just read it....can't believe how little he gets played back at.
Certainly unlike any tournament I ever play in.

Either his opponents were running scared or they were totally card dead for the entire tourney.

Good read though. By only showing the hands he played though it makes it all look pretty easy to win.

Hand nr.84
Crucial Hand 6: A 290,000 pot with Ace high on the flop.

Why he thought that: "I didn't think he started out with a pair."

SB might limp with 22-99 there?

I'm reading this book now and I was wondering what people thought of it. Here's my thoughts.

I never felt strongly about Gus Hansen one way or the other, but he seems like a polarizing figure. People seem to either think he's a great player or a horrible far-overrated player. I don't know him well enough to say, only seen him on tv a few times, but, in general in games, I do respect guys who have unorthodox styles that work. I tend to think a guy who plays unusual and divides opinion is probably smarter than a guy who plays really well and solid but more predictably. So that's part of why I picked up the book when I saw it at Borders, even though I pretty much stopped reading poker books.

I like the unusual style of the book. Instead of giving instructions or abstract reasoning like most poker books, which I personally have found worse than useless every single time, he just gives his own thoughts and reasons for doing what he did for each hand in a tournament he played. So instead of saying this is what you should do, he says this is what I did and why. He realizes that a lot of people think, for example, his preflop calling range OOP is too loose. He clearly thinks he knows better but he doesnt come off as arrogant. He includes every single hand including some where he says "I don't know what I was thinking here, it was a really bad mistake." This honest and unique approach that sticks to storytelling about the tournament, and one guy's subjective thoughts and opinions about hands, is a lot more impressive and more helpful to me than other books I have read which pretend to be definitive, objective truth about poker strategy and aren't.

I can't believe the ****ing guy from the book showed up and idiots hated on him until he left. This guy is the second most important person in a book, the book we are supposed to be discussing. ****ing moron idiots. I haven't gotten to the final section yet but to have insight from both players would be invaluable. Sad that some fat greasy loser who has accomplished nothing chose this opportunity to ruin something interesting.

What are these guys mad about, supposed disrespect for Gus Hansen in his tone? Go to one of the NVG Gus threads or something. The guy is one of Gus's competitors, and you are mad that he criticized his game?

I thought the book was entertaining but we were not provided with the full info.We do not get approx chip stacks of the other players at the table or even how many are left to act on some of the hands.My feeling is that Gus is also holding back on his full thoughts quite often.

i think gus could be a better player, but i think he's very unique...............

i think he's very +EV tournament wise. and probably could even be more +EV with some minor changes.

but i think he gets paid off because of his image........... and i think we could all learn alot from him.

sorry, not too insightfull!!!

I also found this in a bookstore at my lakeplace

"Gus Hansen is brilliant" said Hellmuth on TV and it definately shows in this book. He simplifies the strategy, math, stats, and reasoning of Tournament Poker into less than 200 pgs. This book is extremely easy to read because it only lasted that weekend before I finished.

A MUST READ 4 THE SERIOUS PLAYER

Adam

A friend of mine let me borrow the book about six months ago and I finished it within a day. Whilst I do not think it is the most thought provoking poker book I have ever read, it was certainly entertaining to say the least and I would definitely recommend it to anyone interested in poker.

Gus gets away a lot, cause these young players just try to exploit him too much, turns their willingness to exploit too much into positive +EV/ROI outcomes and results by just waiting patiencienly and using his table image more often than not, when young guys simply try to overexploit him by 3-betting against him too light.

Gus plays a lot OOP, cause then he can donkbet a lot being first to act on and after the flop and then find opponents who just keep bluffraising and floating him gametheoreticly too much and find enough spots to counterexploit that accordingly.

this book looks interesting, I think ill check it out

i read it when it came out and I found it very entertaining and I finished it within a day. but be careful, don't get too recreational after reading it ;-)

It depends who you are playing against. I find it funny, that people tend to worry and still even laugh to GUS like for example Adam, Diego and Phil Gordon on this weeks Scoop on Cardplayer TV, because of the fact that you are not winning and beating huge fields with ABC-poker anymore and that is a way too stupid to play ABC all the way instead of at least trying to win by playing so called recreationally...

For tournaments, At which stakes online do players start playing as passively pre flop as the ones from the hand examples shown in Gus Hanson's book?

