Book Review: Poker Tournaments And The Art Of War

[Al Mirpuri]

Poker Tournaments And The Art Of War 5/10
This book is well presented but it clearly falls into the Zen And The Art Of Poker subgenre of poker books. If you have Zen (and you should) then there is no need whatsoever to buy this book. However, if you wanted to give it to someone so they could understand the mindset of playing tournaments then it might be useful. However, there is no play by play or hand by hand analysis in this book. It deals with the overarching principles of tournament play and is therefore of little value to anyone who has played even a small number of tournaments. Nice conceptual conceit though to couple tournament advice with textual support from Sun-Tzu's The Art Of War. The author is someone I am not familiar with. I even wondered if he had posted here as The Art Of War is regularly recommended as a book to help one's play even though it does not deal with poker.

[jakethebake]

I'm not sure I agree that this book and Zen had much overlap. They covered completely different topics. I thought the book was pretty useless. I agree with the author that Sun-Tzu is very applicable to poker, but this book was mostly just fluff and din't really cover its topic with any degree of depth.

[luckybeans]

For what its worth, I found this book to be a great read. It is not a "how to" book for beginners, but is rather a book to get you to concentrate on the processes and practices necessary to succeed. You can only advance so far by playing by the book. Once you have the fundamentals, this book employs a very helpful analogy to get you to think of different ways to advance. I like books that get me to think about approaching things in a way I had not before. I do caution that this is not a book for newbies but is geared toward the player that has sound fundamentals in place.