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Every Hand Revealed

Gus Hansen

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 39 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

What If You Were Able To Get Right Inside The Mind Of World-Famous Poker Pro Gus Hansen--And Learn His Winning Secrets?

Now You Can.

One of professional poker's most intriguing and fascinating players, Gus Hansen has often been called "The Madman" for his crazy, fearless, aggressive style. But you can't dispute the fact that this poker superstar knows how to win--and win big. The holder of the inaugural Poker Superstars Invitational title as well as the only player to win three World Poker Tour tournaments, Gus won his fifth major international title when he became the 2007 Aussie Millions Champion, outlasting 747 players and nabbing $1.2 million. Now, for the first time ever, Gus analyzes the hands that he played during the tournament and reveals his secrets for winning in Every Hand Revealed.

You'll learn:

• An extensive, easy-to-follow analysis of the more than 300 hands he played during the Aussie Millions...

• The radical, yet coolly logical, methods behind Gus's "madness" that have helped him to win consistently...

• Each and every bluff, precise calculation, educated guess, and read of his opponents ...

• How to call large bets with seemingly unplayable hands...

• When to raise out of position with garbage holdings...

• How the prize structure should influence your play...

• And much more!

Offering unlimited access to one of the most successful, popular poker players out there, Every Hand Revealed will help you understand some of poker's most coveted secrets--and simply shows you the right way to play the game whether you're a beginner or a poker pro. Now with Gus Hansen by your side, you too can turbo-charge your game and watch it take off!

Superstar poker pro Gus Hansen has shaken up the poker world with his loose, aggressive style. Called "The Great Dane" as well as "The Madman," the five-time international title-holder transforms his hands with cool logic ...and flattens his opponents. Voted one of the world's sexiest men by People Magazine, Gus is an avid athlete, backgammon player, and poker commentator for both Danish and American T.V.

Power Hold'em Strategy

Daniel Negreanu

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 13 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Finally a book about "small ball"... 4 out of 5 stars.
4 of 4 people found this review helpful.

I am going to say essentially what everyone else on here has been saying... If you buy this book, know that you can use the chapters not written by Negreanu as toilet paper or kindling for your fireplace. What you are buying this book for is Negreanu's explanation of "small ball" NL tournament poker. I noticed from reading the other reviews that everyone else is similarly interested in small ball, and have found this strategy to be quite effective. I also noticed that one guy on here seems to think Daniel is advocating a "weak, passive" approach to playing poker. This is far, far from the truth. Either he didn't read the book well enough, or is just not intelligent enough to get what Daniel was trying to communicate. Here are some basic ideas behind the small-ball philosophy:

1) Keep the pots small, pre-flop. You don't want to put a lot of your chips at risk before you even see the flop. Your aces may get busted by deuces post-flop, and you'll be pot committed after a few big bets. Not good. Instead, you wait to see the flop, then evaluate the situation based on what your opponent is doing. By keeping the pots small, you will pick up more pots that people don't really care about after the flop and not risk getting drawn out on by some crazy donk.

2) Play lots of hands that have big post-flop potential. That means opening up your starting hand selection by a large amount. This has been a big adjustment for me, but by doing so I have learned a lot about how to play poker in general. I have won a lot of big pots in tournaments and deep-stacked cash games by calling raises with mediocre hands that turn into monsters post-flop. Daniel expounds on which hands to call with under which set of circumstances.

3) Don't let your opponents get a good read on you. By playing your big hands the same as you do your weak hands, it makes it very hard for your opponents to know what you are playing with. It forces players into a guessing game, and if you are fairly decent at reading other people's hands, you can make some really good plays.

4) Playing the texture of the board. A good amount of Daniel's small ball approach deals with making decisions based on the texture of the board. This is something that is key to any poker player's success, I think. You don't always have to have the best hand to end up with the chips.

Those are some main aspects to playing small ball that Negreanu pays a great deal of attention to. What I've noticed for myself and other players is that the people who consistently do well in poker tournaments rely on more than luck and aggression. They rely on skill and discipline. I think this book will help you in both areas, if you aren't a small ball player already.

Editorial Review:

Super Stars of Hold'em does for hold'em what Doyle Brunson's Super System 2 did for poker. Negreanu gathers together the greatest young players, theorists, and world champions of hold'em, to present insider professional secrets and winning strategies for the only poker game that counts nowadays-hold'em. Ten powerful chapters cover every aspect of the major hold'em games-limit, no-limit, and pot-limit for cash games and tournaments -- with in-depth coverage on all aspects of play. This weighty volume will be an instant classic-poker players cannot ignore the professional advice from the greatest stars of the game.

