Quote:
Originally Posted by harharnorth
I'm very much a beginner and was looking to purchase this book. Unsure at this point, as I don't think I have the base yet, being so new to poker. Definitely one for the future it seems with all the high praise people have been giving it.
This is a question to You, Will or anyone else who has read it. What knowledge should I possess before studying this book? I'm sure I could get a lot from it, but at the same time I don't want to be googling a word or concept twice every page as I'm unaware of the basics around it.
Or does the book contain all the information for a beginner like myself to start without a firm grasp on the fundamentals?
Thanks!
Hey, sorry for the delay in responding. I was sort of hoping that someone with an outside perspective might opine on this one.
I wouldn't say there's anything in particular that a new player who carefully reads from one cover to the next won't understand. I'm pretty careful to define all my terms, even if they're really basic, just to make sure everyone's on the same page. For example: what is a raise, what is a 3-bet, a c-bet, a range? (Incidentally a lot of this stuff is in Ch. 1 which is freely available if you want to check it out.) I doubt you'll find yourself googling terms very often.
So I think most new players could certainly read the book and understand it at some level. The thing is, they might not have the contextual unerstanding to make the most use of it. If you read something and you don't really see why it's important, your brain tends to just forget it. But if you read something and you can say to yourself, "yea I get put in that spot a lot against my regular opponent X because he starts out doing A and I adjust thusly so that leads to this sort of situation, and now I see how I should deal with it!" then it sort of attaches itself to that situation in your brain and next time it comes up, you'll remember what you learned. So, I'd say that you need some experience and some big picture knowledge of the game before you'll be able to see where a lot of the more subtle concepts fit in exactly.
I mean, what a true beginner usually really needs -- the fastest way to get them from clueless to breaking even at the micro stakes -- is for a friend or book to just sit them down and say: "from the SB, open raise hands W, call 3-bets with hands X, and from the BB, defend hands Y and 3-bet hands Z. Size your bets between half pot and full pot, c-bet a lot, and try to put a lot of money in with top pair or better." Buuttt I really don't like saying those sorts of things, at least in public and certainly not in book format, because they're oversimplified to the point of being wrong. Each of those things depends on tons of variables. I guess the standard approach to dealing with that issue is to go into a long discussion and try to cover a bunch of conditions under which different strategies might be appropriate, which ultimately still leads to an over-simplification at some point, since there's more possibilities than you could ever cover. So, I usually try to just give you the tools to think about things yourself and then do an example or two -- I think this is simpler and ultimately more useful for people. But of course it also requires a bit more sophistication from the reader.