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GENERAL BOOKS ON POKER
Poker for Dummies ®, by Richard D, Harroch and Lou Krieger, IDG Books Worldwide Inc., http://www.dummies.com (2000).
Consistent with all the Dummies ® books, this has provided a light and breezy overview of the world of poker, complete with numerous sub-headings, boxes, tips, summaries and cartoons.
Basic strategies have been summarized for the common cardroom games: seven card stud, and Texas Holdem poker; and the High-Low split games,
seven card stud Eight or Better, and Omaha Eight or Better.
This book will also serve as an excellent reference if you were setting up a dealer’s choice home game and needed the definitions of variants, such as Baseball, Razz,Black Mariah, Indian Poker and Criss-Cross.
Also provided has been a good overview of tournament poker, internet poker, and video poker.
The Psychology of Poker, by Alan N Schoonmaker, Ph.D., Two Plus Two Publishing.
Schoonmaker, a psychologist, has written with frankness and sincerity on how an individual’s personality has affected the way he or she has played poker. The purpose of the book has been to ‘show you how you beat yourself and tell you how to stop doing it.’
The book has invited you to rate your playing characteristics and those of your opponents, using a styles’ grid similar to the strategies grid Sid has used in Chapter 6.
Reading the book will be an interactive experience with charts to fill out and quizzes to take, all designed to induce reflection on your own underlying motivations for playing poker.
The four extreme playing styles, tight-passive, loose-passive, tight-aggressive, tight-aggressive, have been characterized and discussed in detail with emphasis on the strengths, weaknesses, and adjustments that would be needed for each playing style.
By identifying how you play poker, you will better understand how to overcome your weaknesses and exploit your strengths.
In writing about himself, Schoonmaker has explained that he has preferred low-limit poker games because of the wider variety of playing styles he has found among the people who play these games.
At the higher limits, the poker players would be more serious and more alike in their approach to the game.
To Schoonmaker, the profits have been less important than having fun and learning about people.
Overall, it is an insightful book that would apply to all forms of poker. Serious Poker, 2nd Edition, by Dan Kimberg,
ConJelCo, http://www.conjelco.com (2002). Kimberg, who has maintained a large informational website on poker (see online resources) has provided an ambitious and comprehensive book that has covered a tremendous amount of ground.
Much of the material in his book has been thought provoking and unique, which you wouldn’t find elsewhere.
The poker variants that have been emphasized have been the two most popular in cardrooms, seven card stud and Texas Holdem poker.
He has described the book as ‘an operator’s manual for cardrooms,’ and the current 2nd edition of the book will have a section on Internet poker play. A major strength of this book is that Kimberg has taught us how to think about poker, both at the table and away from it.
As he has explained, because poker has been a fast-paced game, 99% of the thinking would need to be done away from the table.
Among the topics included in this book have been discussions of the luck versus skill factor, poker tournaments, detecting cheating methods, avoiding tells, and conducting home games. One would also find a section at the end for the technically minded, with detailed mathematical explanations on probability concepts and their application to poker.
The Theory of Poker, by David Sklansky, Two Plus Two Publishing, http://www.twoplustwo.com(1994).
This has been one of the most influential books on the subject of poker ever been written. Sklansky has discussed general concepts that have applied to all variations of poker and has included examples from play in Holdem, seven card stud, Five-Card Draw, and Lowball.
The book has presented the point of view of a professional poker player and the emphasis has been on placing good bets, those that have had a positive mathematical expectation.
This will not been an easy read because the mathematical analysis that accompany his examples will at times be complex. Often, for the purposes of computation, he has assigned mathematical expectations to individual behaviors. For instance, a play against an opponent who has bluffed 30% of the time would require different strategy than an opponent who has bluffed 5% of the time because the mathematical expectations would be different when you bet.
Assigning numbers to behaviors would be a good technique for demonstrating why the strategies would have to be different.
In practice, few poker players would think about that at the table. Instead, they would learn to judge the difference between opponents who would bluff frequently, infrequently, or never.