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Improve
Your Poker
Anyone who thinks they
could read a few books, learn some general strategies, and then be able
to go out and regularly beat a mid-limit casino poker game will be
disappointed. Beating the games populated by the better players requires
a more complex strategy than a few rote generalities can provide. It is
necessary to have a deep understanding of this game, an understanding
that can come only from experience and careful thought expended about
the game away from the table. There is no "get smart quick" scheme, but
the fastest and surest path to expertise is to learn what the best
players do and to understand why.
In
Improve Your Poker, Bob Ciaffone has assembled many of the columns he
has written over the years and added some new ideas and clarifications
to comprise this collection of essays. The first section covers what
Ciaffone calls "General Concepts". This is followed by sections on
"Gambling Skills", "Reading Opponents", and "Deception and Bluffing".
Many of these essays provide the most well-reasoned explanations of some
of the most important poker principles that I've read. As an example, I
believe that Ciaffone's discussion of the value of tells is spot-on. His
explanation about betting on the end provides lessons that many poker
players could use to significantly improve their game. Also, the
author's description of the whys and hows of bluffing is the best I've
seen in print.
Ciaffone then moves on to cover specifics from particular games,
including Texas Hold'em, Stud, High-Low Split, and one essay concerning
Omaha. The author then spends a considerable amount of time discussing
"big bet" poker, that is, pot limit and no limit games, and concludes
with a section on tournaments. While I don't think these sections are
quite as consistently strong as the first half of the book, there is
still a great deal of excellent information here, especially because
Ciaffone lets us inside his head as he describes his thought processes
during big bet poker situations. Much of the information on various
poker types is very strong as well. This is not to say that I agree with
everything that he has written, but all his positions are backed by
reasonable explanations, and in a vacuum people would be well advised to
trust the advice of "The Coach" before mine.
Ciaffone focuses on strategies that are predominantly useful against
players who are neither clueless nor superhuman, such as those lineups
frequently found in mid-limit or relatively small blind structure big
bet games. Many of the things that the author discusses just aren't
going to be terribly useful in a common 3-6 Hold'em game. Overall,
though, Improve Your Poker is one of the best poker books I've read. It
is filled with a large amount of nuts-and-bolts suggestions that, with a
significant amount of thought and reflection, the reader should be able
to apply to their game, although it assumes that the reader is already a
fairly seasoned player and that they plan to devote some time to
applying its principles.
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