Serious Poker... Mason

Mason, Have you read Kimberg's book "Serious Poker". What is your opinion of it?

Here's my review.


Serious Poker (7) by Dan Kimberg. Even though this book has the word “serious” in the title, it

is really aimed at beginning poker players and probably should have been called “Beginning Poker.” I also found it uneven and way too wordy. I’ll start with the problems first.


The most important area in any poker book that is trying to teach people how to play should simply be the strategy advice, and this is where this text is a little weak. The other topics, even if

they are well covered, simply pale in importance. And, even though there are over 300 pages here

only about fifty are actually devoted to how poker should be played. However, for a beginning

player the advice is reasonably accurate and should help someone get started on a proper path to good play.


The real strength of the book is what I will call other topics. The author does a good job of explaining mathematical expectation, fluctuations, bankroll requirements, record keeping, and self evaluation. He also has a short discussion of tournaments, computers and poker, and what he calls poker resources. Again, he does a reasonably good job here even though much of this material has already been written up in other places and many successful players won’t consider all of it very important.


So my conclusion is that I don’t quite recommend this book. (It needs to get an 8 on my rating system for that to happen.) However, some of you may want to pick it up as a supplemental

read, and in that sense it’s pretty good.

Mason - I think your review leaves out two major flaws in Kimberg's book when it comes to guiding beginners towards proper play:


1) He doesn't teach the importance of studying your opponents' starting requirements and betting patterns.


2) He doesn't discuss street-by-street strategy in contextual terms. In other words, he reinforces the beginner's error of playing a self-weighting strategy.


Leaving these two hugely important concepts out of the book seems almost a crime. I would NEVER recommend this book to any player who wants to learn the basics of either hold'em or stud.

While you are correct in what you state, I don't consider those beginner concepts. This brings us to my other point. The strategy advice seems to be aimed at raw beginners, while the "other topics" advice seems to be aimed at much more sophisticated players.


To me this is an unusual mix, and just thinking out loud, my guess is that he probably should have written two seperate books.