How to Win at Poker (Teach Yourself) [Paperback]

I struggle to understand or imagine the type of reader who would benefit from this book.

It's not poorly written, it is reasonably well illustrated, and it certainly *tries* to cover (far too) many topics in a scant ~100 pages. It is a very quick read, 1-2 hours at most -- yet even the greenest poker novice would gain a FAR better understanding of the game if s/he merely invested the same amount of time watching one of the ubiquitous World Series of Poker or World Poker Tour events on TV.

The front cover of the book promises the reader (in bullet-point fashion): "learn how to improve your skills," and "increase your winnings." But the contents of the book beg to differ; inside, one finds dozens of quick (2-4 page-long) "chapters" devoted to topics ranging from the history of poker, the (abridged) rules of countless poker variants (including several games not commonly played anywhere in the Western hemisphere), something called "Poker Dice," and ... well, you get the picture.

Lost in the rest of this noise, one can find the occasional chapter on "Tournament Play" or "Poker Strategy" but, rest assured that all poker knowledge in the world can safely be divided into one of two categories:
(1) General information that everybody already knows and/or is inherently obvious, and
(2) Information that is, apparently, not contained within this book.

I'm reminded of grade school, and the dreaded annual assignment to "Write a Research Paper on a topic of your choice." Despite repeated encouragement from our teachers to "be more specific" and "narrow down your subject matter," the end result was always some horrible, high-level overview of some topic (I remember writing about "lasers" once, hehe) that could never be reasonably covered in 20 pages or so.

That's what this book feels like: a 100-page research paper about "Poker." If you're a very young child, or if you're new to the English-speaking world (or from another planet, perhaps) and you want a very cursory overview of "that game called poker," then this book would probably give you a bit more insight than, say, reading a 4-5 paragraph entry out of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

If you're an absolute beginner who knows virtually nothing about Poker but wants to learn more, and you have access to the Internet, you should check out the lengthy Poker and Texas Hold'em entries on Wikipedia. They're just as accessible as this book, but the information is far more useful, relevant, and in-depth. You'll learn far more -- and it's free.

If you're a novice poker player, ie, you've played 5-card draw with a few friends before, watched an hour or two of Texas Hold'em being played on TV, maybe played a game or two on Xbox Live, etc -- then you have nothing to gain from this book.

Naturally, the same also holds true for any average-to-advanced level players looking to "improve their skills." Although this book promises to help you do *exactly that*, it does not deliver. Look elsewhere, eg: Phil Gordon's Little Green Book: Lessons and Teachings in No Limit Texas Hold'em.

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