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Winning in Tough Hold 'em Games: Short-Handed and High-Stakes Concepts and Theory for Limit Hold 'em | |||||||||||
  enlarge | Authors: Nick "stoxtrader" Grudzien, Geoff "zobags" Herzog Publisher: Two Plus Two Publishing LLC Category: Book List Price: Buy New: $13.99 You Save: $15.96 (53%) New (25) Used (16) from $9.95 Rating:  11 reviewsSales Rank: 106922 Media: Paperback Edition: 1 Pages: 350 Number Of Items: 1 Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.3 Dimensions (in): 8.4 x 5.4 x 1.1 ISBN: 1880685388 Dewey Decimal Number: 795 EAN: 9781880685389 ASIN: 1880685388 Publication Date: April 1, 2007 Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Tell A Friend Add to Wishlist Add to Wedding Registry Add to Baby Registry | ||||||||||
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| Editorial Reviews: Product Description The recent boom of Texas hold em has forever changed the way the game is played. Many more people know how to play this game well. Even the loose players who come to gamble have become far more aggressive, making them more difficult to play against. So a basic tight and patient strategy will no longer guarantee that you can make a significant amount of money in games at the higher stakes. This is especially true short-handed, which have become increasingly popular in the online poker rooms. This text is the first to tackle the complex issues presented when playing short-handed and high-stakes limit hold em. But even if you happen to only play in softer games, many of the key concepts presented will still help you against the other good players in your game. Winning in Tough Hold em Games includes an examination of pre-flop play, covering issues at a depth of sophistication which have never appeared in print before including discussions of blind stealing, re-stealing, isolating a loose player, big blind and small blind defense, and blind versus blind play. Also covered are thorough sections on playing heads up and semi-bluffing. In addition, over 50 hands, taken from high stakes online games which were played by Stoxtrader, are presented along with appropriate discussion of the strategy involved. This book is a must read for anyone hoping to make a meaningful income from playing limit hold em. It is a serious text and should be beneficial for those of you willing to make the effort to master this material. | |||||||||||
Customer Reviews: Read 6 more reviews... Much Better Limit Books Available April 30, 2008Daniel McKinnon (Tewksbury, MA USA) 8 out of 10 found this review helpful I had high expectations for 'Winning in Tough Hold 'em Games: Short-Handed and High-Stakes Concepts and Theory for Limit Hold 'em' but after reading this book I was very disappointed. Authored by 2 very successful online (mainly limit) players, I expected to see great writing, analysis, hand inspection, the whole shebang. What I got was a half-hearted, borderline result that I quickly shelved. I don't doubt "Stoxtrader" and "Zobags" being successful players (not one bit) but I just was never sucked in to their book like I have with many other poker books like the Harrington NL tournament series or Small Stakes Hold 'em by Malmuth and Miller. The major problem with this book is that there is simply too much time wasted on charts. The charts provided show the results of each hand that can possibly be played for a full ring player, 6max player, etc. It's interesting to see the results but not much is going to be learned from them. Obviously the better hands (it's expected that the reader have a basic knowledge of limit before reading this text) are going to win more, and this is the same for short handed or full ring play. Of the 300+ pages, about 50 pages or so are just charts. They add something to the book but not nearly enough to warrant so much page real estate. Content is alright but I don't feel that I learned much overall. The authors advise a more daring style for the higher limit games with more bluffs and making river calls without even pairs (as an example). You do have to adapt to win at the nosebleed stakes but the type of analysis here didn't add much to my repertoire. The thing that I was most interested in was the hand analysis and quizzes section and I was not pleased with what was there. The writing just didn't get me excited to go to the next hand like I felt with the Harrington books, itching to read the next analysis. Too many hands are just marginal holdings or non-holdings and I wonder how realistic this is. Of course I don't play at the highest stakes so maybe pushing with air or practically air is the norm but I felt that this wasn't the greatest effort. There's no 2 1/2 star for this book so I tend towards the bottom scale as I was not happy with the end result. Most 2+2 books are fantastic but this doesn't get my stamp of approval. I feel that there are other limit books that handle 90-95% of the market for readers who need such books. For the other 5-10% the advanced concepts discussed are a subset in themselves and I feel hard to document. **  Great Book, Needs Serious Editing April 12, 2008L. Callen (Fairfield, IA) 1 out of 1 found this review helpful This is an unusual book, to say the least. Every detail of how to handle tough, short handed play is in here. The weakness is in the editing, layout and just general usability of the text. This would easily be a five star text with only a little bit of work. Large portions of this book consist of spreadsheets showing performance of certain plays under various conditions. The tables are staggering in their size. There are roughly 70 pages of spreadsheet tables with hundreds of cells apiece. While this is a scholarly work, the editors could have insisted in summations of the spreadsheets using graphs or charts and then put the tables in an appendix. It would have added greatly to the readability. Also, it would have been helpful if they had included a CD ROM with the tables in spreadsheet form for the rest of us to sort through. This is a good book though. If you're willing to take some time to sort out the logic of the tables (here I'm talking spreadsheet tables, not playing tables) then the book is worth every penny. But don't go charging into this text expecting an easy read. This is a book for those serious enough to put extra effort into digging, reading and re-reading. The plus side is - you can rest assured these guys have done their homework. Advanced book - a note for new players February 16, 2008Al C. (CO, USA) 2 out of 2 found this review helpful This is a good, useful book for advanced higher stakes limit players who already win and are looking to improve their bottom line. The content is excellent, but the presentation is lacking in some ways. As others have pointed out, this is seriously NOT a beginner's book. The authors clearly assume that their audience is as described in the first sentence of this review. Look elsewhere for beginner books. For materials on the fundamentals of limit hold'em, I recommend the books by David Sklansky, or to a lesser extent, Lee Jones. Those books don't really address much short handed play, however, so once the fundamentals are in place, if one is interested in the much more fun short handed game, one should read the book by Borer, Mak, and Tanenbaum. Once one understands all of that, it's time for this book!  Outstanding. January 10, 2008Ad-man (Sydney Australia) 6 out of 8 found this review helpful This is a great book by one of the greatest and most successful online cash game players in the world- Nick "Stoxtrader" Grudzien (and of course his collaborator Geoff "Zobags" Herzog). If there is one person in the poker world that you could make a case for accepting his word as gospel then Stox would be it. You can count on what this guy has to say as being factual and accurate. This is not some armchair theoritician who played a bit of 10/20 in soft live games and is now banging out a book to make a quick buck. This is a guy that has played in the toughest, highest stakes online poker games in the world and won- big time- for a long time. This is a book for advanced players who play in tough games against other good, thinking players. It is not about how to beat bad players in loose games so if that is the type of game you play, get Small stakes hold 'em by Ed Miller & co. This text covers multiple facets of the shorthanded high stakes online limit games and it's scope and content is far too deep to be expounded on in any great depth in a simple, two paragraph book review. I'll just say that it is a brilliant piece of work by one of the greatest poker players of the modern era and it's importance definitely cannot be overstated. I guess you could say that this book is the real "Hold 'em for advanced players" now. Five stars and a glowing recommendation. Loaded with Jargon-- not for novices January 5, 2008Someone in TX (USA) 3 out of 6 found this review helpful I bought this book because I liked the fact there were tables to help me understand the game. I ended up returning it because it was so was jargon filled as to be unreadable for me as a less than expert player. The tables didn't appear to have column explanations. If you're a novice Texas Hold'em player (I consider myself above novice but certainly not experienced) you likely won't benefit from this book. If you're an expert player I'll defer to the other expert reviewers for their review of the book. | |||||||||||
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