to Betting on Horses edited by Nick Pulford –  as a gambler I figured a refresher course on the basics of horse racing wouldn’t hurt. This is another that took a little while to get through though, for various reasons.

#86. Amazon Kindle User Guide – it’s now just after my birthday now so early December and I have only read four books since end of Oct. The drugs really kicking in but I have also picked a couple of long books to slog through in that period. Once I had hit the target I decided I should tackle some longer works as I had nothing to lose. Perhaps that is why I read the Kindle User Guide cover to cover. Who reads instruction manuals these days? I read this one and at several points went “coo, that’s clever.”

#87. Blood, Sweat & Tea by Tom Reynolds – I actually read the Kindle version of this but I can’t seem to find that on  Amazon now so I have linked to the paperback instead. Whatever, it’s just a blog in ‘print’ format really and one that doesn’t always work that well as context is sometimes lacking. I wouldn’t rush out to buy/download it, honestly.

#88. Soul Identity by Dennis Batchelder – yes, I read it because it was free on Kindle. It’s an interesting concept – your eyes can be used to determine whether your body is the current vessel for a given soul which means one can take advantage of a service allowing one to store life lessons and valuables ready to be passed on to the next body containing your soul in order to give that ‘you’ a headstart in life – which helps enormously as otherwise it’s fairly standard thriller material with the usual plot twists and character traits evident. It builds towards a sequel but I won’t be rushing to seek it out. If I come across it cheap on the Kindle I may read it but otherwise I shan’t bother.

#89. Screen Burn by Charlie Brooker – I really like Charlie Brooker but for some reason I don’t find myself compelled to seek out his every work. I rarely remember to watch Screenwipe or Newswipe when they are on. I missed his zombie thing (Dead Set?) and I don’t read his Guardian columns, not even online. But then again had I spent the last few years reading his regular Guardian columns I wouldn’t have had any use for this book as it is a collection of said columns from a few years back. It’s actually just a lazy reprinting of loads of stuff Brooker has written before which must make it a cheap book to print (just like the Jeremy Clarkson books I read at the start of the year). But it means I get to enjoy a few hundred pages of Brooker vitriol all in one go and that is a glorious thing. A man not afraid to swear when it is needed, and to do so properly and in full rather than alluding to the swearword by asterisking out key letters. He’s a fantastically grumpy misanthrope who writes a beautifully immature column when he wants to. I must watch more Brooker.

#90. ‘F’ in Exams by Richard Benson – when I go to someone’s house I tend to look at their bookshelves. You can judge a person by the general decor of their house but that’s their public persona. They know that side of them is open so they can manipulate how they are perceived. They can hide their collection of porcelain dolls so you don’t think them weird, especially if they are a man in their 30s. But it is harder for someone to really sanitise their bookshelves, which is why I like to have a nose around when the opportunity presents itself. At christmas I went up to stay with the missus’ parents and thus had a neb around and grabbed this for a bit of light reading. After all, when the opportunity to have a quick read of someone else’s books presents itself I often take it with both hands. The book was supposed to be genuine exam question answers but I have my doubts as to how many were actually real (how many times have I written that recently?) and how many were written for comedic effect by someone other than the person taking the test. This is not a book I would by and is probably better suited to an email or website but it passed a few minutes nonetheless.

#91. Balderdash & Piffle: One Sandwich Short of a Dog’s Dinner by Alexander Games – another borrowed read and this time it was much more like it. I love words so to hear about the history of some more esoteric words and phrases is a joy. I really enjoyed the TV series when it was on (although that was in part due to the fact that it was presented by Victoria Coren) and while this book wasn’t up to the same standard it was a pretty good read.

#92. Dawn Of The Dumb by Charlie Brooker – back to my bookshelves now and more Brooker columns from the Guardian. I’m not sure I got this finished by the end of the year so should I count it as number 92? Can I pull the “I’ve started so I’ll finish” Mastermind trick with books too?

Excluding books I didn’t complete in the calendar year (including the first and last book in this blog) I make that 90 books in a year. My target was 80 so I haven’t done badly. In fact I am quite pleased with how things have gone. It’s nice to be able to quantify my reading speed in terms that everyone can understand. I read around 90 books a year. Without the drugs in the last couple of months I would have easily pushed 100 I reckon. Ah well, 90 is a more than respectable total.

And that’s it from me. I have proved over recent months that I am bloody useless at updating this blog so from now on I probably won’t bother. I set out to see how many books I could read in a year – and also see what variety of books I read in that time – and I have documented the challenge to a greater or less extent here so it feels like job done. I will still be trying to read as many books as possible but I don’t feel the need to blog about them any more. I think it’s probably best for all involved if I just draw a line under things now.

