David sklansky, Holdem Poker,
Two Plus Two Publishing, 1997
This book was originally published by Gambler’s Book Club, a Las Vegas bookstore, in 1978.
It was the first major book written on Holdem.
It’s a classic, and every Holdem player should read it, if only for its historical value. When the book was first written, the usual blind structure was different than it is today.
Games typically had only one blind, the amount of the blind was half of the small bet size.
That’s not much money in the pot to start with. As a consequence structured betting games of the time didn’t play that much differently from the spread-limit games of today.
The book was updated in 1997 to reflect the chance in blind structure that had occurred. However, the update was generally superficial that had occurred.
However, the update was generally superficial, in many places consisting of just footnotes that say that some of the advice is really no longer true-still it’s a good book.
Many of the general principles discussed apply to any structured-limit game. For example, Sklansky has a good discussion of semi-bluffing.
Sklansky primarily takes a hand-domination and a made-hand-versus-a-draw perspective on the game in this book.
He was heavily influenced by the games in Las Vegas at the time, and those games tended to be fairly tight by today’s standards and compared with typical games outside of Las Vegas.
If you find yourself in a tight-passive or loose-passive game, then much of what Sklansky has to say in this book will be useful to you.
Ken Warren, Winner’s Guide to Texas Holdem Poker,
Cardoza Publishing, 1996
This book focuses on 1-4-8-8 spread-limit games. It ’s the only book on the market that I’m aware of that has a focus on spread-limit games, where the initial blind money is very small compared with the size of future bets.
Warren does take somewhat of a multiperspective view of the game, but his primary perspective is that of money flowing from bad players to good players.
That’s a natural way to look at the game when you’re talking about relatively low-limit poker games.
Such games are often populated by many bad players, and a common strategy for those games is to just sit and wait for the money to flow to you.
