ICWUDT? Help me out with this one please

i c wut u did there

Yeah, it was meant as sort of a dig on just what amulet is saying. Who cares what someone plans to do, is going to do or has partially done?
I want to know who has read this book and what they think of the book in it's entirety. I am very surprised it has taken this long, when HOC came out there were reviews in a matter of days. I would like to see a review by Focault or Phydaux or another of the well respected reviewers.

The issue is this is one of the most advanced books PERIOD. It literally teaches you how to break down many areas of your no limit game that I have yet to see in print. This is coming from someone that owns a few expensive ebooks. If you are looking to get spoon fed before you make a decesion to buy then you prob aren't going to get the most out of this book due to the amount of work it takes to become great at this game. I feel this book should be more exspensive as it will no doubt make already tough games even more difficult. It freakin teaches you how to fish man!

Is here someone who read it and plays FR?? I just bought the book from amazon but i play only FR. Thx

fora intermediate player is it recommended to read harrington onlione cash book before jumping into this one or could i just skip the harrington online book all together and just use this one as an advanced read.?

Honestly, I'm not much of a critic on poker books, but this book is really disappointing. The way the book is written just makes it seem like the author is not in touch with how online 6 max games actually play, and it hurts the credibility of the author's points.

Here is an example from page 189 "Getting Three Bet Out of Position." "The first player folds. Hero raises to $35 [with AQs]. The button three-bets to $115 and both blinds fold. The pot is now $165... [talks about shoving allin as a 4bet]... Our other option is to make a smaller four-bet. This should be around $360 since anything less gives our opponent good odds to call, and anything more is similar to an allin."

The effective stacks are 110 bbs at a 5-10 game. If you get 3bet to $115 it makes absolutely no sense to 4bet to 36 bbs because as he mentions in this discussion, you can't fold to a 5 bet for this price. A good sizing for a 4bet would be between 24-30 bb's in this situation because then you can balance a range of bluffs and value hands. He dogmatically says that flat calling this 3bet is not even worth a discussion because you're out of position, but doesn't address the fact that in 3 bet pots position is less valuable. So basically our options when someone 3bets us and we're out of position are shoving allin with a 100 bb stack or folding.

On page 57 in the section "Playing Against Short-Stackers," Bakker claims that with 20 bb effective stacks in sb vs bb play, the ev of making a small open from the sb vs open shoving from the sb are very close in value and then proceeds to give a detailed discussion of the latter scenario. This is ridiculous. From my simulations in Cardrunners-ev-calculator, the ev of the sb in his equilibrium solution is -.2 bb per hand. In reality if you open 60-80% of sbs with 20% effective stacks, cbet every flop, and call shoves preflop with around a 20% range, and call postflop with a good draw, middle pair or better, you will show a profit from the sb. I've backed this strategy up with my own play against shortstackers in the small stakes where rake is an even bigger factor.

Anyway, I'm sure that there are some good points that Thomas Bakker makes in the book. I like his section about playing with weaker players. Overall the book reads like a college thesis paper. I just think that some of his examples are profoundly different from the actual game play online, and they make the examples totally worthless.

support twoplustwobookstore and site and get the book from Mike...

I just got the book yesterday and am about 2/3 of the way through it (I spent a lot of today reading it and thinking). So far, like the previous reviewer, I am less than satisfied. There is some really seriously flawed information, examples, and methods in here. If the reader isn't already a good player and able to discern which parts are good and which are bad, he will be hurting his game tremendously by following all of the advice.

That being said, I did find enough value out of the book so far that it's not a total loss. The discussion of ranges and polarization was interesting and I really like the "tool" of visualizating a range as a graph. I also liked many of the reads and adjustments he talks about.

Still, this is the 2nd 2p2 book in a row to hurt my view of this company. The plo book was not very good either. I think they need some new staff members to discern when a manuscript is worth picking up and how to edit it properly. Between my dad and I, we have every 2p2 book since the 90's and most of them are great even as I go back and look at them today. I am not sure what is going on lately that any poker related books are sub par. I did really like the recent DUCY but that wasn't a poker book.

