Monday November 08, 2004

Small Stakes Hold'em

Small Stakes Hold'em by Miller, Sklansky, and Malmuth¹ is a book aimed at helping beat small stakes Hold'em games. At the beginning of this book David Sklansky explains that the explosion of poker driven by TV has created new opportunities in small stakes games on the net and in the traditional casinos. As is true with most of the 2+2 books with David's name on the cover this book contains some very good advice. It suffers, as do many of the other 2+2 books, from the authors lack of ability to write very well. In their Advanced Hold'em book they comment that this shouldn't be an issue as they are experts in their field. They miss that this creates a loss of information at the communication boundary. Many good poker players like this as it keeps what is very good information out of the masses hands, but unfortunately it reduces the value of 2+2s books. Small Stateks Hold'em is written a little bit better then some of the other 2+2 efforts but still falls down heavily in its lack of organization. At the top level the organziation is reasonable progressing through the hand from beginning to end and then picking up misc. topics, an example hand section (structured as quizes), and a Q&A section spread over 7 numbered chapters. But within each of these sections there is significant information which isn't organized very well. The book is laid out as almost a set of independent essays without numbering or references² between each which makes it harder then necessary to link information between the sections. This is very detrimental to the reader as one of the core parts of learning poker is learning how to take actions and ideas from various parts of the hand and put them together in a coordinated fashion. Most decisions in poker are coupled with other decisions.

Having said that I still think that this book is important for the vast majority of poker players to read. The ideas contained within this book could be built up from a good understanding of poker (via David Sklansky's Theory of Poker probably). But collecting them together in a series of essays under a little bit of structure helps the journeyman poker player make good and immediate use of the information. This provides a bridge between knowing the rules and having sat down and played a few hands, having read Lee Jones or a similar book, and reading David Sklansky's Advanced HE book or doing some of your own research.

¹Small Stakes Hold'em: winning Big with Expert Play, Two Plus Two Publishing, 2004, Ed Miller, David Sklansky, Mason Malmuth, ISBN: 1-880685-32-9.

²There is an index which is helpful for finding information by page number. ( Nov 08 2004, 05:53:53 PM PST ) Permalink