New Book: How To Read Hands At No-Limit Hold’em by Ed Miller
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I promised an announcement at the end of May, and here it is. I’m currently putting the finishing touches on my newest book. I think you all are going to like it.
It’s called How To Read Hands At No-Limit Hold’em. It is, as you may have guessed, about hand reading in no-limit.
In January I got the idea for this book. I’d been talking to a number of small stakes players about the game, and something became clear to me. A lot of people who have read my other books, read this website, watched videos, and so forth, are familiar with the basics of hand reading. You put an opponent on a range of hands. When you get new information, you adjust the range.
But when pressed, many players were fuzzy on exactly what this process entails. They know what a hand range is, but how do you adjust it? And, more to the point, how do you use this theoretical list of possible holdings to make real decisions in real time?
Hand reading is perhaps the single most important no-limit skill. Players with some bad habits but excellent hand reading skills will destroy players with more solid fundamentals but sketchy hand reading. These players that I had been talking to simply didn’t have the hand reading skills to break through to the next level.
This book is focused like a laser on improving your hand reading. It’s extremely detailed, as you might imagine given that I wrote a whole book about the one topic. It starts at the beginning, explaining hand ranges, how you construct them, and how you use them. Then it walks you through the hand reading process. Preflop, on the flop, on the turn, and on the river. It talks about hand reading where you have the initiative and hand reading when you’re responding to aggression. It talks about hand reading in heads-up pots and in multiway pots. It talks about reading your opponents’ hands and reading your own hand (to help you balance your ranges and become a tougher player). Better hand reading means better continuation betting and barrelling decisions, better bluffs, better value bets, better hero calls, and more.
It’s a relatively straightforward read, but it’s absolutely packed with critical information. There are lots of exercises and hand quizzes throughout that let you test your newly learned skills.
One read-through won’t make you a hand reading master. But this isn’t the sort of book you read once and put away forever. It’s a book you work through many times. With practice, practice, practice, you will improve your reads and improve your confidence too.
The book is geared toward reading opponents who aren’t tough pros. It is written with live games in mind, but online players will get a lot out of it also. It’s not going to teach you how to outlevel a Cardrunners pro, but it will teach you how to reliably put your everyday opponents on ranges and then make sharp decisions against them.
The book will come out first as an e-book in PDF, Kindle, and EPUB (iPad/iPhone/Android/most other e-readers) formats. It’s going to sell for $49.99, and I’m going to run a preordering period for about two weeks prior to release. Those who buy during the preordering period will receive some extra goodies including a coupon for personal coaching and a discount on another book or product.
After the e-book is out, I will look into making a paperback version available via Amazon.
I’m still finishing it up, and I’m not going to release it until I’m satisfied. Right now I’m planning for preordering to begin sometime in early July with release near the end of the month.
I’m very excited. If you have any questions about the book, ask them in the comments or on my Facebook page.
Tags: Hand Reading, how to read hands at no-limit hold'em, no-limit-holdem, poker, poker-books
Very nice article Ed. I see these plays every Friday night at Johnny’s bar in Cooper City, Florida. I started playing a a year and a few months ago and just recently began thinking about bet sizing and how important that is. With a nut flush on the river, a bet too small equals small value, yet a bet too large equals no value at all!
I like to say “and then there were three” when our tournament gets to this stage just to remind myself that it now time to make very large bets, usually all-in’s so long as I hit the flop, as the blinds are now large enough, and my two remaining opponents either have nothing or are afraid to call my large raise.
Won two tournaments back to back last Friday!
Hand reading skill is improving if I can keep my eyes on the board and not my sexy bartender.
Will “How to Read Hands” be available on paper?
I’m still old fashioned like that.
Thanks Ed. Daniel Welker – Pembroke Pines, FLA