I am waiting for delivery before i comment.

But what has changed from the aldineO7 post to the last 2,
ajloeffl you should be a bit more specific on said flawed methods examples ect.
and bad advice as this is a disscusion thread.
And i dont agree with awesemo that position is less important in 3 bet pots.
If your in a ultra agressive 5/10 6 max game online the amount of squeezing with/and 3 bets IP that goes on is unreal.

Can you point to some examples? That's a pretty strong statement to make without pointing to the text.

Not saying you're wrong, I'm just curious as to where the flaws are IYO. I'm about 2/3 of the way through the book, so it's quite relevant to me.

+ 1

If we make a four-bet to $240, the button will be getting around 3:1 odds and he will have position. Considering the range we assigned to him, it seems completely unreasonable to assume that he will fold many stronger hands. Considering that he has position, we are not happy when he calls our four-bet with slightly weaker hands either. Thus four-betting that small would simply be giving away money.

If he was three-betting a much wider range, then a small four-bet (still bigger than this 24bb, though) might have some merit, but it is a dangerous habit to get used to; in many cases, you'll just be building a huge pot while out of position while giving your opponent the choice when to play.

First of all, I have short-stacked for around two months back in 2008 to study short-stacked play. In the situation you mention, where you are effectively short-stacked in the small blind in an unopened pot, the difference between the EV of opening with a raise and open-shoving depends greatly on the stack size. I don't remember the exact numbers, but I think the crossover was somewhere between 15 and 20 big blinds. It is true that for high stack sizes, close to 20 big blinds, it would technically be better to open with a raise.

Professional short-stackers can do this, they can spend a lot of time studying and memorizing this situation. However, playing optimally with such an open-raising strategy would be much more complicated than the single chart we use for our open-shoving strategy. For most regular players it is much more convenient to use only this simple strategy and give up a little bit in EV when our opponent has a full 20bb stack. This section is not meant as a guide for short-stackers to play optimally, but for poker players to deal with short-stackers effectively.

This is all just my opinion. I am no expert high stakes baller but I've played hundred of thousands of hands.

First off, though I was harsh (and rightly so), for me, this book was worth getting and spending time reading. It just wasn't even close to on par with books such as NLHTAP and TOP, and I was expecting much better given the long wait and anticipation.

Part 1 Range-Oriented Thinking - Overall this is a pretty good section. Like many players I was already thinking about ranges, polarization, and balance etc but I really liked the frequency vs hand strength graph representation. Often I like to visualize rather than think in words and this "tool" is very helpful. As one aside, I find the example on page 34 to be pretty bad. My experience is that "aggressive" players as he describes will continuation bet quite a lot. The flop of A63r is a flop that many aggressive players will continuation bet with near 100% of their range (which would include most of their bluffs). This means they usually have a weak-ish made hand (ie less than tp or a weak tp) on the flop when they do check behind. If they do forgo a bluff on the flop with some of their air, our opponent will often bet the turn with it once we check and give them the green light twice. I think it is pretty unlikely that an aggressive villain even gets to the river with a bluff. You would need some more read specific information to justify that this bet on the river is "often a bluff" as is said.

Part 2 Preflop Play in Unraised Pots - The example on page 41 seems rather worthless and I can't figure out why it is there. There is really no explanation of it and then it jumps into limping. The discussion of limping seems alright though I and sure most of the 2p2 audience and decent players know by now to raise mostly when first in. Then on page 50, we have another seemingly worthless example. It starts with an explanation and then tangents into short stack play and never gets back to the example. It seems to be a reasonable intro on short stack play but then talks about short stack 3 betting, optimal play, equilibria, and POST FLOP play against short stackers. WTF, I'm pretty sure we are in the "Preflop Play in Unraised Pots" chapter. This short stack stuff should be off on its own somewhere and not in here.

