Re: learning pot limit?
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Science of Poker by Mahmood N Mahmood.
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Your credibility might be tainted here - I have never heard of even a single person who has read this book who didn't absolutely loathe it aside from you just now.
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I know someone who is a very good player and has a very large poker library, and he really likes this book. Just because the groupthink on the twoplustwo website is to bash this book (and most non-twoplustwo books), does not mean that there are no poker players out there who like it.
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I never said that the entire "sample" was taken from twoplustwo users exclusively. Usually in the case of a non-2+2 book, there is a fair amount of "not published here" noise interspersed with the signal of honest opinion. In this particular case, however, this book was given an across-the-board review of utter trash by everyone I have ever heard or read discussing it. The fact that your friend owns a lot of poker books and happens to like this one makes him the outlier in this case. Here is a quote from a reviewer on amazon who is apparently in a similar positon - or, at least, I have as much evidence that he is a knowledgeable player with a lot of books as I do that your friend is - "This book is a perfect example of how a mathematician with little experience or understanding of poker typically approaches the game. The result, in this case at least, is a complete train wreck. I'm a professional poker player, a recent college grad, and the owner of about 50 poker books. I was excited but wary when I found this title recently; I've always thought there was a gap in the poker literature on this topic, approaching the game from a more rigorously analytical perspective. Many have tried, but just about all have failed miserably, and this is no exception."
Here's another choice snippet from the same review: "
For hold'em, a good example of the terrible advice in this book is a discussion of "Q-7(s)", queen-seven suited. He is assuming you are in late position and that a player you somehow know has A-Ks has raised in front of you. He reasons that the hand becomes profitable and should be played if you can get at least four opponents, because it will win 21% of the time against AKs and three other random hands. This might apply if there was no more betting after the flop and the cards were just turned up, but that's not how poker is played. He also assumes that the other three players have average, random hands even though they've called a strong raise - totally unreasonable."
If that is true, how can you even try to tell me that this is a book worth practicing your origami on, let alone worth reading, let alone worth infusing into your game?
Not having read the book, I can't say with 100% certainty whether or not I agree with anything or nothing within, but based on the opinions I've read, I can with a fair degree of certainty conclude that it is a waste of my (and probably others') time. It's not necessary to read every poker book that comes down the pike, you know.
Sometimes conventional wisdom and the behavior of groups are considered for a reason. Or would you run toward the erupting volcano against the direction of the masses simply because you think the average person is stupid?
But hey, if you're correct, and all these people are wrong, then what a diamond in the rough this book must be - I'd advise you to keep a competitive advantage like this under wraps. [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]
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