Power Hold'em Strategy

Negreanu's attempt at the next Super System with his "Small Ball" strategy taking the place of Doyle Brunson's aggressive, take no prisoners approach. This book follows a similar model to SS with a variety of guest writers contributing a number of chapters before we get to Negreanu's part. Though none of these are as good as the chapters Sklansky or Caro contribute in SS, they're still worth checking out if you're interested. Of course the valuable part of this book is Negreanu's chapter and the explanation of his particular, and particularly potent style of play, complete with statistical explanations, and guide for playing small ball. Rating poker books is different than rating other books. If only half of a novel is good that's a pretty lousy book. But a poker book is important if it provides invaluable information that you can't get elsewhere. A lot of people here have dropped the rating on this book as if people can't just skip around the fluff. The fact is, this book is one of the top books worth owning for what you can learn from it. As they say, "nuff said."

Negreanu really hit a homerun with this one. While he doesn't really go into the depth of WHY survival is more important, and why i's okay to give up a little edge and play more passively at times to avoid losing the tournament, in principal it makes a lot of sense, and it really can improve your game. I love the way Negreanu just takes so many concepts to fine detail. For example, he talks about "bluff outs". He shows an example where you might actually make what seems like a really loose call with only a gutshot draw, or even a backdoor draw, knowing that there are so many scare cards in the deck that the odds are that if your opponent knows that you might play a draw in that situation and can fold if it looks like he's beat, it makes sense to call. If one of your "bluff outs" hits, you can bluff and take down the pot. But he goes into situations of how it might work andreally takes that concept and makes it really work with the rest of his strategy. He then talks about calling with nothing, or just a backdoor straightflush draw, knowing you can bluff the turn if your opponent shows weakness. Then if you DO pickup a backdoor draw, you can take the freecard, and if you hit,the odds are your opponent wont be able to put you on it, and will probably pay you off. But that's just Negreanus section which makes up about half the book. The other half of the book is written by several top pros Todd Brunson, Evelyn Ng, Erick Lindgrin and others and this book is definately worth a read. A very good book especially for postflop play.

I have always been A Negreanu fan, so when I saw this book, there were no options. I read the first chapter (for beginning players) and agreed with the vast majority of what Evelyn Ng had to say; she has a smart approach for beginners and lays out simple strategy and decision making principles. Where most books have beginners learn the math of pot odds, implied odds and hand odds, she makes it very easy to learn as you play, enabling the beginner to develop their hand reading ability as they learn the math, which I think is very effective. I scanned the others chapters, which I will go back and read, but was more interested in the last chapter, which was my main reason for buying the book - Daniel's small ball playing style. While I have been employing some forms of the small ball theory at different points during tournament play, I now realize the full potential of the small ball approach. Learning how to better play marginal hands in position and to maximize earnings while doing it is invaluable information, and it is spelled out here for any level of player. He describes each of his concepts in great detail with examples - from hand selection, pre-flop, flop, turn and river play, betting amounts based on situation, when to fold 'em and when to hold 'em. Everything is covered in terms that anyone can understand. The bottom line is that this book is absolutely a must have for any serious NLHE tournament player. I rank it with Super System and other renowned books that are considerd "must haves". But I emplore you - DON'T buy it...it'll give me the edge!!!

