[Kidam]

Malheureusement c'est un livre qui couvre trop de variantes et dont le premier et plus intéressant chapitre est libre de droits. L'auteur de l'article y va de la relation qu'il entretient avec les livres.


The Full Tilt Poker Strategy Guide
by Michael Craig

Chapter 1

Player Introduction: The Passion to Be the Best
by Phil Gordon

What does it take to be a champion at poker? What are the players at the final table of the World Series of Poker doing that is so special? How can I take my game to the next level? What are the fundamentals of winning online and in live games, in tournaments and cash games? If you're like me, these are the questions you ask yourself over and over in an effort to improve and gain insight into the fascinating game of poker.

I am very fortunate. I've been able to use my early success at the tables to infiltrate a unique fraternity of kindred souls—my fellow professional poker players. Very often, when we're standing around before a tournament (or, more commonly, drinking a beer or two after we've busted out), I get a chance to ask questions and learn from the best players in the game. Less desirably, I very often get firsthand lessons as pros like Chris Ferguson, Howard Lederer, and Ted Forrest stack my chips and count my cash.

I take every single opportunity to learn from these players. My combined experiences at and away from the table with the folks who wrote this book are my driving influence to improve, my guiding influences in my game, and my shaping influences for my ideas. In short, without their help, insight, and frequent theft of my blinds and bets, I wouldn't be the player I am today. In fact, I might not be a professional poker player at all.

See, if you're like me, you don't want to be good at poker—you want to be truly great. I want my name uttered in the same sentence with Doyle Brunson, Johnny Chan, Howard Lederer, and Erik Seidel. I want to be the greatest player in the world. And, perhaps egotistically, I think with continued hard work, practice, and tests, I can get there. I know it won't happen overnight, and I know that it won't happen easily. But that's okay. Just the thought that it could happen is all I need to continue working hard at the game.

The players who wrote this book, me included, want to help you become a better poker player. We want you to experience the same joy that we do when we make a great play, take a great read, cash a million-dollar check, and slide that bracelet onto the wrist.

Some players complain about the introduction of books that help other players improve. "Hey, why do you want to educate the fish? The games will be much tougher if you keep this up!" To those critics, I say, "Bring it on! I want tougher competition. I want my opponents to play better so that I have to play better. I want them to push me. I want them to force me to take my game to the next level." There is no Nicklaus without Palmer. There is no Jordan without Barkley. To be the best we can be, we need competition—fierce, tough, unwavering competition.

The strategies and plays you'll find in this book will absolutely help your game. There is no doubt in my mind about that. But it's up to you how aggressively you pursue improvement. It's up to you how patient you'll be with your improvement. It's up to you how courageous you'll be in trying out these techniques. It's up to you how resilient you'll be when you face the inevitable setbacks.

Aggression. Patience. Courage. Resiliency. These are the qualities of a champion poker player. These qualities and an intense desire to improve are why you see the authors of this book winning on television and cashing the million-dollar checks. Will you join us at the final table, push us, and give us a battle for the bracelet? We sincerely hope so.

See you at the final table.

Chapter 2

Editor's Introduction: The Role of Books in Poker
by Michael Craig

A Book Made Me Want to Play Poker

I didn't start playing poker until I was thirty-two years old, and I started playing because of a book. My dad loaned me his copy of A. Alvarez's The Biggest Game in Town. I had never been interested in playing poker, but I became fascinated by the stories of the lives and games of the competitors at the 1981 World Series of Poker. (I'm pretty sure I still have that copy; sorry, Dad.)

Not long after, almost by accident, I picked up and read Anthony Holden's Big Deal. Having read just one poker narrative, I approached this book warily and, like a gambler, asked myself, What are the odds this is going to be as good as Alvarez? After devouring thirty pages, I looked at the dedication and acknowledgments and found out Holden and Alvarez were good friends and had played in a weekly game together for decades. (I later learned that another poker writer, the late David Spanier, had gotten kicked out of the game for playing too tight, and WPT/WSOP winner Mel Judah, then a London hairdresser, had played in it.)