The Full Tilt Poker Strategy Guide: Tournament Edition

Andy Bloch, Richard Brodie, Chris Ferguson, Ted Forrest, Rafe Furst, Phil Gordon, David Grey, Howard Lederer, Mike Matusow

Amazon Price: $19.79 List Price: $29.99 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Grand Central Publishing Amazon Marketplace: 38 new & used starting at $12.00

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 24 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Great book for those with Experience 5 out of 5 stars.
10 of 10 people found this review helpful.

This is a true gem in the wacky world of poker books. After Sklanski & Malmuth, Super System I/II, and the Harrington trilogy, there are very few poker books that actually offer original content or any new insights into the game of poker. True, Bill Chen's "The Mathematics of Poker" offers both - to some extent - but in a format that is better suited for someone working on dissertation research more than for someone looking to get an edge at a poker table. The value of this particular book comes from the differing perspectives of the authors. Gavin Smith, Howard Lederer, and Chris Ferguson (just to name a few) have disparate playing styles and it is reflected in the portions of the book they write. Some go as so far as to implore the reader to ignore some of the advice from the earlier authors. While Ferguson doesn't care for flat calling raises, Gavin Smith loves it, and both explain the reasons why. Ted Forest goes as so far as telling the reader to ignore his advice in the aptly titled "Don't Play like Ted Forest" chapter.

If you are considering buying this book, there's a good chance you know about position play, starting hands, and most other basics. What I loved most about this book is the fact that these pros tell the reader how they play, not how a hand should be played. Due deference is given to Sklanski and Malmuth, but the advice doled out is original and unique. It's refreshing to read how differently two pros would play the same hand and their explanations for doing so.

The only weak point in the book is the discussion about online poker is not as in depth as one would expect (or in my case, hope) in a "Full Tilt" title.

I would strongly recommend this book over most any other in the soup of modern poker books.

Editorial Review:

The professionals of Full Tilt Poker include the best and most famous poker players in the world. Their accomplishments are unparalleled, with countless World Series of Poker and World Poker Tour championships to their names and well in excess of $100 million in winnings in private games. Now, this group of poker legends has banded together to create THE FULL TILT POKER STRATEGY GUIDE, which will stand as an instant classic of the genre and is sure to become the industry standard.

Winning Poker Tournaments One Hand at a Time Volume I

Eric 'Rizen' Lynch, Jon 'Pearljammer' Turner, Jon 'Apestyles' Van Fleet

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 4 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Want to win poker tournaments?
Now you can learn exactly how consistent winners REALLY do it!
Meet PearlJammer, Rizen, and Apestyles. These top guns of tournament poker are frequent winners in today's highly competitive online scene, as well as in live tourneys. Their collective experience and track record is staggering: more than 35,000 tournaments played, more than 1,000 final tables made, over 200 major wins, and more than $6,000,000 in cashes. They regularly outplay fields consisting of other top professionals victories that are documented by detailed online hand histories.
Are you ready to learn winning ways from today's true tournament experts?
The authors are not only consistent winners, but powerful teachers as well. Step-by-step, they reveal their decision-making processes, using hands drawn from actual play not examples contrived to fit a particular poker theory.
Reading this book is like attending a master class in tournament poker.
You'll see the way cutting-edge pros use their wisdom and incredibly extensive experience to analyze almost every poker situation imaginable. Deep-stacked or short-stacked, against single or multiple opponents, you'll learn the skills that will make you a winner, including:
- When and how to play aggressively or tightly
- When to make moves
- When to make continuation bets and when to hold back
- How to induce and pick off bluffs
- How to accumulate chips without constantly risking your tournament life.
Poker is a fun game, but it's even more fun when you win.
If you want to become a great tournament player, shouldn't you be learning from the best? NOW You can!

Beat the Dealer: A Winning Strategy for the Game of Twenty-One

Edward O. Thorp

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 23 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

The Grandfather of Blackjack Strategy 5 out of 5 stars.
3 of 3 people found this review helpful.

Beat the Dealer: A Winning Strategy for the Game of Twenty-One by Edward Thorp started a craze toward card counting in casinos, prompted several rules changes including increased numbers of decks, shorter cuts, and more frequent shuffles. It's the grandfather of Blackjack strategy books and the first mathematical analysis of the game published outside academia. For those reasons alone it's worth having and studying even if its effectiveness has been diminished by the rules changes I noted above.

The other advantage that Thorp's book has over the dozens of blackjack books available is that it includes the probability charts. You can take the numbers from the appendix, see where the strategy was developed and make your own adjustments based on the conditions you encounter at your local game or casino.

