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Hold'em Poker For Advanced Players (21st Century Edition)

Rating: 6/10

Cost: $29.95

The Nuts: Good discussions on playing positions.

The Muck: Nearly 100 subjects get covered in barely over 300 pages.

Recommended For: Beginning players

Despite the title clearly stating that this book is for advanced players, David Sklansky and Mason Malmuth’s updated edition gives a lot of attention to loose, low-limit cash games, which has beginner written all over it.

These two respectable poker players and authors can calculate odds like there’s no tomorrow. However, in this book the authors devote all of four pages to odds and implied odds, and only give a scattering of percentage quotes throughout the rest of the book. With that said, there is an obvious overall theme of “grazing” over topics and never diving too deep. Each subject in the book gets about three pages of attention.

The authors explain that their approach to poker in this book is “tight but aggressive” and their tactics are best used in medium-limit cash games ($10-$20 and $40-$80 limit hold‘em).

Sklansky does get bonus points for printing a modified Hand Rankings chart from one of his earlier books, Hold ‘em Poker. The chart breaks starting hands down into 8 “groups,” which are then used for a lengthy discussion on playing hands from different table positions.

Another plus for the book is that it covers short-handed and loose cash games, which isn’t present in a lot of other poker books. A big minus, however, is the sixty pages Sklansky and Malmuth devote to a “Q&A” that recaps all the previously discussed subjects in the book.

Some of the answers are so obvious they’re not even worth mentioning; a lot of the language is ambiguous at best; and a majority of the scenarios described in the questions don’t give enough information to give a sound answer.

Overall, this book is great for the beginning low-limit cash game player, but just don’t expect a lot of “meat” to it.  

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