Championship Hold'em

One of 3 books on poker I bought. Good read and very comprehensive. Would recommend it to anyone. Its got something for everyone. I've started playing online in the last two months and its been really helpful. You can dip and choose from sections, or just read it cover to cover. Good examples and well laid out. This book will improve your poker playing.

Although Tom McEvoy and T.S. Cloutier are world class players this is not a world class poker book. They repeat themselves a lot and and even contradict themselves a little, and they do ramble on. One gets the sense that somebody miked them up and had them just talk about how to play various hands in various positions in various circumstances, mostly limit hold'em and in tournaments. For the not really booked up player this might be exactly right, but for the experienced player a lot of the advice is old hat. McEvoy and Cloutier recognize as much because on a couple of occasions they apologize for the repetition and advise the reader to take what they're saying as a "refresher." There is more than some merit to this advice. Anybody who has played poker for any length of time knows that you can go through stages where you drift from correct play to careless play to downright bad play. You are winning day after day, and you start to get overconfident and play more hands than you should. Next thing you know you're raising with ace-rag and calling with J9 offsuit and leading into the flop with second pair, no kicker. Reading this book will get you back to reality and tighten up your loose play, because believe me McEvoy and Cloutier do NOT play rags. Well, except when they know you're going to toss... Generally, just about everything they say is correct or at least debatably correct. Nonetheless I want to take exception to a couple of things, and to point out where what they say is only part of the story. Here's a good example. Cloutier says, "I never--and I emphasize never--call a bet on the end just because of the size of the pot. (p. 213) Well, if the pot is ten grand and your only opponent coyly pushes fifty bucks into the pot, you're gonna call. And when I say "you" I mean T.J. Cloutier as well. You're also going to call if it's a limit game and your lone opponent flips his last dollar chip into a five-hundred dollar pot. What Cloutier really is saying is that he reads the other player and the action. He recalls what experiences he has had with this player while he considers what his opponent's likely hand is, and that all of these considerations are more important than the size of the pot. Here's another. Cloutier says, "If there is more than one other player in the pot and you try to bluff on the end in limit hold'em, you might as well just donate your money to charity instead." (p. 215) In a sense this is just an exaggeration to make a point. But if you look deeper you can see that this cannot be right. True, trying to steal the pot with a bet on the river is a losing proposition in limit hold'em. However, if everybody only bet the goods on the river there wouldn't be much of a reason to call except in those cases where it's unclear who has the best hand. Furthermore, if you NEVER bluff at the pot on the river, you are--in the nicely expressed words of David Sklansky--"giving away too much information." Here's a t