I could not have imagined that I would become close friends with Tony Holden, appear as a character in the sequel, Bigger Deal, and, through Tony, become pen pals with Al Alvarez. (I even wrote a column about one of my experiences with Tony for Card Player, titled "Thank Mel Judah." When I used the upcoming issue to introduce myself to Mel and ask him about his experiences in the Tuesday Night Game, he said, "Yeah, they kicked me out for winning too much. Terrible players.")

As I slowly overcame my fear of being the least experienced player in the crowded Mirage poker room, I started playing $3-$6 hold 'em whenever I was in Las Vegas. Soon I was finding excuses to "stop by" this poker room eighteen hundred miles from my home. I had moved up to $10-$20 and $20-$40 games and also played in some of the cardrooms outside Los Angeles and San Diego while on business in Southern California.

And I read.

It wouldn't be until the release of James McManus's Positively Fifth Street that I would find another poker narrative to fuel my imagination, but I found no shortage of challenging manuals on how to improve at the game. Like everyone else, I desperately wanted to get better.

Two Guns: David Sklansky and Mason Malmuth

I got lucky. The first book of poker strategy I ever owned was David Sklansky's Hold 'Em Poker. Originally published in 1976, this skinny book had a goofy cover, a typeface like a ransom note—and most of the concepts I have learned from the fifty to one hundred books I have read since (and the one you are reading now). With so many players learning poker and taking it seriously in the last few years, it may be difficult for a lot of people to understand how slow the learning curve was for a beginning player in the early nineties. With no poker rooms for almost two thousand miles, I probably played the same number of hands my first year as a new player today would in a week or two.

Semi-bluffing? Free cards? Pot odds? Imagine playing poker and being completely ignorant of those things. Just the idea that you played different cards based on your position at the table was a revelation.

Mike Matusow and Phil Ivey separately told me that that book was the only poker book they ever read. Howard Lederer told me, and he explains it in chapter 12, that Sklansky's book was responsible for his becoming a professional poker player. David and his collaborator/ publisher Mason Malmuth deserve credit for permanently raising the quality of poker. I think I own a majority of the books they have written or published, have bought numerous copies for friends, and own multiple editions of a few.

The Book of Tells

Another book I picked up in the early nineties was Mike Caro's The Body Language of Poker. (It is better known by its current title, Caro's Book of Poker Tells.) I am not engaging in hyperbole when I say this book is as valuable to students of poker as Sigmund Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams is to students of psychology. Frankly, Mike's book would be pretty valuable to students of psychology too.

I read through Caro but didn't study it until years later. Several players dismissed the book, saying, "It was huge back then, but so many players are familiar with it that they correct for those tells, or incorporate them as false signals." I'm glad I finally rediscovered Caro's Book of Poker Tells a few years ago. First, even if not a word of it is true anymore, I owed it to myself as a writer to read any book that was actually responsible for changing human behavior on such a large scale.

Second, things haven't changed that much. Sure, Howard Lederer knows which players are likely to have that level of knowledge and how to fake some tells to exploit it, but I'm already handing over my chips to Lederer if he's at my table, unless I get lucky with the cards. I haven't played a tournament yet where I drew the same table as Howard, Annie Duke, Chris Ferguson, Chip Reese, Mike Matusow, Phil Hellmuth, Ted Forrest, Jennifer Harman, and Barry Greenstein. I have played with far, far more players who haven't mastered and exploited Mike Caro's revelations than I have played with those who have.

Third, and most important, when someone offers you something to help you at poker (or any activity involving skill), you can look at it in two ways—as a magic box or as a tool. Most criticism of learning tools is that they have flaws. They aren't a magic box.

Mike Caro's book is an incredibly useful tool, but not one to be used indiscriminately. I think close to 100 percent of the people who read it benefit from it, but that is far different from saying every word in it is correct or that for it to be worthwhile you have to automatically win every time you see a behavior described in the book and act on it.