It's tricky, his counting system and strategy, but once you have the hang of it you can be assured a fair game with a casino. And, all told, it's not that difficult a system to master with some practice ahead of time. Don't read this volume on the plane flight into Vegas and expect to beat the dealers in a day, but spend a week or two with some decks of cards, practice, go online and play, then take your shot against the pros. Good luck.

- CV Rick

Editorial Review:

A winning strategy for the game of 21. The essentials, consolidated in simple charts, can be understood and memorized by the average player.

Phil Hellmuth Presents Read 'Em and Reap: A Career FBI Agent's Guide to Decoding Poker Tells

Joe Navarro, Marvin Karlins, Phil Hellmuth

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 47 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

10 pages of content and 188 pages of filler 2 out of 5 stars.
7 of 8 people found this review helpful.

This book is pretty bad. It has a few useful tidbits of info if you are willing to wade through pages and pages of filler material. I strongly suggest anyone considering purchase go to a bookstore and examine the book first. Here are some things you will find:

1. Look at the print - it's practically double-spaced.

2. It's filled with unnecessary full-page photos. For example, look at page 168, where a full-page photo shows what whistling looks like.

3. It reuses photos. Look at pages 34 and 87. Notice anything? Entire page taken up with exactly the same photos. The captions are slightly different, but basically say the same thing.

4. It reuses content. Everything is repeated over and over and over again. There are countless examples of this throughout the book.

5. The writing is very long-winded. Open to any random page and read a few lines and you'll see what I mean. Here's an example: pages 133 to 137 describe a single tell called a tongue-jut, including a full-page photo to show what it looks like. Here's what those 5 pages say: if a player flicks his tongue between his teeth for a second, he feels like he got away with something. That's it. 5 pages.

6. The Phil Hellmuth anecdotes are self-promoting, uninteresting and basically useless to the reader. Is anyone surprised by this? To see what I mean, flip through the book and read any section with a gray background. For example, on page 137, Phil begins a 3-page story about how great he was at reading Howard Lederer in a certain hand.

And so on...

The cover of the book tells us that Joe Navarro wrote the book with Marvin Karlins, but it's presented by Phil Hellmuth. What this means is: Joe wrote up everything he could think of and only came out with about 10 pages of actual content. They hired Marvin to spread that out to a full book, but still came up short. So they added Phil Hellmuth to give his endorsement and write a bunch of anecdotes to stretch the story even more. Finally, they threw in a bunch of photos to get up to about 200 pages, still a minimal length for a reference book on poker.

Don't take my word on this - go to a bookstore and look for yourself.

p.s. I'm not a huge fan of Mike Caro's book either. It's just so old. There definitely is a need for a modern, well-written book about poker tells. Anyone have any ideas?

Editorial Review:

very great player knows that success in poker is part luck, part math, and part subterfuge. While the math of poker has been refined over the past 20 years, the ability to read other players and keep your own "tells" in check has mostly been learned by trial and error.

But now, Joe Navarro, a former FBI counterintelligence officer specializing in nonverbal communication and behavior analysis—or, to put it simply, a man who can tell when someone's lying—offers foolproof techniques, illustrated with amazing examples from poker pro Phil Hellmuth, that will help you decode and interpret your opponents' body language and other silent tip-offs while concealing your own. You'll become a human lie detector, ready to call every bluff—and the most feared player in the room.

Pot-Limit Omaha Poker

Jeff Hwang

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 13 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Bob Ciaffone
"This book is very accurate technically and a great addition to poker literature."

Lou Krieger
"Lucid, literate, and comprehensive. Dissects the complexities of this game and explains why big play strategy is the winning strategy."

Are You Ready for the Next Wave of Poker?
If you've never tried Pot-Limit Omaha, you're missing out on the most exciting, most lucrative cash game around. Omaha has long been one of the most popular forms of poker in Europe, as well as the Midwest and Southern United States. PLO is also the highest-stakes game in every cardroom in which the game is spread. And now it's spreading like wildfire throughout North America. The reason is simple: Omaha offers more action and bigger pots than Texas Hold'em. Isn't it time you got in on it?

Whether you're a cash-game professional or a recreational player -- and whether you play live or online -- this book will arm you with a winning big-play strategy that's easy to master even if you've never played Omaha before.

Key topics include:

- The Big Play Objectives
- The Power of the Big Draw
- Straight Draws and Starting Hand Construction
- Limit Omaha Hi/Lo and Pot-Limit Omaha Hi/Lo

Complete with practice situations and hand quizzes, this is the most comprehensive Omaha book available -- and the only one you'll ever need.

