The Best Hand I Ever Played: good book saw yesterday

[benkahuna]

The Best Hand I Ever Played : 52 Winning Poker Lessons from the World's Greatest Players (Paperback)
by Steve Rosenbloom

I read through some of this book yesterday and liked it pretty well.
Many of the hands are already fairly famous (Gus Hansen's T[img]/images/graemlins/heart.gif[/img], 8[img]/images/graemlins/heart.gif[/img] all in call, for instance), and not the best demonstrations of poker, but I still thought it was a great book.

The book has 52 hands by famous poker players (no Hellmuth, unfortunately) and why they liked it the best. Each passage begins with some explanation of the person and their role in poker, then moves onto the hand, then moves onto the author explaining about the hand and giving little play factoids and describing the play in context.

I found it entertaining and insightful and the author clearly has a good understanding of how to play poker.

If you want help applying poker theory to real life situations, this book could help and there are probably a few tidbits for those looking to find out every possible poker trick about which something has been written.

[joewatch]

I also took a quick read of this book when I was in the bookstore this weekend. It looks like a nice read for people who like reading poker story books like Positively 5th Street, but other than that, I don't see that this book will improve your game. Almost all of the examples I read are Texas Holdem tournament hands, and very situation dependent (i.e. they were playing against somebody they knew well). My feeling was this was just another book looking to cash-in on the poker craze. If you like this kind of book, I think Doyle's Poker Wisdom of a Champion is probably more entertaining and educational.

[benkahuna]

I'll check that one out too. I think it's significantly better than the McManus book for learning about how to play because of the explanations by the author after each hand, but I agree it's still quite limited.

[betgo]

I picked up this book today. It is awesome. I know some people may consider it light, but the insights in some of the hands are fantastic.

Some of the hands involve calls with bottom pair. There is Arieh's laydown of a flush. Gus Hanson's call of the push with T8s, where he found up a 52-48 dog getting 65-35 pot odds shows the strength of a great backgammon player.

I am mainly a NLHE tournament player and most of the hands are from that and some are from NLHE cash games, so I particularly appreciate this.

I think this is very underrated as a serious poker book.