http://www.amazon.com/Pot-Limit-Omah...7947533&sr=8-5

Anyone know anything about this book?

Probably going to be better than Farha's?

I asked about this book back before the switch over to vBulletin, but I don't remember what the responses were.

The author and his stalker came here to flame each other briefly. Bit weird. I would like a review of this book. I hope it stinks and the Omaha fish remain plentiful.

You're looking at it from the wrong angle IMO. A successful book would help increase the number of fish, not reduce it. It would increase the game's visibility, attracting further interest, and thus more players. Most players don't really think much on their plays, and the books don't change this. In fact, they don't seek books to learn how to think, but for ABC winning formulas. So what you really get is a ton of players memorizing starting hand charts, and then bungling around in the post-flop phase. I'm oversimplifying, but you get the point.

Strangely, chess is very similar. It is the reason for the mountains of opening books guaranteeing results. These books in turn attract more players to stick to the game, in the search for that Holy Grail.

Anything that might increase the pool of players should be welcomed with open arms.

I partially disagree Mr Silver - my feeling is you earn most money from the weakest players and books which give fish even a partly sound guide to play can stop someone being an uber-donator to the table,

having said that it may be possible that someone loses more money with a partially understood book strategy than with their own strategy.

As you mention you can see this in chess where say for a low rated player to try to play open sicilian as white is probably worse than themmakingup their own anti sicilian strategy.

I think the original thought holds. Using your Sicilian analogy: some woodpusher creates an anti-Sicilian strategy and loses far too often so he gives up playing. Whereas if he plays a recognised line, he does not go awry until move eleven and thinks he has a chance and keeps coming back.

Moreover, knowing something does not mean anyone will act on it. Do you think smokers don't know that smoking kills, that somehow they missed that?

I just got it in and posted one deep discounted copy as B-stock. It got a little dinged up in shipping if anyone wants to check it out. Upon first glance it looks interesting. He describes several plays and has several hand quizzes. 332 pages so its not a slouch on material. Here is a scan of the back cover:

Mike

You're still focusing on the players who learn it right. It doesn't matter if there are now 1000 more players playing it right, if the total pool of players grows by 10,000. Meaning 9000 more for you to play against. Game selection has always been a factor in poker anyhow.

books, or even one book, definitely make the fish better. they learn not to play so many hands, which is at least half the battle, i'd say.

also, TV brings them in, but i think eventually they learn somewhat from the TV commentary. not as much as you'd learn from a good book... but again starting hands, and not calling down with garbage (although that's more limit)

Help the FISH !!!

it is the right thing to do and the right time of year to do it

gee i have to wait til after christmas to order it but i want to say i am impressed.
the reason is for so long on amazon the book is listed at 156 pages
now i find out the book is twice as long!!!.
I am happy and hope to purchase the book after christmas and look forward to a review by someone of course.

so someone please review away eh!

This assumes that the Fish know enough to buy a poker book. I would suggest poker book sales suggest otherwise. Moreover, the biggest teacher in life is experience and the Fish refuse to learn from it so what chance has a book of instilling any wisdom in them. A Fish who did find himself reading a poker book would become marginally better and stick around longer. You can shear a sheep many times but skin it only once.

I'm shocked that a thread on this book has diverged into a philosophical discussion, the arguments of which a couple of posters can't let go of...

Definitely like somebody to review this one.

A good PLO book is long overdue in the poker book market.

There are no less than 5 high-quality hold'em books, yet there are a ton of terrible players. There are only a handful of good omaha books and the players are still terrible. The difference is that there are about 5 million terrible hold'em books that people buy and use, so the fish will always get worse. I think certain posters are over-estimating a person's desire to study. A general player is a hobbyist. He reads a book once if it is too hard (2+2), or maybe twice if it is easy.

Omaha is an evil game, IMO. I also think that the Omaha8 forum is one of the most complete and accurate forums on 2+2, and that anyone willing to learn and study study study would become a very good Omaha player by just reviewing the back-threads.