There are dozens of logic errors, grammatical errors and other flaws that I am skipping because typing all this crap out isn't worth my time. I just wanted to point out some issues. I may look at Part 3+ again and comment later.

I don't have a copy of the book with me right now, so I cannot look up the specific pages you mentioned here. However, I believe that the examples you are referring to are the hand that is split over multiple chapters. Part 2 of the book is written around the pre-flop part of the hand. So, when the short-stacker is to act in this hand, there is a chapter about play against short-stackers. The chapters in the post-flop part of the book use the post-flop part of the same hand as example.

Hey man, thanks for replying to my criticisms about your book. My point about the 4 betting was that making a 4 bet to 36 bb's isn't a good strategy because your opponent is going to know you're not bluffing because you would have to expect to fold out 2/3 of his range to show a profit on a bluff. So, he can feel comfortable just folding his hands that are weaker than AQs. I didn't say that 24 bb is optimal sizing, I said somewhere in the range of 24-30 bb's. I think the typically recommended strategies that I've seen are 4betting to 2.4-2.5x the 3bet size with a range of bluffs and value hands. I could see how you might argue that your strategy would involve 4betting small with monster hands and bluffs with blockers, and argue for 4betting allin with hands like AK or AQs; but, that's not what the book talks about.

That being said, even if we did 4 bet to 24 bbs, there would be 49.5 bbs in the pot with 86 bb effective stacks, so the SPR would be 1.7. I fail to see how position is going to even be much of a factor with a SPR this small, unless you are just planning to check fold any missed flop. You only need to have 38.6% equity to jam the flop profitably. I would argue that if your 4 bet gets flatted, you are going to have way more than 38.6% equity preflop, and that means on the average flop you are going to have more than 38.6% equity against your opponents range as well. Position is valuable for two main reasons: seeing what your opponent does before you have to act, and controlling the size of the pot. If you plan to just bet/call almost every flop, the fact that he is in position doesn't even matter. In addition, your opponent needs to be worrying that you have AA, KK, or any other hand that is dominating his; so even if he pairs on the flop or hits an overpair his hand might not be good. That's why it's not that bad to give them 3-1 odds; in addition, your reverse implied odds are low.


I believe that you know how to play a short stack strategy well, and I believe that you know how to play a full stack well also. But, I'm talking about the content of the book. The example in the book is talking explicitly about 20 bb stacks. As I mentioned, you claim that going allin and making a small raise are similar in equity is completely false. If you follow the equilibrium strategy of jamming preflop, you show a EV of losing 2/5 of your small blind. If you make a small raise and call allin with hands that have a Skalansky Chubokov rating of more than 20, you win a quarter of your opponents big blind on average. This is a difference of .9 sbs each time this situation comes up. Obviously that is a huge difference.

As this is a book for advanced players, I was really excited for this section so I could optimize my game because I play against professional short stackers every day. To be able to compete against them effectively, you need to understand the strategy just as well as them for playing 20 bb stacks and nothing less. That's why I was so disappointed by the strategy in this section. It's not even good advice for the .5/1 games I play, much less 5/10 games.

It's very weird there is no discussion of 4 bet bluffing as the author seems fully aware of balance. Or maybe I missed it and someone could point out where in the book that discussion is. I see some stuff on 4 betting on page 195 and the sizing is awful as another reviewer pointed out. Thomas points out that by 4 betting to 45 big blinds we have options yet our opponent can only shove or fold at this point. What option do we have exactly? If we are dealing with 100 big blind stacks, I hardly see the point of ever 4 betting to 45 big blinds. We can't fold if we get shoved on given the odds. If he expands and says we have 200 big blinds, then a 4 bet of that size is fine.

Hey stop with criticism:-)). I bought the book and now I found here only bad reviews. Is it really that bad?? Someone positive? Save me so I didn't lost one half of BI for buing this book.

