REVIEW
Briefly,
this book tells you how to calculate the
odds of just about any event occurring
at a Texas Hold'em poker table. The book
starts with a review of basic mathematics
and probability and then slowly builds
the math necessary to do complicated card
odds calculations.
The
book solves most problems using a quick-and-dirty
calculation, a detailed calculation, and
a computer simulation. It is interesting
to compare one's intuition to a back-of-the-envelope
answer and then a detailed answer. In
many cases one's intuition is excellent,
in others, the real odds can be surprising.
This
book is a lot less about what the odds
are of various Hold'em events occurring
as it is about how to calculate these
sorts of card odds. To be honest, I was
expecting, and hoping for, more of the
former than the latter. For myself, I
already know how to calculate these odds,
I was interested in finding a place where
all the numbers I was interested in are
already calculated. While it should be
noted that it's not the author's fault
that this book isn't Percentage Hold'em
by Will Hyde, the book that fulfills the
role I was hoping for, I really can't
recommend this book on its own merits.
Setting
aside for the moment that the book looks
cheap, with its fixed width font layout,
for the money it commands, the book just
doesn't seem terribly substantive to me.
The book occupies a fairly narrow niche
in the market. The prospective reader
has to be unfamiliar enough with math
not to be comfortable calculating basic
probabilities while not being fearful
of the math itself. While I liked the
large number of examples and the quizzes
for the readers to test their knowledge,
the presented here could have been covered
far more compactly.
Feel
free to page through the book and see
if it appeals to you, it may be exactly
what you're looking for. It's my opinion
that the material in this book is better
covered in other places, such as in Richard
Epstein's The Theory of Gambling and Statistical
Logic or David Sklansky's The Theory of
Poker. Although these books don't cover
Hold'em in this depth, they both provide
the same foundation in a more general
manner and are much better written. I
really can't recommend this book.
Capsule:
If you want a book on how to calculate
the probabilities of various events occurring
in Texas Hold'em, you're not afraid of
math, but you're not well versed in probability
theory, this book may be for you. Otherwise,
I'd make sure I had an opportunity to
page through it and make sure it's what
I was looking for before buying it.
Nick
Christenson
Gambling
Book Reviews
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