The Full Tilt Poker Strategy Guide [Paperback]

This most engaging book is broken down into a number of concise chapters each written by a star player and expert in his field. Rather than being boring, as the other reviewer might have found at times, I found the book to be extremely useful, always engaging and never less than charmingly informative.

Of the many poker books I own I put this one up there with the best of them and highly recommend it. Albeit it's not as detailed as Harrington or Sklansky (whose works I find to be boringly too technical), it does nonetheless make up for same with a lot of great instructional advice which is more to the point than most books of its kind. I recommend this book especially for intermediate to advanced players who are short on time but remain hungry to widen their knowledge of how the pros play.

Also, I recommend this book not just for those on Full Tilt, I happen to play and far prefer "Pokerstars", yet still found the advice in its pages to be extremely relevant to my game. By the way, there are chapters on various other poker games too - like pot-limit Omaha and not just holdem.

Top marks.

This volume gives us the rare opportunity of hearing a number of professionals' innermost thoughts on the game. The players can be put into two broad camps: "feel" players, and "analytical" players. In the former camp we have such luminaries as Mike Matusow, Gavin Smith, and Ted Forrest; while most notably in the latter camp there's Chris Ferguson, Andy Bloch, and Howard Lederer.

All of these players have been successful; my only concern is that the feel players aren't great at communicating the elements which give them an edge. In the words of Mike Matusow:

"Part of what makes a great Omaha player are things I can't teach you. Things like knowing when the flop misses your opponent and you can take the pot away with nothing. The best Omaha players in the world can do that, and you can't teach it."

The analytical players, on the other hand, are much better at enunciating their strategies. In particular, I really liked Chris Ferguson's chapter on preflop no-limit hold 'em; his basic idea is that for deception's purposes it is a good idea to play as many hands as possible the same way.

Gavin Smith's chapter on big stack play is another warning of the dangers from naively applying a feel player's approach to the game. In particular, he describes a hand where he raises with J-6o, a tight player reraises him, he calls and bets out on an ace-high flop -- his opponent folded Q-Q. It's an entertaining hand, but you could easily lose a lot of money trying to imitate it. Now, an analytical player could well make a similar move, the principal difference being that they would do it with a specific hand so at so maximise the value from the situation. Maybe this would be a good play with 8-9s -- the trouble is that most players need to impose some structure on their game to appropriately ration and get the most from this sort of move.

Ted Forrest's chapter on no-limit is similar, appropriately titled "(Don't) Play Like Ted Forrest". Clearly its a style he's had success with, but his game is based around a complete embrace of subtle judgements and specific factors which can lead to him taking completely unconventional plays. My opinion is that the vast majority of readers would have better results with a more structured (and analytical!) approach to the game. Luckily, there are some great authors of that style in this volume, but readers need to carefully attune themselves to weed out signal from noise. The chapters by Bloch and Ferguson are genuinely useful contributions from two great poker thinkers.

Not a patch on Harrington but still a great read with some great nuggets of info in there. A bit boring to read though and the paper / book quality feels a bit cheap. If your serious about holdem tournaments buy it!