Dominate No-Limit Hold'em by Daniel Ashman
Daniel Ashman is a well-regarded online no-limit hold 'em player. He has been successful at nearly all stakes and formats, but specializes in online short-handed play. Dominate No-Limit Hold'em is his latest book that focuses on tips to winning in those games.
Some poker books have a strong unifying theme that ties together all the concepts the author lays out in its pages. This one is more free form than most. The subtitle, "A guide to the math and psychology of NLHE," implies that math and psychology will be the focus points, but in my opinion, it doesn't really turn out that way. Instead, the book is a set of loosely connected sections, although they all deal with no-limit hold 'em.
The first section is titled "Basic Poker Strategy". While some of what Ashman discusses here is, indeed, basic, this is certainly not an appropriate starter book for an aspiring poker player. If you're not coming to Dominate No-Limit Hold'em as at least an intermediate player, you'll definitely lack the proper foundation to understand big chunks of what the author talks about.
While this isn't the author's first poker book, it's clear to me that he has a lot more experience at the tables than at the word processor, and it shows in this first section. It's a bit muddled and the tone isn't strongly defined. Sometimes Ashman requires a great deal of sophistication from his readership, and sometimes he can be quite pedantic for that audience. The book can also be quite confusing in spots.
For example, he has his own notation that he uses to categorize player types. This is introduced in this section, but players' defining characteristics are provided piecemeal and without a lot of foundation. Then these categories are ignored for quite a while before occasional references reoccur late in the book. In the mean time, I had forgotten what behaviors were typical of which player types and had a difficult time trying to find the spots where these characters were first introduced. I don't think the book would have been any the worse if he had just stuck to using more familiar, universally recognized player types.
The second section, "The Poker Mindset", is much shorter than the first. Truthfully, I didn't really get much from it. It's not that it's bad or contains a lot of horrible advice, I just found it unremarkable.
Sections three and four, though, are where the book really shines. Section three is titled "Hand Reading", but it's really a bunch of isolated hand examples. Section four, "Game Sessions", covers similar ground, but considers meta-game questions by tracking play over the course of a session. It's clear from these descriptions why Ashman has been a successful poker player. His analysis is strong, honest, and full of insight. In the "Game Sessions" section, I really wish he had given more background up front for the table as a whole in the multi-player examples, but with a little work the reader can figure out what's going on.
As I said before, while Ashman is clearly a skilled poker player, it's pretty obvious that he doesn't have as much experience as a writer. The sections are terribly unbalanced in terms of length, cross-references are haphazard at best, and he doesn't do a very good job of either sticking to or progressing his themes throughout the book. He will probably get better at this if he keeps at it, but this book could have used either a coauthor with more writing experience or a more involved editor. Ashman also begins his book subsections with quotes, but to be honest I found their applicability to the material they preface to be tenuous at best. Fortunately, they are easy enough to ignore.
It's not surprising when the best parts of poker books written by players whose playing skill is much greater than their writing skill to be examples of play, and this is one of those books. While the early parts of Dominate No-Limit Hold'em can sometimes be a chore to get through, the last half has some really strong analysis that's worth the effort.
Overall, this would be a poor choice for a first book on no-limit hold 'em, and I certainly can't describe it as "essential" anything, but I think the hand examples are strong enough to make it worthwhile to those students of the no-limit game who are looking for material to supplement a thorough course of study. So, I recommend Dominate No-Limit Hold'em on that basis.
The Full Tilt Poker Strategy Guide Tournament Edition edited by Michael Craig
During much of 2007, Russ Fox and I were writing Winning Strategies for No-limit Hold'em. For my own part, in order to avoid having other sources subconsciously influence my writing, I was intentionally not reading books about no-limit hold 'em strategy during that time frame. Years after the fact, I'm still catching up with many of the books that were released in 2007, and The Full Tilt Guide to Poker Strategy Tournament Edition was one of these I had sitting on my bookshelf for years but have only recently read.
Because I'm writing this review in late 2011, it's difficult to approach this book from a purely objective standpoint. Everyone in poker has been affected, even if indirectly, by the events of Black Friday and the subsequent shutdown of Full Tilt Poker. I suspect that in the present context seeing many of the names on this book's cover will inevitably arouse strong feelings in many, if not the majority, of players who have followed the saga of online poker. This is to be expected, but in this review I will focus solely on the material that lies between this book's covers.
The Full Tilt Poker Strategy Guide is divided into five parts and subdivided into 19 chapters. These are written by twelve widely known personalities affiliated, at least at the time the book was written, with Full Tilt Poker. These selections have been aggregated by Michael Craig, also author of The Professor, the Banker, and the Suicide King. Presumably, it was Craig who coordinated the cross-references between sections of the book. He does a good job of turning a bunch of separately written views of the game into a reasonably cohesive whole.
The Full Tilt Poker Strategy Guide is focused on tournament poker and, as befits the number of events and public interest, about half of the book is specifically about no-limit Texas hold 'em, so that's how the book starts out. I have to admit that it was a bit of a shock to find considerable overlap between parts of the first two chapters and what Russ and I wrote in our book. Not surprisingly, I believe these early chapters by Chris Ferguson, Howard Lederer, and Andy Bloch contain excellent advice on tournament poker, and I recommend them highly.
Some of the later chapters espouse some contradictory advice with both each other and the earlier chapters, but there's often less disagreement than there first appears. The reader is left to reconcile these the rest of the way. Personally, I didn't find this difficult, as I find some of the authors more thoughtful and, consequently, more credible than others. Those who have read my reviews and other writing will probably have an easy time determining which authors' explanations I prefer.
While the subsequent hold 'em chapters and the coverage of the non-hold 'em games aren't quite as stellar, they contain their share of good advice. These chapters cover limit hold 'em, Omaha/8, PLO, and various forms of stud poker. There is also a chapter talking about game psychology using the example of roshambo. There's some decent advice here, but it doesn't measure up to what the book has to say about no-limit hold 'em. The chapter on roshambo starts down a promising path, but I believe it concludes at a point just before it might have become interesting.
Much of the best material in this book serves as an introduction, both conceptually and historically, to the more advanced strategies surrounding the concept of range, which has become so popular among advanced students of hold 'em. Poker players who have studied this concept in depth aren't likely to find much here they haven't already considered, at least to a large extent, but those who are looking for a gentle introduction to this topic could do a lot worse than the chapter in this book authored by Andy Bloch.
Overall, I found the strategies espoused in The Full Tilt Poker Strategy Guide to be decent, and at the time it was released it makes sense to me why it would be roundly praised. Compared so some other books published during the poker boom, I feel that this one hasn't aged quite as well, but it still has enough good advice to be well worth reading, as long as one can get past any emotional associations one might have toward the team that wrote it.
