Ed Recommends: Winning Poker Tournaments One Hand At A Time

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I just finished reading my first poker strategy book in quite a while (probably the first one since The Mathematics of Poker). It’s a tournament book published by Matthew Hilger’s company, Dimat, and it’s good. The book has a long title and an even longer author list, so I’m going to make a new paragraph for it.

It’s called Winning Poker Tournaments One Hand at a Time Volume I and it’s written by by Eric ‘Rizen’ Lynch, Jon ‘Pearljammer’ Turner, and Jon ‘Apestyles’ Van Fleet.

(When I write a book with two other authors, we are at least gracious enough not to jam both our real names and our internet handles on the spine. )

The format of the book is simple. It’s 180-odd hands, all taken from online multi-table tournaments, analyzed by at least one of the three authors (and occasionally by all three). The book covers play in deep stack and short stack situations, and the examples range from early in the tournament hands through to the final table. The bubble is probably the tournament stage covered in the most depth, with a section near the end of the book devoted to analyzing every bubble hand played by the author at a single large buy-in tournament.

The format of the book is simple, and it’s also a fairly simple decision for me to recommend the book. The authors have selected the example hands well to illustrate important tournament concepts, and the level of analysis is consistently strong.

One aspect of the book I particularly liked was the authors’ take on the psychology of tournament play and how it affects hand reading and estimates of opponents’ hand ranges. As primarily a cash game player, I’m used to adjusting reads based on stuff like who may be tilting, who may be looking to take a stand, who may be looking to make a play at me due to recent history, and so forth. But I’m not used to drawing tournament-specific distinctions such as the differing psychologies of satellite winners and those who bought in the full entry fee. And I don’t have particular insight into how various player types react to being on or near the bubble, or when they’ll tend to feel pot-committed in short-stack situations and when they won’t. Winning Poker Tournaments One Hand at a Time routinely explains how to use these subtle psychological factors to adjust a read on an opponent’s hand range and to anticipate how an opponent will react to various plays.

I’ve started to play a tournament here and there recently. After watching a few of Matt Matros’s excellent multitable tournament videos at Stoxpoker and after reading this book, I feel like my tournament game now has a solid foundation and I’m ready to take on the world.

I do have one minor criticism of the book. I wish it were slightly more organized. As far as I can tell, the hands have no particular organizing principle from one to the next. In one hand we might be making a river decision during an early stage of the tournament, and in the next we might be on the bubble deciding whether or not to resteal preflop. I think some readers would learn more efficiently from the book if the hands were grouped in a way that served to reinforce important concepts through series of related hands (much as the authors did near the end of the book with the series of bubble hands).

But really it’s a minor quibble. I think most readers, if they read through the book several times (well worth doing), will eventually squeeze all the wisdom from the book.

If you play multi-table tournaments more often than once a year, I definitely recommend Winning Poker Tournaments One Hand at a Time.

Tags: apestyles, dimat, eric lynch, jon turner, jon van fleet, matthew-hilger, MTTs, multi-table tournaments, no-limit-holdem, pearljammer, poker, rizen, Tournaments

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