REVIEW
More
Hold'em Excellence is renowned Card Player
author Lou Krieger's follow-on to his
book Hold'em Excellence. While the first
was an introduction playing a winning
game of Texas Hold'em, the second goes
further than just the basics, attempting
to impart the correct decision making
skills in the reader so they can take
their game to an even higher level.
I
would divide this book into three sections.
The first section deals with some review
material and gives general advice on topics
like position, what decisions are more
important, being aggressive, etc.. In
my opinion, the review material is tedious
in any sequel such as this one, but it
was probably the publisher's decision
to include it. It's also short enough
not to be terribly distracting. The general
advice looks generally correct to me,
but most players who have played a little
and read Krieger's previous book, Hold'em
Excellence, and have played a bit are
likely to be able to answer a reasonable
quiz on the section without having read
it.
What
I would categorize as the second section
deals with starting hands and how they
relate to position in more depth than
in the author's previous book. Most of
the advice is pretty good, although maybe
a tad loose for my tastes, but also pretty
much in line with what other authors have
recommended. One thing I don't think Krieger
emphasizes enough is that many hands that
are worth bringing it in with for a raise
in late position are hands that one shouldn't
consider calling two bets cold with, or
often even calling with if there are a
couple of early position limpers.
The
third section, covering just over half
the book, is a collection of loosely related
essays that seem to have mostly been culled
from Krieger's Card Player articles. In
quality, these range from pretty banal
to seriously good. I like essays like
"Aggression" and "Counting Heads", but
"Your Bankroll--How Much Do You Need"
is lifted almost entirely (with attribution)
from an essay in Mason Malmuth's Gambling
Theory and Other Topics. Restating another
essay seems reasonable to me when you're
trying to crank out 26 columns a year
for a magazine, but why include it in
a book?
As
another example, in a couple of essays,
Krieger talks about questions of preserving
a professional player's bankroll vs. extracting
money from one's winnings to live off,
and he gives the sage advice to "not eat
one's seed corn". However, it seems to
me that the essay ends before Krieger
has really driven home his point. While
this may be a necessity given the word
constraints of being a magazine columnist,
I would have like to have seen more effort
go into tying these essays together and
extending them where appropriate.
Overall,
the book contains little bad advice, but
like Krieger's previous book, I fear there's
little here that the book-reading intermediate
poker player isn't already very familiar
with. Again, poker book junkies won't
be offended by anything in the pages of
More Hold'em Excellence, and those who
haven't read many poker books may find
it contains much valuable information,
although I would suggest that there are
more efficient directions in which that
reader should expand their library.
Capsule:
Although
a reasonable Intermediate level book on
Texas Hold'em, More Hold'em Excellence
doesn't contain a great deal of novel
additions to the information base already
available on playing poker well. Also,
I believe that Krieger often doesn't drive
home the good points he does make strongly
enough, and that the former Card Player
articles that are the basis for the essays
in the back half of the book could have
used some more expansion and should have
been tied together tighter. It's not a
bad book, but I don't believe that any
poker player with a decent library won't
gain very much from reading it.
Nick
Christenson
Gambling
Book Reviews
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