For decades, the highest level of poker have been dominated by players who have learned the game by playing it, road gamblers' who have cultivated intuition for the game and are adept at reading other players' hands from betting patterns and physical tells. Over the last five to ten years, a whole new breed has risen to prominence within the poker community. Applying the tools of computer science and mathematics to poker and sharing the information across the Internet, these players have challenged many of the assumptions that underlay traditional approaches to the game.'
A New York Times bestseller • A New York Times Notable Book “The tale of how Konnikova followed a story about poker players and wound up becoming a story herself will have you riveted, first as you learn about her big winnings, and then as she conveys the lessons she learned both about human nature and herself.” —The Washington Post It's true that Maria Konnikova had never actually played poker before and didn't even know the rules when she approached Erik Seidel, Poker Hall of Fame inductee and winner of tens of millions of dollars in earnings, and convinced him to be her mentor. But she knew her man: a famously thoughtful and broad-minded player, he was intrigued by her pitch that she wasn't interested in making money so much as learning about life. She had faced a stretch of personal bad luck, and her reflections on the role of chance had led her to a giant of game theory, who pointed her to poker as the ultimate master class in learning to distinguish between what can be controlled and what can't. And she certainly brought something to the table, including a Ph.D. in psychology and an acclaimed and growing body of work on human behavior and how to hack it. So Seidel was in, and soon she was down the rabbit hole with him, into the wild, fiercely competitive, overwhelmingly masculine world of high-stakes Texas Hold'em, their initial end point the following year's World Series of Poker. But then something extraordinary happened. Under Seidel's guidance, Konnikova did have many epiphanies about life that derived from her new pursuit, including how to better read, not just her opponents but far more importantly herself; how to identify what tilted her into an emotional state that got in the way of good decisions; and how to get to a place where she could accept luck for what it was, and what it wasn't. But she also began to win. And win. In a little over a year, she began making earnest money from tournaments, ultimately totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars. She won a major title, got a sponsor, and got used to being on television, and to headlines like "How one writer's book deal turned her into a professional poker player." She even learned to like Las Vegas. But in the end, Maria Konnikova is a writer and student of human behavior, and ultimately the point was to render her incredible journey into a container for its invaluable lessons. The biggest bluff of all, she learned, is that skill is enough. Bad cards will come our way, but keeping our focus on how we play them and not on the outcome will keep us moving through many a dark patch, until the luck once again breaks our way.
This is the first book to provide winning strategies for the small buy-in ($100 or less) no-limit hold'em tournaments that have exploded in poker rooms all over the country-and on the Internet. The strategies for small buy-in no-limit hold'em tournaments are similar to the big-money games, but the important factors-hand value, position, aggression and others, and speed of play-cause a radical change of strategy. Snyder recounts his own experience with these methods at a win rate of almost 300% and gives readers specific strategies for winning the big money available in prizes at the hundreds of small buy-in no-limit hold'em tournaments taking place weekly around the country and on the Internet.
The first volume in a series, the book reviews a collection of poker hands played from the button, cutoff, and hijack positions which illustrate concepts to help improve the reader's poker game.
DUTCH BOYD is a three-time World Series of Poker bracelet winner who has won and lost millions. Read his amazing true story of the sky highs and cavernous lows living the life of a professional poker player, and his struggle to hang on to his bankroll and his sanity.
Poker is a game of table position, flop texture, players in a hand, personalities, and so much more. This book teaches you how to identify and analyze those variables, become a great strategist, and have confidence in any poker situation. Decide to Play Great Poker is written by Annie Duke, the world's most renowned woman poker player, with John Vorhaus, himself a winning poker player and prolific author.
Rough sex, black magic, murder, and the science-and eros-of gambling meet in the ultimate book about Las Vegas James McManus was sent to Las Vegas by Harper's to cover the World Series of Poker in 2000, especially the mushrooming progress of women in the $23 million event, and the murder of Ted Binion, the tournament's prodigal host, purportedly done in by a stripper and her boyfriend with a technique so outré it took a Manhattan pathologist to identify it. Whether a jury would convict the attractive young couple was another story altogether. McManus risks his entire Harper's advance in a long-shot attempt to play in the tournament himself. Only with actual table experience, he tells his skeptical wife, can he capture the hair-raising brand of poker that determines the world champion. The heart of the book is his deliciously suspenseful account of the tournament itself-the players, the hand-to-hand combat, and his own unlikely progress in it. Written in the tradition of The Gambler and The Biggest Game in Town, Positively Fifth Street is a high-stakes adventure, a penetrating study of America's card game, and a terrifying but often hilarious account of one man's effort to understand what Edward O. Wilson has called "Pleistocene exigencies"-the eros and logistics of our primary competitive instincts.
Many poker players can make good decisions at the table with a reasonable frequency. Nevertheless, there are numerous situations where even very experienced players behave in predictable ways. These deeply-ingrained habits lead them to make mistakes. The problem is that these situations won’t often arise at the table by chance – you have to make them happen. Exploitative Play in Live Poker is a ground-breaking work that teaches you how to create the circumstances where your opponents will be likely to blunder and how to exploit them when they do. To achieve this you will need to put to one side starting hand charts, balance and GTO (Game Theory Optimal) play. Instead you will incorporate new concepts that may well place you outside your comfort zone. However, your style will now be forcing the other players at the table outside of their comfort zone and, unlike you, they won’t know how to adapt. Learn how to: Counter the auto-continuation-bettorDevelop a powerful donk-betting strategyUse the overbet, the check-raise and the three-barrel effectively As well as being a highly successful player, Alex Fitzgerald runs a poker consultancy that serves more than 1,000 professional poker players in 60 countries. As part of this work, he has very likely trawled through more hand history databases than anyone else. This gives him a unique insight into how players really play, especially when placed under pressure and forced into unfamiliar situations.
Widely regarded as the world's best poker player, Johnny Chan has been beating the highest buy-in tournaments and big money cash games everywhere for the past twenty years. He is regularly featured on such television networks as NBC, ESPN, and Fox Sports Net. He played himself in the movie Rounders opposite Matt Damon. Because Johnny worked his way up to the top of the poker world by starting in the smallest games, he is the perfect person to teach you how to win. Whether you are a beginning or intermediate player, this book will help you to your road to expert status. Concise and easy to understand, Play Poker Like Johnny Chan covers all the popular casino poker games.