Dolly Llama

I found the Rosetta Stone at the Gambler's Book Shop in 1992. I had just discovered the funky store on Eleventh Street in Las Vegas. A lot of the books that sell big at GBS can be found at your local bookstore— now. In 1992, the selection of poker books at bookstores was almost nonexistent. There were always a few titles, but they always managed to be years out of date and/or concerned games that I never saw spread at the Mirage or the Bicycle Club. David Sklansky? Maybe one title. Doyle Brunson? Never heard of him, and neither had the store's computers.

I can barely describe my excitement when I saw Super/System for the first time: shiny silver cover, silly caricature of a roly-poly man dribbling a basketball, 660 pages, $50 price tag. The book was practically an urban legend. I had read several things about it, but this was one of the few places on earth where I could see it and, better still, buy it. It didn't matter at all that I had never seen no-limit hold 'em (other than grainy VHS tapes of the final table of the World Series of Poker), or seven stud hi-lo split, or ace-to-five lowball, or that limit hold 'em as described by Bobby Baldwin was played with a single blind and antes.

Super/System described a way to think about poker. It didn't even matter what form the authors were writing about or what form you played. The best players in the world were discussing poker, and if you couldn't learn something by listening, then you weren't trying. I have described the book you are now holding as Super/System for tournaments, with better grammar and punctuation. Duplicating the concept of gathering great players (and great thinkers) and collecting their ideas was at the core of Super/System, and it is at the core of this book. The Full Tilt Poker Strategy Guide: Tournament Edition focuses on tournaments; Super/System and its sequel focused on cash games. This book has gathered a different but at least equally able group of gaming minds to share their insights.

Dan Harrington Detonates Poker

The current poker boom caught the strategists unprepared. Everyone wanted to play no-limit hold 'em, initially in tournaments. There were few books about tournament poker, though David Sklansky's Tournament Poker for Advanced Players introduced many important concepts, including the "gap concept" (referring to the gap in quality between the hand someone needs to bet and the hand needed to enter a pot after them).

But it was not the equivalent of the other Advanced Player guides. It was not a comprehensive examination of no-limit hold 'em tournament poker. Dan Harrington and Bill Robertie became the first to fill that need with a product good enough that, like several of Sklansky's and Malmuth's books, it permanently increased the quality of play. Between late 2004 and early 2006, they released three volumes of Harrington on Hold 'Em.

Within a week of purchasing the first volume, I recognized that tournaments would soon consist of two groups of players: those who understood the concepts in Harrington on Hold 'Em, and those who didn't. The books are a thoughtful, comprehensive, carefully reasoned approach to playing no-limit hold 'em hands and the strategic risks and opportunities created by how tournaments operate.

If I learned anything from conducting consecutive interviews with Chris Ferguson and Ted Forrest on no-limit hold 'em tournament strategy, it is that many different approaches can succeed. Although the pros tend to act indifferent to poker strategy books, the following opinions were generally held by the players I asked about Dan's book: (1) Harrington was an extremely skilled player (and you would be surprised how few players other pros will say that about); (2) his book contains a lot of good advice in nearly every area of tournament no-limit hold 'em; and (3) approaches different from his can work just as well and sometimes a lot better.

This is not a criticism of Harrington on Hold 'Em. Those books improved my own game, probably benefited all of the hundreds of thousands of people who bought them (if they read them), and, as I said, permanently lifted the level of tournament poker. You won't find anyplace in this book where a contributor describes something out of Harrington and then attacks it or explains how a different approach is better. You will, however, read advice that contradicts Dan Harrington's.

But guess what? Dan Harrington has done pretty well with his advice and so have people who followed it. And Chris Ferguson has done pretty well with his advice, and when he has given it, the people who followed it were glad they did. For that matter, you will read essays in this book that conflict with other essays here. One of my favorites is chapter 5, "(Don't) Play Like Ted Forrest," by Ted Forrest. I encouraged contributors to contradict each other, and specifically asked Ted if he wanted to say something about the common pre-flop strategy of raise-or-fold, which has been explained in this book by Howard Lederer, Chris Ferguson, and Andy Bloch.