Thank you for reading and I hope we meet again, perhaps on a different blog I don’t update for several months.

Mat

#64. Secrets The Pros Won’t Tell You About Winning Hold’em Poker

Secrets The Pros Won’t Tell You about Winning at Hold’em Poker: About Winning Hold’em Poker by Lou Krieger and Sheree Bykofsky

Surely a contender for the longest title on a book I will read this year. In fact it takes up almost the entire front cover. Yes, I am well aware that the front cover of a book should make it clear what the book is so the title usually occupies a good chunk of the space but often publishers use larger fonts to achieve that effect. No need for that here as the title is just ridiculously long. And this is probably the longest paragraph I have written about a title.

Oh, I remember this book now. I finished reading it several weeks ago so I had to grab it off the top of the pile and flick through it again as a reminder of what it’s all about. And yes, I realise that the title is probably a bit of a clue as to the contents. But it’s not so much the actual contents I wanted to mention here, it’s the formatting of them that stands out for me. Let me try to elaborate…

The authors are poker/gambling authors and journalists who play quite a lot of poker. They themselvers are not poker professionals. Numerous professional poker players have written books and generally speaking they are crap. Alright, not crap as such but they could be a lot better than they are.

Often they are poorly-written, Doyle Brunson being one of the worst offenders on that front. His Super/System books have long been regarded as poker bibles, especially the chapters on no-limit hold’em. But they are so badly written that it’s hard to get much useful stuff out of them. Brunson may be one of the most successful poker players ever but he’s a lousy author. And the same is true of many of the others who have tried to cash in on their success at the tables by writing a book. Dan Harrington’s cash game and tournament books are probably the exception to the rule as they are very clear and well-written.

Books written by poker pros tend to be somewhat lacking too. Maybe some of what makes a great player is hard to put down in words. So much of the game is situational and there is usually no one right way to play any hand. Ask any experienced poker player a question about how to play a hand and the answer they give will usually be “It depends.” And that’s true so often in poker. The right course of action depends on many things, including your table image, the action to date, history with your opponent and so on. With more and more attention be paid to the metagame too it is hard to analyse hands and situations in a vacuum. Because of all of this the pros tend to mostly write the same things. They will give advice about playing tight-aggressive poker and not doing what your opponents expect you to do and so on but they hold a lot back. Part of this is because these guys rely on their skills and the edge those skills give them to make a living. They don’t want to put all their best plays down in a book so that others can learn how to beat them, that would be massively counter-productive for the poker pro. But I think there is also some stuff they simply can’t put into words. They have a feel for the game that they were maybe born with or perhaps developed over many years. You can’t teach someone to have exactly the same midset as you have.

So Krieger and Bykofsky set out to write a book that fills in some of those gaps, teaching you the things the pros either couldn’t put into words or that they didn’t want you to know. And because they are both experienced writers it is to be hoped that this book won’t be as poorly written as Brunson et al. That’s the theory anyway.

I honestly would have expected respected gambling writers to have structured this book very differently to the way they have opted for. The book is around 250 pages long and is broken into 11 chapters – I don’t have a problem with any of that. But each chapter is then broken up into way too many subsections, so much so that the contents listing at the front of the book takes up 10 pages! This structure would work if each subsection were a separate playing tip such that each subsection within a chapter is self-contained. But that’s really not the case here. It honestly reads as though most chapters have been written as proper continuous prose before being artificially broken up into these subsections. So you’ll have a concept introduced in one subsection and midway through that you’ll get a subsection break and it will continue in the next subsection. It’s massively frustrating and makes it much harder to read and to get the message across in my opinion. This book could have been so much better had more thought been given to the structure.

As I said earlier, I read this book a few weeks ago. Can I remember any of these secrets I was promised? In a word – no. I seem to recall there was a lot about playing in position and exercising proper bankroll management but that’s the same sort of advice you get in most poker books so I don’t think this one has really lived up to its title.

#59. Bigger Deal

Bigger Deal by Anthony Holden

Nearly seven months on from the original Big Deal I bring you the sequel – Bigger Deal. It’s subtitled “a year on the new poker circuit” and it was overdue given how out of date the first book now seems. That’s not Holden’s fault though, he wrote a book that captured the game and the scene as it was then (back in the late ’80s) but in recent years poker has changed massively and unfortunately dated Holden’s excellent work. He was up to the challenge of bringing things up to date though and decided to spend another year as a poker professional (sort of).

