This website edition (and the ebook edition) is a revision of the orginal work which is still available in paperback.

Contents

• Preface
• Chapter 1. Introduction
• Part 1
• Part 2. Why play poker?
• Unique features of poker
• Chapter 22. Tournaments
• What is a tournament?
• Very large fields

The last few years has brought us a huge glut of options in playing poker and a corresponding glut of options in how to learn the game. There are more poker books, more computer tools, and the ability to play on line for very low stakes. In some ways readers have a wider range of choices than ever in choosing a book (or books) us use as a guide to learning the game. Given the number of poker books on the market, this is probably not your first poker book. Why another book on Hold'Em?

It's because you don't have nearly as wide a range of reading options as appears by just looking at the number of titles. Most of the books on the market today are repetitive, derivative, and some of them aren't all that well written and don't offer much other than repetition of misconceptions. Most have been written to cash in on the huge popularity that has accompanied the growth of poker on TV.

I’m hoping that this book stands out from that crowd, that it offers the reader a guided tour into ways to think about the game that will serve you through a lifetime of playing poker. The book is about Hold’Em poker, many different versions of the game including limit Hold’Em, no-limit Hold’Em, tournaments, short-handed play, and other popular variations. But, we’re going to cover all these variations in such a way that the reader should be able to apply the concepts to other forms of poker. The general principles don’t really change from one poker variation to another.

You can win at poker without much of an understanding of the game and some of the stuff being written today illustrates that. To win regularly in poker all you really have to do is learn some basic guidelines for playing tight, then find some weak opponents. You can win that way, but weak opponents are getting hard to find. If you want to play a lot of tournaments you aren't going to be able to count on finding weak opponents. If you want to win consistently against a wide range of opposition you’ll need to go past just playing tight.

Of course you can often win just by getting lucky, but that isn't something you can count on to be a consistent winner. Especially in tournaments is almost always turns out that the winner got very lucky, but that doesn't mean that getting lucky is the road to success. The better you understand the game the better your chances of both getting lucky and of being able to profit from getting lucky. Getting lucky doesn't help much if you don't also profit from getting lucky.

A player who knows what he’s doing will win much more when he’s lucky enough to get dealt AA than a player who doesn’t know what he’s doing will win.

This book, like the first edition, is intended to provide you with the playing and intellectual tools needed to consistently play winning poker.

If you want to maximize your wins, and be able to win against almost any non-expert opponents (and some experts) you'll need to do more than just find weak opponents while hoping to get lucky. Hopefully, this book will help start you down that road.