Other books go over basic preflop guidelines with little explanation for the intricacies of postflop play. They never move beyond "mix it up," "value bet," "catch over-aggressive players in bluffs," and other basic sayings few authors go very far to explain. Aside from a few gems from Sklansky and his team, not until Harrington's tournament and cash game series did we see detailed examples of postflop strategies. Earlier authors focused on the simple line of thought associated with world class play: outplay your opponent. What they failed to do was discuss the variables necessary to determine: 1.If we have the best hand in murky situations 2.If we do have the best hand, what lines of play extract the most value? 3.If we don't have the best hand, what situations and players can we exploit to turn our hand into a successful bluff? 4.What kinds of variables are necessary so we can exploit similar situations? What we need is a book that addresses the weaknesses so many other books promote. That's where Daniel Negreanu's Power Hold'em comes in, and where we jump ahead to it's real gem: Small-ball. Small-ball is a style meant to confuse your opponent and give you maximum value. It is a style employed by many of the smartest, most successful tournament players including Gus Hansen, Phil Ivey, and our author, Daniel Negreanu. As Negreanu states, when you watch a small-ball player, "you will notice that he appears to be in control of the table, yet at the same time, seems to be playing with reckless abandon, giving little thought to the strength of his starting hand." Daniel Negreanu's small-ball section details a myriad of complex postflop decisions. He wants us to play as many hands as possible to put us in as many profitable situations as we want. The more hands we play, the more situations we must be able to exploit or we will become exploited ourselves. As such, the author must provide vivid examples of how to take advantage of common but complicated streets based off specific player tendencies, board textures, and typical methods of exploiting how certain hands react to different boards. Once we move beyond the monkey play of getting it all in with the nuts, a player's skill becomes dependent not just on how to play his hand but on how to play his opponent. The message of other advanced strategists has been to read what hand your opponent has. Small-ball takes this a step further with the axiom: Don't play what your opponent has. Play what your opponent doesn't have. Building on this axiom, Negreanu explains perhaps the most revolutionary concept in his book: "bluffing outs," a strategy that calls for us to determine the true odds of drawing out on our opponent as well as what cards we can bluff with. Negreanu stresses that advanced plays such as these require advanced reads. We must observe if an opponent is capable of folding, and if so what hands will he fold to what situations. Unless we have noticed a player can lay down pocket Aces to

I pre-ordered this a long, long time ago and had almost given up on it when I got the the email that it was being shipped. The funny thing about this is that the most important thing I learned from this book wasn't in the book at all.. First of all: this really isn't a book for beginners. There is a chapter by Evelyn Ng that lays out a strategy for beginners, but that's not the main thrust of the book. This is about power tournament no limit poker and it's the absolute best book I've read yet. The problem with many other poker books is that you sometimes can't tell what game they are talking about: pot limit, limit, cash games? The strategies for all of those are much, much different than those for tournament NL so the lessons learned can be very harmful. Daniel makes it very clear what he is talking about. Here's another thing: most poker books aren't really written well. The authors aren't writers, and it shows. Daniel Negreanu writes very, very well and that makes a big difference. I really appreciated that. There are several other chapters by important players: Brunsen, Lindgren, Ng, Williams and Wasicka all contributed material. Frankly, they could have left all of that out and I would have been just as happy. I don't mean that those are bad chapters, but for me the meat of this book is Daniel's. So what's that most important thing I learned here? Simply, that I was right. That is, over the few years that I've been playing, I have slowly come to the same place that Daniel outlines: "small ball" is the path to winning tourneys. But every time I'd express any opinion along those lines, the old-style Doyle Brunsen high-aggression players would insist that I was wrong. Well, if I'm wrong, so is Daniel and I don't think many are in a position where they have any claim to question his play. Not that I'm in Daniel's league, of course. But so much of what he said caused me to say "Yeah!" and feel vindicated and of course the rest helped me refine and improve the things I have been thinking about. Of course the thing about poker is that if "everyone" started playing small ball, the old style Doyle Brunsen aggression would once again be the best play. You always have to remember that primarily you have to "play the player" and be ready to switch your style as circumstances dictate. However, right now a lot of the lesser wannabees still know nothing about small ball so the few that really apply these lessons will benefit greatly. I feel a little funny recommending this book. If everyone I play with read it, I might not do as well as I do. Well, unless they all took this as cookie cutter recipes (something Daniel warns against, by the way). The big lesson here is that good poker is smart poker - that it's not about "always do this if that", but only about looking for (and creating) opportunity. I'm not a great poker player. I've only been playing NLHE a few years and may never get beyond mediocre, but if I ever do, I kn