I say sort of as Holden wasn’t a full-time poker pro during the time covered by this new book (summer 2005 to summer 2006). He was also masquerading as the classical music critic for the Observer, which is quite different to playing poker. And in the last 15 to 20 years the poker scene has changed significantly too so Tony is not walking back into the same world he left at the end of Big Deal.

Since Holden last wrote a poker memoir the game has seen online poker come along and change the whole landscape for ever. The so-called Moneymaker Effect has been massive. For those of you not up on such matters, the Moneymaker Effect is a massive explosion in the number of poker players – both online and live – accredited to the fact that an online poker player by the name of Chris Moneymaker won the main event at the 2003 World Series of Poker after qualifying via a $40 satellite tournament rather than paying the $10,000 entry fee. When people saw that you could turn $40 into several million dollars (Moneymaker won around $2.5 million for winning the main event but made a lot more in sponsorship and endorsements afterwards) they all wanted in.

The sneaky bastards in the American government put a bit of a cap on things by sneaking through the UIGEA (Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act) in 2006 on the back of the SAFE Port Act (an anti-terror measure) which made it illegal to transfer funds from a financial institution to online gambling sites, effectively killing Neteller et al’s trade in the US and seriously pissing off Party Gaming and others. But best not get me started on this right now.

In Big Deal our author played in the WSOP main event as part of a field of 167 players. In 2006 he does the same but this time the field numbers nearly nine thousand! There’s that Moneymaker Effect for you. And rather than chasing a grand prize of just over a quarter of a million, they are now battling for a first prize of around $12 million. The poker scene has changed.

What you get with this book is exactly what you got with Big Deal. Much of Holden’s life is laid bare and his love affair with poker shines through. He soon adapts to the crazy new world of online poker but also retains his affection for live play, even though his tourney results often aren’t exactly stunning. But to the reader the results are not that important. What matters is the quality of the writing, which is fantastic. Anthony Holden writes a good book, I’ll give him that. I’m a poker player and poker fan, which may help, but the prose is gripping but also ticks along at a nice speed so you feel as though every word is taking you somewhere, and somewhere you want to go too.

There’s not a great deal more to say about this. If you like poker then I think you’ll like this book. If you liked Big Deal then this is more of the same really, and that’s a good thing. If you like good writing but have never played poker then I still think there is something in this for you. Give it a go and find out, eh?

#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…

#8. Secrets of Sit’n’gos: Winning Strategies for Single-Table Poker Tournaments

Secrets of Sit’n’gos: Winning Strategies for Single-Table Poker Tournaments by Phil Shaw

What is it with poker books and their need to have stupidly long titles?

Yes, another book on that wonderful game of Texas hold’em and just as with the Earn $30,000 a Month book, this is all about sit’n’go (SnG) single-table poker tournaments and how to beat them. It’s not a new book, it’s one I have read before, but as I am playing SnGs quite a lot now (around a dozen a day on average) to build up a poker bankroll I figured now would be a good time to pull this volume off the shelf and see if there were any more tips I could pick up from it.

This book focuses a great deal on Independent Chip Modelling (ICM), a process by which one can estimate one’s true cash equity in a tournament based on the number of chips held by each remaining player. Suppose a poker tournament starts with 10 players each paying $100 in return for 1500 chips. The top three players will be paid out with $500 for first place, $300 for second and $200 for third, standard SnG payouts. At the start of the tournament, assuming all players are of equal skill level (which is a poor assumption but one that has to be made in ICM unfortunately), each player has the same amount of equity ($100) since everyone has an equal chance of finishing in each of the prize positions. Now suppose two players go all-in first hand and one is eliminated. There are now nine players each with a starting stack of 1500 chips and one with 3000. The player with the big stack is now more likely to win than the other players simply because he has more chips, twice as many as he started with, but he doesn’t have double the equity he started with. ICM calculations show his equity has increased to around $184 while all remaining players have an equity now of around $102. As the equity doesn’t increase linearly with stack size this affects the hands you should be playing at certain points in the game and in certain positions. Much of this book is about which hands can be played profitably from an ICM viewpoint.

ICM is just a model though, and as such requires a number of assumptions to be made to simplify things to the point where they can be modelled. As I mentioned earlier, relative player skill levels aren’t factored in and this is a big deal. If you’re playing against a weak opponent who doesn’t know anything about ICM you might find yourself making certain moves that ICM says should be profitable but if the other guy doesn’t know what he’s doing then he may play his hands in an unexpected manner and blow all ICM assumptions out the water. One of the main inputs into the model is the range of hands your opponent is playing so you can then decide what is the best way to play your hand. If you don’t know reasonably accurately how your opponent plays poker then you’re going to make an error estimating his hand range and as with so many models, it is only as accurate as the input data. Garbage in, garbage out as they say. So Phil Shaw has based pretty much his whole book around a model that is fundamentally flawed in so many cases. Why? Because it’s the best model there is out there. You need to know how your opponent plays almost as well as you know your own game but among the high stakes pros this may well be the case and it’s them who will benefit most from ICM. For the rest of us dabbling at lower stakes it’s not that important.

