This book is an excellent companion volume for Chen & Ankenman’s Math of Poker (MOP), and will give the careful reader a deeper and richer understanding of poker. There is a lot about game theory optimal play and lots of examples about what kinds of hand ranges belong in which betting regions. It is far and away the best book available at balancing your play (and exploiting unbalanced play of villains) and creating unexploitable lines, and it helps that the book is well-written and well-edited.

A lot of his Newall’s strategy is based on information hiding and balancing and he talks a lot about how it is easier to balance your game if you restrict your strategic options. He spends a lot of time reviewing limit holdem plays made by state-of-the-art computer programs and analyzing how the plays by the computer compare with the strategies he has derived based on information hiding and balance. I was surprised by how strongly the computer played some of its weaker hands and how weak some of the hands were that it called down with.

Although other books apply math and theory too, they tend to place more emphasis on experience and pragmatism over theory, and provide more guidelines and rules of thumb about how to play in different situations. Newall’s approach is more weighted more towards math/game theory/scientific research and how they apply to poker. It bridges part of the gap between the toy games covered in MOP and real games.

Most of the examples in the book are from limit holdem. As far as I can tell, most of the concepts would apply to other games as well, but in most cases you would need to work out the implications and specific examples on your own. I would have liked to see some more advice about how applicable some of Newall’s concepts would be to games with other betting structures such as big bet games or split pot games.

Part Two is a review of the principles of finance, game theory, and psychology and composes about a third of the book. It is interesting, but is more abstract and there are few concrete examples.

This book will appeal to academic types or to those who want to devise their own strategies. It will be invaluable to very advanced players who play in tough games and want to be on the cutting edge and develop their own creative and non-exploitable lines.

The book won’t be quite as useful after Black Friday, because there is more of a need for balanced game-theoretically optimal play in high stakes online games than there is in live games.

This is a top-tier book, but I don’t think it will be that popular or useful to the average player. Although there is not a lot of computational math in the book, it does emphasize game theory and logic and that requires careful reading and concentration. There are few easy to follow rules and extrapolating from the principles in the book to other games will require a lot of work.

Newall early on makes the point that in order to play exploitive poker its much easier to see spots to exploit once you understand gto poker. They work hand in hand.
Also, just as mop uses simple toy games to breakdown poker to simpler elements, newall uses limit poker,
a simpler form of poker to bring forth concepts that can be implemented in nl etc.
this is a very well written book, and its up there with both mop and top. Its a must read for anyone serious
about their game. Seriously good if you use the info.w

Thanks for your two reviews. Even though the excerpts were disappointing, I feel I can now safely add the book to my "to buy" list.

+1

What is something you learned from this book that you could see yourself implementing into your game or have already implemented?

This book should help change the way you think and approach the game.
If you are already a true expert player who has read mop ,for example, and taken that information to create a "blueprint" for yourself, then you might not need this book.
other than that, after reading this book, if you are serious,...... then you will probably want to deconstruct your game, as you will be looking at things differently. Thats the best I can give you. Someone else can probably say it better i'm sure.
This book comes from the right perspective. rather than telling you which hands to re-raise with etc. it teaches you how to think about these situations.
I've read many times about how other books teach you how to think about the game. In my opinion, this one really lives up to that statement.

Thanks for the response. I was contemplating whether to buy it or not, and your review has helped in my decision. I am wanting a book more advanced like this.

P29:
we play FLT, post blind in CO, all fold to us. book says always raise. for me this seems like we just increase the size of our forced blind which the rest of the players sure would like, if they could they would make our size infinite and just call with all hands that have >50% vs random. thus checking 100% must be a better play than raising 100% given all play GTO. right?

If all other Players play GTO, they dont care what strategy you play. They just defend enough Hands that you cant make an automatic Profit with your play. The strategy that you explained exploits a player that has posted and then raises 100%. But they dont play exploitive strategys.

if we blind more their EV increases which means it has to come from someone and that someone is us. yes they would play the same but they would have higher EV and our EV would be lower.

Listen, if you want to post your blind in the c/o and not raise then do that.

thanks! i dont play a pure strat but i was forced to i would prefer checking over raising. it obviously doesnt make intuitive sense to you, but it makes logical sense to me.

This book isn't for someone who is looking to buy "a book" to improve.

It's more a study guide. The structure closely follows Mathematics of Poker by Chen and Ankenman (with additional material related to psychological biases), but much of the strength and value of this book may well be in references to research publications. One of the criticisms of Mathematics of Poker was that it was inaccessible, and did not address "real games". Newall's book fills much of that gap.

From a game-play POV, I would guess that the reader needs to read carefully about the questions posed (eg: should I be cbetting 100%, and if not, constructing different ranges), since the book isn't algorithmic in a way that provides a cookbook for a turnkey GTO poker game.

Definitely belongs on the second tier of poker books alongside Theory of Poker, but below the current champ, Mathematics of Poker.

I would agree for the most part but there are specific recommendations for playing different streets but with no specific hands.
Im reading this book for a second time . All the examples from polaris are really helpful in getting a more concrete idea how to construct your distribution for the different streets etc. Really there is alot of good info in here. you dont see the high limit or heads-up forums talking much about this book, as its really an opportunity for the lay person to get on a much more equal footing with the elite in this game imo,.. and im sure some are not too happy about that.

Does anyone else wish to say anything good or bad about this book?