The Myth of Poker Talent is a unique book and is the culmination of renowned poker trainer Alex Fitzgerald’s work with over 1000 students over a 10 year period. Alex has discovered what makes a winning poker player and here’s the good news… It has nothing to do with poker talent. If you want to excel at the game you’ll need to buy this book, study Alex’s method and work hard – but you don’t need talent. Alex’s method focuses on understanding generic poker situations and not specific hands. As a highly experienced teacher, he expresses his ideas in simple, easy-to-understand language. The Myth of Poker Talent will teach you: A “model of poker” built from scratchAn understanding of every poker toolWhy much of what experienced players think they know is actually wrong. … and much, much more.
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.
"[This book] ..teaches theoretical sound poker, and thus the ability to create the best-sizings and ranges that will beat the better players ... Many confusing concepts such as overbetting, balancing multiple bet-sizing ranges, donk betting, and check-raising as the preflop raiser are crucial to a player's strategy, despite few players implementing them or talking about them. ..reading this book, you should be able to not only conceptually understand these ideas, but also know how to begin to incorporate them into your game and thereby successfully complete against tough opponents"--Back cover.
Patience and aggression are key elements of a successful poker strategy, but also, as this innovative and accessible guide reveals, to a successful leadership strategy in business decisions. Acclaimed poker instructor Charles Swayne presents down-to-earth career advice using a language that makes the valuable guidance both relatable and understandable—the language of poker. The logic-based viewpoint built upon proven strategies will be a welcome relief to individuals who have been turned off by self-help books that use empty metaphors and promises and are looking to give their professional circumstances a boost or improve their daily corporate interactions. In poker and in business there are written rules—and unwritten ones as well. Offering such insight as considering the perspectives of others during a negotiation in the same manner as reading hands and players, and understanding the stakes and accepting financial limitations in the mindset of raising a bet, this business success guide will inspire confidence and purpose in both the boardroom and at the card table.
This book explores the rise and increased acceptance of gambling in America, particularly the growth of the game of poker, as a means for examining changes to the American Dream and the risk society. Poker both critiques and reinterprets the myth of the American Dream, putting greater emphasis on the importance of luck and risk management while deemphasizing the importance of honesty and hard work. Duncan discusses the history of gambling in America, changes to the rhetoric surrounding gambling, the depiction of poker in the Wild West as portrayed in film, its recent rise in popularity on television, its current place in post-modern America on the internet, and future implications.
Modern Poker Theory is a comprehensive, rigorous guide to the most important aspects of No-Limit Hold’em. It is based around an in-depth examination of what is meant by game theory optimal play (GTO) and how it can be applied at the table. Understanding GTO is fundamental to being able to make accurate poker decisions and being able to exploit players who don’t. Modern Poker Theory uses modern poker tools to develop a systematic approach to the analysis of GTO. It organizes the ideas and concepts in an intuitive manner that is totally focused to practical applications. Next time you are at a table some of the players will have studied Modern Poker Theory and some won’t. The players who have studied Modern Poker Theory will, without doubt, have a better theoretical and practical understanding of No-Limit Hold’em. They will be the favourites in the game. Make sure you are one of them. Michael Acevedo, one of the world’s leading poker theorists, is a game theory expert who is renowned for creating cutting-edge content for the world’s leading players. The production of Modern Poker Theory is the culmination of many thousands of hours of his research work with the most advanced poker software tools available. It is poker theory for the 21st century.