It's not all bad. Just read through all the reviews as you are reading it to see what people think is or might be wrong.

There's lots of positive stuff above.

I thought this was an excellent book, way better than most poker stuff available. The chance to follow a thought process like Bakker's is worth way more than the price of the book, regardless of whether or not the results of his analysis are completely correct. Anybody who buys the book will take away at least one thing from it: a solid method of breaking hands down into logical units from which you can make more sound decisions.

While the book's content is excellent, my one complaint is that the prose needs a good editing job. I commend Bakker for writing 300 pages in a non-native language, but it gets hard to follow at times and could be easily improved with a simple gloss by a pro. You can get editors to do full book jobs on eLance for like $300, so there's no real excuse not to.

This book, like all the books we publish, went through a lot of editing and a great deal of content review, and we wouldn't release it if we felt it didn't read well and wasn't accurate. One of the issues is that we require all our books to have a mathematical preciseness which means that the text will say in very exact language what the author meant it to say, and that it cannot be interpreted in more than one way, (yet at the same time we also strive for a conversational tone). However, the price of doing this is some language will not read smoothly. (If you have any doubt about what I'm saying, just pick up an advanced mathematics text and start reading.)

Also, your comment that we could hire an editor for $300 is extremely inaccurate. There is no way, at this price, any of our books would be readable at even a basic level of understanding. And by the way, we do use a professional index builder for the index, and the price we pay to get that done is approximately four times what you are suggesting we pay for an editor.

MM

Um...

I don't even know what to say here, Mason.

I have a literature degree w/ a minor in computer science. I'm familiar with both kinds of texts--flowery prose and dense, arcane math.

I run a content provision business for a living. Part of my job is making sure that work gets out as efficiently as possible. Let me just say this: if you're paying your index compiler ~$1200, talk to me next time you publish a book. I will charge you half of that, and you'll still be overpaying.

(you realize that a Python script can index a book w/ almost as much accuracy as a human, yes? Run the script, pay a human to gloss over the results for even $100 an hour--MAX $300)

And re: your editorial pricing comment. I don't even know where to start. There are so many journos out of work right now that you can get a bestseller edited for $500. I have no idea where you're hiring people from but they are overcharging you. A lot.

P.S. I take reading notes whenever I make my way through a book. ANLHE is no exception. If you want me to post mine here, I will. If you want me to PM them to you, I will. If you want me to just keep my mouth shut, I will. It's up to you. But your decision will speak volumes.

**** man! I loved the book! And I get the publisher coming at me in full attack-dog mode when I point out that the editing job is ****. I don't get it. You used the word "immensely" as an adjective in two consecutive sentences ON THE BACK COVER OF THE BOOK.

P.P.S. Ban?

On page 308, the answer to Exercise No. 1 seems to be incorrect. I am pretty sure each pocket pair has 6 combinations if there are no known dead cards to account for, yet the chart says 3. This messes up both answers in that exercise.

What? Obv I feel ******ed engaging you, but:

Here immensely is an adverb modifying the verb phrase has changed.

Immensely is an adverb modifying the adjective popular.

Redundant, yes, but not grammatically incorrect. I've read the book, and I think it's excellent, especially if you're interested in learning how players think about problems and how they work them out away from the table.

I personally spent well over 100 hours on this text, just like I do on all our texts, working with the author on the content and the language. If you were to pay for that, what do you think the charge would be? and I'm not the only one who does this type of work on every book we publish.

If you think the editing job is poor, then that's the case with all our books, because the approach and effort is exactly the same.

As for using the same word close together on the back cover, that's a correction which we make literally hundreds of times in each book we publish, perhaps because none of our authors are professional writers. Unfortunately, the back cover verbage was done quickly and I only looked at it once, but you are correct, that error should not be there.

And finally, when you write something like:

if you don't like the way the book, or any of our books, is written, that's your opinion and we have no problem with it.

MM