Hold 'Em Poker | 
 enlarge | Author: David Sklansky
Publisher: Two Plus Two Pub. / Creel
Category: Book
List Price: $19.95
Buy Used: $2.80
You Save: $17.15 (86%)
New (38) Used (35) from $2.80
Rating:  47 reviews
Sales Rank: 86116
Media: Paperback
Pages: 113
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.5
Dimensions (in): 8.4 x 5.5 x 0.5
ISBN: 1880685086
EAN: 9781880685082
ASIN: 1880685086
Publication Date: December 1, 1996
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
This text is must reading for anyone planning to play hold em. It was the first definitive work on hold em poker and was originally published in 1976. Yet, it is still one of the most important and best selling poker books available. The text is designed for someone relatively new to the game, but it also contains much sophisticated material which all players should find beneficial. It is probably best known for the Sklansky Hand Rankings, which made the game much simpler to quantify and understand. Some of the topics include how Texas hold em is played, the importance of position, the first two cards, the key "flops," strategy before the flop, semi-bluffing, the free card, slowplaying, check raising, head-up on fifth street, and how to read hands. Not only was this text, which is Sklansky s first work, a major contributor to the explosive growth of this game, it is also a book that should still be read by all serious players.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 42 more reviews...
Just the basics here... April 19, 2008
Brian Hawkinson (San Jose, CA)
I picked this one up because in my search for a poker book I kept running across Sklansky, and where better to start than the book that started it all? At least it was the first to the starting gate, the rest is up in the air. I've been playing for about four years now and have a good grasp on poker itself, but wanted to get a little deeper to see if I can propel my game play that much further. So I started with the basics.
Sklansky gives some very good tips on strategy on various different types of hands, positions, chip stacks and so on. I lot of this was intuitive for me but I had never actually sat down and tried to understand why I did those things, such as raise in order to get the free card in case I don't hit it, or raise if you are one of the first to act just to feel out the players behind you. Sklansky did a great job in describing why many of these steps are taken and explained why it is important to do them. For that I felt I have learned a lot.
On the flip side though he mentioned a lot of ratios and odds and never went into how he did that. He would throw numbers out there and I had no way to relate to it and understand how he came to the math that he did in order to apply it myself. Perhaps that is something intuitive and I just can't grasp it right away, but some explanation would have been good. Also this is a rather basic book on Hold 'Em. Obviously, being 108 pages, it only had the chance to brush up on the basics, but I wish he could have went a little deeper (of course you can also buy his other book with advanced techniques, always a businessman in the wings to get more money out of you).
Over all this was a decent book and help me understand a lot of the basic moves I have already been doing and help with knowing why it is important to do that move and so on. But there is more that I wish he would have done better with, such as some of the math or gone in to more detail. I would still recommend.
3.5 stars.
 Foundation booklet for Limit Hold'em April 5, 2008
Mark K. (California, USA)
This book (more like a booklet, actually) gives a quick yet firm foundation from which one can start building his/her own Hold'em strategies. It was originally written when the single blind game was the norm then updated, but the "update" consists mostly of footnotes at various pages. Some of the concepts aren't exactly explained as well as they could have been, but they're good enough to understand what the author is trying to get at - it's the overall wins you care about, not the game you're currently playing, and encourages you to look at the long-term probabilities of winning rather than the individual game.
The book discusses almost exclusively the limit hold'em games, not the no-limit hold'em games. It's not for those that are not familiar with the rules of a hold'em games but it does touch up on the variations of the limit hold'ems and the differences between the limit and the no-limit games. The reader will likely want to read other books after reading this one. It's a fairly easy read that focuses on concepts more than the exact numbers, but some probability calculations and tables are provided if the reader is interested in them.
 This guy is a creep February 28, 2008
YankeeMomCT (USA)
0 out of 3 found this review helpful
He's not as good as he seems to think he is. This book was not at all helpful.
 Out of Date February 23, 2008
J. Jeffrey Donahue (San Antonio, TX)
This was probably an awesome book when published in 1976, but the book has not been really updated since then, in spite of being reissued in 1997 as a new edition. The only real updating as far as I can tell is the addition of footnotes here and there explaining that some of the specific advice for certain situations may not be valid for the modern double blind structure. This book has a lot of very worthwhile ideas, but most of them are better explained in more detail in Sklansky/Malmuth's Hold'em Poker for Advanced Players, which I highly recommend. Another awesome Sklansky et al book is Small Stakes Hold'em, which I find extremely useful since I don't play in the big leagues. Overall I would rate Hold'em Poker for Advanced Players as much more valuable book than this one, even if you are not yet an advanced player.
Great theory, dated practice April 13, 2007
therosen (New York, NY United States)
David Sklansky, the dean of poker writing, picks up where he left off on the Theory of Poker. It's more practical than his theory book, in that it focuses on one game, but it's less relevant to what many people play - No Limit Texas Hold 'Em. Very useful book, but not the Be All End All of poker playing.
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