Thursday Night Poker

[Homer315]

Hey all, I've read many of the book titles usually tossed around. When I first started playing, it was mostly 7 stud in casinos. I read a book called "Thursday Night Poker" by a guy named Peter O. Steiner. I thought it was an excellent book, and (though I haven't read it completely again in a couple of years) think it might bridge a decent gap from very beginner to someone who might appreciate TOP more. Has anybody else read it and have any thoughts on using it as an intro to thinking about poker (but not Holdem in particular)?

[Homer]

[ QUOTE ]
Hey all, I've read many of the book titles usually tossed around. When I first started playing, it was mostly 7 stud in casinos. I read a book called "Thursday Night Poker" by a guy named Peter O. Steiner. I thought it was an excellent book, and (though I haven't read it completely again in a couple of years) think it might bridge a decent gap from very beginner to someone who might appreciate TOP more. Has anybody else read it and have any thoughts on using it as an intro to thinking about poker (but not Holdem in particular)?

[/ QUOTE ]

I haven't read it yet.

-- Sincerely, Homer1

[nolanfan34]

[ QUOTE ]

-- Sincerely, Homer1

[/ QUOTE ]

You just couldn't resist, could you. [img]/images/graemlins/tongue.gif[/img]

[bolgenmod]

As an avid reader and relative poker newbie, I've looked at a lot of "which book?" threads both here and on RPG and never saw Thursday Night Poker recommended, which kind of surprised me as I think it is an excellent book, especially for beginners.

One reason many people may have passed it up is that it is mostly directed at the home game player, not the aspiring professional. It also deals with a wider range of games (ie, it is not hold em specific, but does have a long chapter on hold em).

By chance, I read this book fairly early in my ongoing poker-reading-tear (I've read more than thirty books in less than a year, including all the usual suspects), and I found it enormously helpful in raising my thinking beyond the "I have a good hand, so I'll bet" stage. Steiner explains those all-important concepts like pot odds and expected value clearly and shows how they really do matter. To a beginning player, his explanations seemed much clearer than those in TOP and others.

Another invaluable quality of the book is that it is NOT aimed at the serious mid-limit players that all the other books address. Of course, he shows you how to make money, but he flat out states that making money is not the only reason why people play poker. Sure, I want to win and make money, but I also want to play well and have fun. And he points out more than once the obvious truism that tricky plays don't work against unthinking opponents, a point that most other books gloss over: they assume you're playing better players, players like the authors usually play against.

(I must say that this aspect of not trying to trick the untrickable is fully addressed in the new Miller/Sklansky/Malmuth Small Stakes book, a GREAT book, but still not for beginners.)

In sum, I think this is an excellent transitional book -- a really good book for a relative beginner to read. And if one plays mostly in home games (even high-stakes home games), I wouldn't miss reading this book. In my own case, even as I moved up to Sklansky et al, I found myself re-reading bits of Steiner.