Since its first publication twenty years ago, The Biggest Game in Town has become a sought-after cult classic. Acclaimed writer and critic Al Alvarez delves into the murky and compelling world of high-stakes Vegas poker, where 'the next best thing to playing and winning is playing and losing'. Uncovering an exotic underground rich in ambiance and eccentricity, The Biggest Game in Town is a real one of a kind, deftly capturing the skewed psyches and peculiar rites of professional poker players who descend every year for the World Series of Poker. It's a world that seems almost too surprising and bizarre to be true. 'A cool, precise, sharply witty, vivid evocation of a place and people, their appearances, behaviour and speech..Mr Alvarez is a shrewd analyst of the psychology of gamblers and a cleverly selective recorder of their bizarre talk with which, directly and indirectly, they reveal their secure grasp of unreality and their insane courage' Sunday Telegraph 'It will have most readers sitting on the edge of their seats' Sunday Times 'A new classic on gambling...it's quite brilliant' Time Out 'This is a magnificent book. Beyond the straights and full houses, Alvarez has written about people who are extremely good at what they do, and about America' San Francisco Chronicle
Michael Lewis’s instant classic may be “the most influential book on sports ever written” (People), but “you need know absolutely nothing about baseball to appreciate the wit, snap, economy and incisiveness of [Lewis’s] thoughts about it” (Janet Maslin, New York Times). One of GQ's 50 Best Books of Literary Journalism of the 21st Century Just before the 2002 season opens, the Oakland Athletics must relinquish its three most prominent (and expensive) players and is written off by just about everyone—but then comes roaring back to challenge the American League record for consecutive wins. How did one of the poorest teams in baseball win so many games? In a quest to discover the answer, Michael Lewis delivers not only “the single most influential baseball book ever” (Rob Neyer, Slate) but also what “may be the best book ever written on business” (Weekly Standard). Lewis first looks to all the logical places—the front offices of major league teams, the coaches, the minds of brilliant players—but discovers the real jackpot is a cache of numbers?numbers!?collected over the years by a strange brotherhood of amateur baseball enthusiasts: software engineers, statisticians, Wall Street analysts, lawyers, and physics professors. What these numbers prove is that the traditional yardsticks of success for players and teams are fatally flawed. Even the box score misleads us by ignoring the crucial importance of the humble base-on-balls. This information had been around for years, and nobody inside Major League Baseball paid it any mind. And then came Billy Beane, general manager of the Oakland Athletics. He paid attention to those numbers?with the second-lowest payroll in baseball at his disposal he had to?to conduct an astonishing experiment in finding and fielding a team that nobody else wanted. In a narrative full of fabulous characters and brilliant excursions into the unexpected, Michael Lewis shows us how and why the new baseball knowledge works. He also sets up a sly and hilarious morality tale: Big Money, like Goliath, is always supposed to win . . . how can we not cheer for David?
The author recounts his experiences on the lucrative Wall Street bond market of the 1980s, where young traders made millions in a very short time, in a humorous account of greed and epic folly.
Poker star Dusty Schmidt presents his first book [¬" one that stands to shake up poker in the same way Moneyball did for baseball. Schmidt offers an inspiring look at how in just five years, he went from not knowing a thing about poker to netting a seven-figure annual income. Far from a mathematical or technological genius, Schmidt says what guides him through is a fundamental understanding of business. Treat Your Poker Like A Business provides a foundation upon which all poker will be evaluated in the future, and will help an entire generation of poker players evolve their games into empires. A consummate "grinder," Dusty Schmidt has played nearly 7 million hands of online poker over more than 10,000 hours during his five-year career. He's won over $3 million during that period, and has never experienced a losing month. In 2007, he achieved Poker Stars' SuperNova Elite status in just eight months while playing high-stakes cash games exclusively. Schmidt posted the world's highest win rate in both 5/10 NL and 10/20 NL in both 2007 and 2008. In a four-month period between Nov. 2007 and Feb. 2008, Schmidt won in excess of $600,000 in high-stakes cash games. He is now a highly respected instructor at Stoxpoker.com, and plays as high as 25/50 NL. As a young man, Schmidt was a top-ranked golfer. He broke two of Tiger Woods' junior records, and was the leading money winner on the Golden States Tour when, at age 23, he suffered a career-ending heart attack. Schmidt returned to golf in 2009, winning medalist honors in qualifying for the Oregon Amateur Championship. Later that year, Schmidt famously represented himself in federal court in his suit against the United States Golf Association, which controversially stripped him of his amateur status, in part due to his poker profession. Schmidt is now a volunteer assistant coach for the University of Oregon's men's golf team, working under his good friend, Head Coach Casey Martin. Schmidt is also a successful entrepreneur. He is part-owner of Stoxpoker.com and Imagine Media, and the creator of 10thGreen.com, the first social network for golfers. His story has been featured in Sports Illustrated, Card Player, Poker News, Golf Magazine, Fairways and Greens, Golf Week, Golf World and the Portland Oregonian, as well as on ESPN, cnn.com, wallstreetjournal.com, forbes.com, fortune.com, espn.com, golfdigest.com and golf.com, among many others. He recently founded the House of Cards Project, a philanthropic effort to provide food and shelter to disadvantaged families. His life story will be told in the book [¬Raise: The Impossibly True Tale of Dusty Schmidt, [¬? to be released later in 2010. He lives in Portland, Ore., with his wife, Nicole, and daughter, Lennon.