While ICM just isn’t that important at low stakes (and limited to say the least at larger stakes), the book does have more going for it than just ICM. I have picked up a few pointers on my short-handed game, especially around the bubble (when there is just one more player to be eliminated before all remaining players are guaranteed to finish in the money) and also when down to the final three, helping me push on and go for the win rather than just settling for the third place money that is already secured by that point. With that in mind it was worth re-reading I suppose.

Now I should try and give the poker books a rest really shouldn’t I? You didn’t come here to read poker strategy. Not that I know what you came here expecting but they are my books and I’ll read what I like!  🙂

#6. Big Deal: One Year as a Professional Poker Player

Big Deal: One Year as a Professional Poker Player by Anthony Holden

Another poker book to follow on from my previous read but this time not a poker manual but an account of one man’s love affair with poker and his exploits during a year out as a professional poker player. And not just any man either as Anthony Holden is apparently a respected author and former journalist for The Times whose works include a biography of Prince Charles, several books on Shakespeare and a history of the Oscars. He’s an Oxford graduate and comes across as a bit of a posh ‘un at times, not least when he peppers his prose with latin phrases (of which vita nuova seems a particular favourite).

While reading this book I had two overwhelming thoughts: how dated the poker scene Holden describes seems compared to the current state of the game and how appalling his bankroll management was.

The book was written in the late 1980s and details a poker game played largely on the road with a band of professional players flitting from location to location in search of the next big game. Word of mouth seems to have been a major factor in arranging games, especially tournaments and knowing about the next big game seemed to largely depend on who you knew. But then the scene was much smaller then than now with only a hundred or so players entering even the biggest events. There were few, if any, year-round poker rooms even in Las Vegas. Poker was a seasonal game that moved around the world spending a week or two in any one place before jetting off for pastures new with a few dozen degenerate gamblers on its tail. Of course, this is all before the internet took off and brought us not only the online poker explosion but a simpler way of finding out about the big events in advance. Now tournaments that were contested by a couple of hundred people are played out with several thousand entrants and online players can play more hands in a month than the pros of 20 years ago could play in several years.

Online poker has also brought with it a much wider range of stakes and with it a much better understanding of bankroll management. I played poker before the online game was born but it was just five card draw as a kid and it wasn’t that exciting. Then came Late Night Poker on Channel 4 bringing Texas hold’em to the UK television audience at around the same time as the game was blossoming on the internet, coincidentally. Live poker, played in a brick and mortar casino, requires a table, some chips, chairs, cards and so on. The house provides these in return for a fraction of each pot known as the rake. If the rake is too large a percentage of the pot then players just won’t play at that casino so the rake is kept to around 5% of the pot but in order to make sure the casino covers their costs and makes their bit of profit on top this means the lowest stakes games they can host are still prohibitively expensive for most new players testing the waters. Not so online poker where a new table requires little more than a small chunk of server bandwidth so poker sites can offer games down to the very lowest of stakes, even freebie games where the new players can get a feeling for the game without parting with a penny. It’s designed to be like crack though: the first hit is free and from then on you’re hooked and after your next fix. Only with poker you have a chance to win money, so it’s not that like crack really. Anyway, where all this was heading was bankroll management. With the advent of online poker one can now take a small amount of capital and get a good deal of poker from it, building it up steadily through small stakes games without the worry of going bust if you have a bad run of cards or luck. There are games for all bankrolls which doesn’t seem to have been the case when Antony Holden tried his luck for a year. He started with $20,000 and would enter tournaments costing a couple of grand, even when it wasn’t his preferred variant of the game. That’s a big no-no when your poker bankroll is your working capital and losing a chunk of it represents a significant limit on your earning potential. These days, with a bankroll such as Holden’s, he would be advised to enter tourneys costing no more than a couple of hundred to enter. In the book he sits down to play games at all sorts of stakes that just don’t fit his bankroll but smaller games just weren’t there at the time he was playing so he didn’t have the luxury of playing within his means most of the time. The same is true for the vast majority of players on the circuit too; they were always borrowing funds here and there to get a stake for a game that looked juicy but which they couldn’t ultimately afford to enter. As I say, things are so much different now that online poker is around to offer a huge number of games at all stakes to suit all pockets.