I just picked this book up tonight. In case people missed the wording on the back cover, the book actually covers more than pot-limit omaha. Of the 317 actual pages of text, 177 cover pot-limit omaha, 98 covers limit omaha hi-lo split, and 26 pages covers pot-limit omaha hi/lo split. The remaining pages are filled by a glossary and an index.

you guys dont understand how few read books

I have to agree with scorer... even if you have the books to read, it takes a real big concerted effort to study the book (reread at least 3 times) to gain a good understanding to apply the concepts.

I've seen many players in live games talk about pot odds and correct play but time and time again, I see them make major errors in over valuing their hands and losing their stack with top pair.

Wow, it's been a while. I came back just to see what others think of this book. I'm delighted it's being discussed.

Saw it Wed. night in local B&N; by Thurs. night had decided to buy it. I'm through about Ch. 3 and it looks EXCELLENT. Premise, which makes total sense from my NLHE experience, is that whereas OH hands run close in value, they don't run close in postflop stacking potential. (Think 33 vs. A5 if you need a HE analogy, with the caveat that 33xx is NOT a PLOH hand you want to play.) Therefore, let's learn what hands turn into big postflop hands with which we can stack our opponents -- mostly via freerolling, which I'm learning is the secret to deep-stack PLOH.

AFAICT it's only a deep stack book. I haven't read Slotboom's book but I really would like to have a PLO short-stack strategy which I'm told Slotboom gives. Nevertheless, after just a couple of chapters I'm closer to thinking about deep-stack PLO like a good player would.

The inclusion of a chapter on limit O8 is extremely odd. There are whole books on that game, and it has little to do with the PLOH version. However, the chapter on PLO8, which I haven't read, may be the best thing (only thing?) in print on that game. I would imagine PLO8 is also about developing huge freerolls and getting A2xx to pay to draw at a quater of the pot. It's mostly an online game, but not an uncommon one.

So far, this book looks like gold. I'll attempt a review when I'm done.

(Brief theoretical statement: I tend toward the poster saying that good books help the game, by bringing in fish. The ratio of people who properly apply a good poker book to those who only THINK they can apply it is usually much less than 1:1.)

QFT. The more I read, the more I feel like I'm learning three-card monte. Except that the cops won't shut me down.

The presence of the three different types of Omaha makes the book slightly schizophrenic it would seem to me. I would have done one of three things. I would have cut out the games other than PLO hi and left the page count whatever that would have made it; I would have cut out the other chapters and upped the page count of the PLO hi section; or, I would have eliminated the limit Omaha hi/lo split section and fleshed out the PLO hi/lo split section. Given this last section is only twenty-six pages or so, logic dictates that the author can only have barely scratched the surface.

Doc,

I agree. This seems to afflict Omaha books worse than most. Cappelletti's LO8 book, really just a pastiche of articles, includes an oddball chapter on OH. I guess his rationale is that you need to know how to play high-only hands, but really it's just filler.

But it sounds like we agree that the PLO8 is more useful than the limit O8. The LO8 part is treated in more depth in other books. The PLO8 probably isn't, although I agree it would be better to be its own book.

In any event, the PLOH material appears excellent, in spite of the lower-than-we-wish page count.

I wonder about the order of the sections, in addition. Does PLO hi, limit Omaha hi/lo split, and PLO hi/lo split seem to be the correct order? If a lot of what you need to know about the ground rules for PLO hi/lo split can be found in the PLO hi section, wouldn't it make sense to put those back to back instead of separating them? Or do you need to know something about limit Omaha hi/lo split first before tackling PLO hi/lo split?

One of the things I liked about this book is Hwang's reference to the importance of people thinking of PLO8 being more of a split-pot version of PLO, rather than a pot-limit version of O8. A slight distinction, but important nonetheless (and, of course, one that I hadn't made until I read it).

The O8 chapters are a little like the 6-max chapter in 'Kill Everyone', sort of a bonus that doesn't necessarily fit with the rest of book, given the title 'Pot Limit Omaha'. Before anyone jumps on that statement, I'm not making judgement as to the relative value of the additional chapters, just the structure of the book.

This sounds like a really good book. I am assuming this is great for those of us who are very HE players that struggle at Omaha.