I’ve read the basic limit hold ‘em books, the ones that everyone recommends. I’ve read Miller, Sklansky, and Malmuth’s “Small Stakes Hold ‘Em” more than once and Lee Jones’ “Winning Low-Limit Hold ‘Em,” but while both (especially SSHE) are full of good fundamental concepts, nothing ever has got me thinking about how I play as much as a book I recently found.
It’s called “How Good Is Your Limit Hold ‘Em,” by Jacobs and Brier. I’ve never heard of these two authors in the poker world, but what they’ve done is so tremendously useful that I want to recommend it as the next book you read after SSHE or WLLHE.
The entire book is nothng but a series of quizzes. Each quiz is a single hand. Each hand, you’re told something about the other players in the hand. Often, questions describe not only the actual action, but hypothetical action. It’s multiple choice, and points are awarded based on your choices. The hands are typically from $10/$20 up to about $30/$60 games, higher stakes than I usually play.
The hands are taken from real online play. Like real life, sometimes the best decisions don’t come with the results you want–which is a good thing because the important thing in the long term is the good decision, not the result.
I’ve read about a quarter of the book so far. I’ve scored in the 70s and sometimes 80s in points for each quiz (best for each is 100).
Each time I do a quiz, I end up thinking about how to play a hand, about the people in the hand, not just the cards themselves. It’s a great way to adjust my thinking to how poker should be played, even limit games.
Last weekend I used this sort of thinking to better identify the types of players at the tables, and did pretty well. (More details later.)
I highly recommend this book.
If I had just one criticism, I’d say that the book is too small. I’d love to see two or three times as many of these quiz situations. Getting me to think about specific situations and then seeing how well my analysis matches up against the best analysis is such a useful tool, better in some ways than even playing, that I can’t get enough of it.
Or maybe we’re being set up for a series of these books, depending on how successful this first one is. Either way, I cna’t get enough of this particular style of poker education. Try it for yourself and see.