It’s because of how dated Holden’s account of the poker scene now seems to the internet generation who can scarcely believe that just 20 years ago the game has advanced so much that he has written a follow-up volume called Bigger Deal, which I don’t yet own (it’s on my Amazon wishlist but I thought I’d see if I liked this one first – I did, it was an interesting read) and don’t know that much about but it’ll be interesting to compare and contrast the poker scene in that book with the equivalent in this one.

#5. Earn $30,000 Per Month Playing Online Poker: A Step-by-Step Guide to Single Table Tournaments

Earn $30,000 Per Month Playing Online Poker: A Step-by-Step Guide to Single Table Tournaments by Ryan Wiseman

This book probably has the longest title of all books I will read this year and may also have the most misleading too. Promising $30,000 per month from online poker is a brave move, some may say foolhardy. It is certainly true that reading this book won’t automatically open the door to a world of riches but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s not a decent book.

Before I get into my thoughts on the book I should briefly explain why I was reading it as it’s not really in tune with my previous reads. I have been playing online poker on and off (mostly off) for over five years now and I love the game. Mostly. When I am taking a kicking at the tables then I hate it and curse the day I ever found it but generally speaking I adore poker. I love to play it, I love to read about it and I enjoy discussing the finer points of the game. I have a pretty big collection of poker books including pretty much all the major volumes on hold’em along with several texts on more left-field subjects such as the art of bluffing and the mental side of poker. When I re-read a book it is more likely to be a poker book than any other type as I look to regularly brush up on certain aspects of hold’em play. But when it comes to actually playing my results are best described as mixed.

Over the years though I have demonstrated an irritating inability to stick to one form of the game, learn the nuances of playing it and earn a bit of pocket money from it. I would hit a bad spell, spit my dummy out and try something else. I used to make a reasonable profit from limit poker before getting into no-limit tournaments. I was seduced away from the limit tables by all the talk of no-limit in the poker media, got it into my stupid little head that the game I was playing is for girls and that real men play no-limit poker. I initially did well in these tourneys before suffering some awful runs of luck combined with over-confident and poor play. So I ran for cover and returned to the limit cash tables only to find my game was shot to pieces. No-limit play had badly affected my limit game so I am back on the no-limit tournament trail at present.  

I hope things are slightly different from before as I have identified no-limit sit-n-go (SnG) tournaments (also known as single table tournaments) as good bankroll builders and something I should be able to beat on a regular basis, at the lower stakes at least, to bring in a bit of supplementary income. I think the missus has picked up on it too as she made a point of reading out the title of this book very deliberately when she bought me it for my birthday. I want to show I can stick to a plan of progressing through the stakes of these SnGs and while I don’t want to reach the obsessive levels of play it takes to earn a living from them I would like to be able to bring in some extra cash from them and not have a hissy fit when the results go against me. So with that plan in mind I picked this book up of my pile of books to be read and waded in.

It’s a slim volume at around 120 pages so the basics such as the setup of the game and the structure of a hand are skipped meaning this is not a book for beginners who have never played before. It’s aimed at players who are trying to improve their SnG game really.The opening section of the book describes a number of software tools that are available to help improve your results, either by tracking your play and that of your opponents allowing you to get a read on their style of play or by enabling you to identify weaknesses in your own game. Unfortunately, depsite the fact the book is only a couple of years old much of this information is out of date as new versions of many of these software tools have been released since the book was published. And that is one of the biggest risks of writing a book about online poker – as soon as you talk about software or hardware in any detail you limit the shelf life of your book, but if you avoid these subjects you may end up with nothing to say that hasn’t aleady been said by someone else in their book. Once you get beyond the out-of-date section on software tools you’re into the meat of the book – a quick run through how to beat SnGs from the $10 level all the way up to $500. Not that I expect many readers of this book to reach stakes that high, at least not because of what they learned from this book. Don’t get me wrong, it contains some good advice but you don’t reach the level of playing $500 tournaments from reading a single book. It takes a hell of a lot of dedication, building up experience through hours of play every day as well as something that no book can teach: natural talent. I’m sorry to say it but to some degree good poker players are born rather than bred.

There are some useful tips one can pick up from a book such as this but it shouldn’t be the only book you read on the subject if you plan to make any serious money from the game. Don’t be suckered in by the title and regard this as one of many volumes you will need to read if you wish to dominate SnGs. It’s a worthy addition to any poker library but is my no means the bible for SnGs.