There seems to be an endless stream of no-limit strategy books. Some authors may think that more pages is better for sales -- I looked at one voluminous book in particular (The Grinder's Manual) and on the first page was a multi-syllabic word from high school 'vocab' -- which was startling and caused me to put the book down. I haven't seen much written in a concise or directive fashion to help amateurs avoid the darker sides of poker and gambling all day.

Mistakes can happen with the cards themselves, either intentional or a technical glitch...(i think this is a fair breakdown?)... a hand that illustrates the latter really well happened at the Aria in a 300k buy-in game; televised with pros and all. Doug Polk was dealt into a misdeal involving two Queen of Spades being shown....it wasn't clear how it came to be, but a chaotic situation was in place.

I was wondering if anyone could find that hand on YouTube? Also curious to hear the best advice people have to offer.

Barry Greenstein's Ace on the River may be the book you are klooking for. less technical a book, for sure.

You put the book down because of the vocabulary on page one, but used the word "voluminous" in your own post?

I think I originally saw the misdeal on another channel, but you can see that crazy As Qc Qc flop in this clip:

poor phrasing in the op- it was a free chapter on amazon and i tilt closed the window...i wasn't in the mood to read something with flowing vocabulary in that moment.

thx for locating the duplicate Q video.

tbh, I read the first page of the book after reading the first post here and I found the writing annoyingly prosaic.

As with anything, newbies can protect themselves by the crawl/walk/run technique. I would never suggest that a new player avoid the classics one bit, SS and PG's 'color' books are just fine to get started.

I usually find 'something' in every book I go through, but there's a lot of repeat information from one to another so get used/library if available.

Of course putting in some time on a site like this one will work some good as well. GL

better protect themselves from what? Being preyed upon? What "dark side" of poker are you referring to? As in a gambling problem?

Depending on your skill level, game selection, and bankroll management(or budget management), you can win a lot of money, or you can lose a lot of money by gambling all day, or you can fall somewhere in the middle. It's not glamorous. It's not good for your body. It can disrupt your eating and sleeping habits. It can seriously **** up your relationships. There is a dark side and it's not pretty.