Universal Waite Tarot Deck and Book Set

Arthur Edward Waite

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 28 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Striking re-coloring of the traditional Rider Waite 5 out of 5 stars.
5 of 5 people found this review helpful.

This beautiful redrawing/coloring by Mary Hanson-Roberts of this most traditional deck is complete with a depth of color that many other versions of the same are lacking. If what you are seeking is a softer alternative to the bold colors and heavy black outlines of the "traditional" Rider deck, you've found it.

Interpreting this deck is like resting on a soft pillow. This is my original working deck, and is still my second working deck, after the Robin Wood. It's an excellent place for beginners to start. There's no wondering why the images created by Pamela Colman Smith are singularly the most popular in the world. These images are timeless and are traditionally known as being easy to read, as well as providing depth and insight for the more advanced.

This deck is pencil-colored with delicate, soft lines drawn around the faces and figures, and soothing rich colors within the cards. The backings are an intriguing and fully reversible gold and indigo star field. The Fool in this deck is absolutely gorgeous with his gentle yellow sky and snuggly robe. The High Priestess is absolutely beautiful.

I am reviewing the deck alone, as I don't have the book that now comes with it. I found this deck to be excellent when coupled with "Learning the Tarot" by Joan Bunning, which uses the Universal Waite for illustrations. This book gives a solid grounding in how to read Tarot, and along with this deck, you will be well on your way.

Editorial Review:

Set includes the 78-Card Universal Waite Tarot Deck, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot by Arthur Edward Waite, and spread sheet. 340 pp.Ill.(pb).

The Poker Tournament Formula II: Advanced Strategies

Arnold Snyder

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

An exception poker book! 5 out of 5 stars.
3 of 4 people found this review helpful.

I like this book because it doesn't go in detail on what starting hand requirements a person should play. This is an advanced concept book and is not for folks who are just starting out playing hold'em.

I won't take away from Mr. Snyder and lay out the content of his book online. You can purchase the book for all of that. However, I will describe a few of topics otherwise no one will be inclined to read his material.

One of the interesting things about the book (and it's not even listed as a selling point) is the 10 functions you have with your chip stack.

Think about it for a second, can you list down all the functions your chips stack has besides adding to the pile? PFT2 goes into detail on how to use your chip stack to make information bets, value bet, dominate small stacks.

The books primary focus is utilizing the weapons you have at hand to develop a monstrous chip stack.

Editorial Review:

Snyder adapts the loose aggressive fast tournament strategies of his groundbreaking first book to the big buy-in events where the real money is made. Players learn never-before-revealed concepts and secrets that shows players why cards don't matter as much as the dynamics of a tournament. Readers learn how to alter their strategy for any tournament structure and opponent, why hands must be played differently from cash games, and why players can't figure out what winners are doing just from watching them play. The book also covers optimal satellite strategy, sit'n'go strategy, methods for estimating tournament win rate and edge, plus:

• Why many of the most skillful poker players fail in poker tournaments
• Why it's often correct to play a hand "wrong" in a tournament
• How to develop the optimal strategy for any tournament based on its blind structure
• How to consistently build a big stack and use it to terrorize your opponents

Hold'Em Poker for Advanced Players (Advance Player)

David Sklansky, Mason Malmuth

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 78 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Excellent 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

I was constantly breaking even before getting this book on online poker sites. After reading it, I took nearly all of the guesswork out of my playstyle and recently just bought a new guitar entirely with winnings.

I recommend this book to anyone who already considers themselves decent at poker and already has good intuition as to spotting how others play to determine what they have... or don't have. This book will not probably help you with those things. This book is best for those who are already good at poker but either have their game strategy wrong or off a little.

The best part of this book is it makes it much more easy to spot poor play from other people at your table and thus allows you to profit hugely from that.

Editorial Review:

Texas Hold 'em is not an easy game to play well. To become an expert you must balance many concepts, some of which occasionally contradict each other. In 1988, the first edition appeared. Many ideas, which were only known to a small, select group of players, were made available to anyone who was striving to become an expert, and the hold 'em explosion had begun. It is now a new century, and the authors have again moved the state of the art forward by adding over 100 pages of new material, including extensive sections on "loose games," and "short-handed games." Anyone who studies this text, is well disciplined, and gets the proper experience should become a significant winner. Some of the other ideas discussed include play on the first two cards, semi-bluffing, the free card, inducing bluffs, staying with a draw, playing when a pair flops, playing trash hands, desperation bets, playing in wild games, reading hands, and psychology.