He seems to steal very easy pre flop with not much resistance.

Saw this book the other day and thought "Wow, what a great idea...I always wished this could be done but never htought possible..." anyway I began reading it and read probably 20 pages and it's quite a great read. I am not a great poker player but I was very surprised to see how Gus' mind works. He's smarter than I had given him credit for. He makes plays I'll never be able to make and I think reading this has made me realize that I can never make it as a poker player.

I hope mainstream players don't read this and realize "Oh sh*t, this dude is way smarter than me. Are all players this brilliant? I can't beat tournaments...." and leave poker.

I will try to finish reading the book, for entertainment purposes only. I am not capable of implementing much of it. But I certainly am intelligent enough to appreciate it.

given that this thread was bumped, i'll wade in again... great book. enjoyed it alot....... but what i don't understand is this: gus was very aggressive and has a very loose image but people just folded over and over and over again to him. given his image, shouldn't they have been more inclined to "look him up" and call more.......... my theory is that people are so worried about crashing out of these events that they are far too conservative. big reason ivey, hanson, negreanu, greenstein etc. do so well. they don't care about busting out.

Compare this book to watching a baseball game. The pitcher throws a fastball inside. The batter takes it for strike 3 and the commentator talks about k-zone. That is about all the information you get by just watching and listening.

In reality there were scouting reports on the batter, the batter on the other hand studied tapes of the pitcher. The sequence of pitches was planned more or less. He threw the fastball inside, because his last pitch was a change-up away and that is only 1st level thinking. I am not even talking about what happend in the past, the current score, the inning and baserunners here and I am not mentioning control issues or adjustments to the umpire either. Overall I want to show that there is much more to it than just a fastball inside and the batter taking it.

Now why am I writing all of this stuff? It basically means that Gus doesn't give away anything. He "shows" us how he plays, but he hardly explains it. There are some superficial comments about all-in odds and such, but that's beginner stuff. You hardly learn anything about his ranges or what his overall play is based upon.

It is a nice book, it is even an interesting book, but don't expect to gain any sort of deeper insight about Gus Hansen from it. The book is scratching on the surface and this alone may already lead to a huge impression on beginners or intermediate players, but in reality there isn't much to it. Basically everyone could write a "I had nothing, but I thought he couldn't stand the heat, so I bet"-book.

I got the same impression from reading the book.You are not even told basic information like what the approx stack sizes at the table are.

I would say the part where he agonizes about folding 72o and 42s give a pretty decent indication of his range.

It's interesting, even if there's really not a lot to it as far as in-depth strat or any heavy thinking. $11 or whatever I paid seemed about right

Full tilt academy has a new video by gus hansen and in it he uses examples and concepts he used winning the aussie millions to make a video on controlling the table in tournaments.

I found it to be a nice compliment to the book and worth trying out the challenges if one is so inclined.

the concept was "i bet, you fold".... but i what want to know is "are they folding because it's gus hansen??"....... seems the opposite of what i would have thought. don't think they fold nearly as much for you or i even though almost all of us are TAG.

Hi folks,

I didn't read this entire thread, so maybe it was mentioned before, but:

Did you notice that there are errors in this book?

- several times, Hansen wrote things that actually happened differently! You can see it if you compare the book to the tv reports of the Aussie Millions 2007 on youtube!

E.g. hand # 212:
In his book, Hansen says he had A9 ;
what he did have in fact was A9
(you can see it -here-, at 5:00)
....as there are three s coming on the board, this does indeed make a decent difference for his (semi-?)bluff on the turn!


- Also, Hansen often says "opponent foldet instantly" when he/she actually did think for some seconds.


- Furthermore, the secuence of hands is not identical with the one shown on tv - however, this might also be an error by the tv makers, so no blame on Hansen here.



Altogether don't get me wrong:
I still like this book very much and I loved reading it!

So this book has great reviews from when it was published, but is it still as reputable/relevant/useful now that the author is one of the biggest online losers?
Or is it just a fun read?

To me it is a very fun read. Also, I believe it is still highly relevant today if only to see what goes through the mind of a LAG player as he progresses in a tournament. There are much better books to learn the technical aspects of the game from if that is what you are interested in. However, this remains my favorite "entertaining" poker book.

Looks like you came along quite well sir!