No Limit Hold 'em: Theory and Practice

No Limit Hold 'em: Theory and Practice author: David Sklansky Ed Miller rating: asin: 188068537X binding: Paperback list price: $29.95 USD amazon price: $19.77 USD

No Limit Hold'em Theory and Practice is David Sklansky's first major foray into No Limit Hold'em. It came out in mid-2006, was very widely anticipated by the poker community, and has proven to be a big success.

NLHTAP is fairly unstructured, with sections on different topics such as adjusting to different game types, maximizing value in hands and preflop strategy. There is a fair amount of discussion, including some basic math, on expectation in hands based on bet sizes which is instructive. Sklansky and Miller discuss many standard poker concepts such as bluffing, check-raising, multiple-level thinking and many more. In general, this is a more theoretical than practical book. There are not too many specific hand examples but there are a lot of useful concepts and ideas.

The book introduces the Sklansky-Chubukov hand rankings. These tell you the maximum size of your stack that you can profitably move all-in with from the small blind in an unopened pot, even if you were to expose your hand. It's helpful particularly for medium to high blind tournament situations. I haven't found it particularly helpful for cash games, since for the weaker hands, your stack is typically too large to move in, and for the stronger hands, moving all-in is rarely the optimal way to play the hand. For instance, the S-C ranking indicates that it is a non-exploitable, positive-expectation play to move all-in with pocket queens, with $1/$2 blinds and a stack of $478, but this is obviously isn't a good way to maximize your profit.

My favorite section of this book is the "Concepts" section, which consists of 59 terrific short tips. It's best to take these in slowly. I'd suggest reading these 5 or 10 at a time. There is far too much valuable advice in this section to absorb all at once.

I highly recommend this book for improving your no limit hold'em game, once you have already learned the basics of the game.