Excellent reading and if you pay attention you may win some money.

Like the Little Green Book, this is a must-read for anyone who wants to improve their no-limit hold'em game. I will be reviewing, highlighting, and studying this book for years to come.

Picks up where his Little green Book leaves off. I'm not too enamored with Phil Gordon. He seems to be somewhat of a jack-ass

This poker book was terrific . . . . . the stories of the hands are definately there to give you an idea how a professional thinks and plays the game. That level is what most seek to attain.

I’m reviewing my poker library after re-reading each of the books and formatting them for ease of reference.

Poker player experience level required: n  BEGINNERn

Original publication date: n  2006n
Reviewed: n  2023n

Game: n  No Limit Hold‘Emn

Book information is relevant at time of review: n  NOn

Content:

The third book in Phil Gordon's series begins to highlight the progress modern poker players thinking when compared to the early 2000's mindset. Of course, the math never changes, but the approach to opponents does. Gordon superficially touches on combinatorics and ranges, but this wasn't prevalent in players' mindsets at the time.

Current players should be thinking in terms of range vs range, how the community cards interact with that range and exploitative strategies. This book doesn't touch on that even at the $2/5, $5/5, $5/10 levels and upwards. It is amazing to the gamer's mindset and how far forward things have come in twenty years.

I cannot recommend this book due to the concepts being outdated. There are small nuggets to glean from the analysis, but so few and far between for the modern poker player to actualize any real value.

I'd say the book is fun more than anything. I first read the book before i knew anything about poker, but came back to it after i had learned i fear bit. And both times i found it easy and fun to read. Phil makes it easy for you to see each game he explains from the eyes of the player, and teaches you along the way. He also ends each little story of the games with a summary of what happened, what he did right and wrong.

The book is easy to read and is good for beginners to learn about hold 'em poker, but also fun for anyone, just see what it's like to play professional level poker.

One of the better poker books I've read.

Entertainingly written background into the game of Poker. You think Poker's about luck? How do the same 9/10 people make the final table of the World Series year after year?

Only read the tournament pages (from 94 to 266, in a 322 pages book). It was very interesting. Nicely contextuLized. Both winning and loosing hands, makes it real. Phil gordon makes us feel the poker with his well written (known and) interesting style. Makes a player evolve.

After reading and enjoying  Phil Gordon's  Poker: The Real Deal and  Phil Gordon's Little Green Book, I debated whether to pick up  Phil Gordon's Little Blue Book or wait until I felt I'd mastered the concepts in the Little Green Book better (read: at all). Eventually, I remembered that it's never good when I decide to deliberately derail my own momentum at something, so I ordered the Little Blue Book while I still felt like it, and picked it up and started reading it as soon as I felt like it.

I think this was a good move on my part, because the Little Blue Book doesn't really introduce many new concepts, but instead applies the ones from the last book to a bunch of hand histories roughly grouped by game type. There's probably some people for whom "entire book full of hand histories" sounds like the most boring stuff on earth, but I found that format especially engaging and useful. One thing I like about poker is that it plays like a mystery story, so each hand history and its little box of "Key Analysis" points at the end felt like reading a bunch of little poker parables with clearly identified Morals of the Story at the end. This is how we teach tiny children the basic concepts for living in a society, and it's about the level of simplicity I seem to require for learning about poker. Also, Gordon is an entertaining writer, and his hand history-short stories contain plenty of amusingly drawn characters and absurd jokes, which also makes them more memorable. I'm still going to have to reread sections multiple times if I have any hope of remembering enough specifics to be able to recall them at a table, because due to my line of work, in which the stuff-I-read to stuff-I-need-to-know ratio is wildly skewed, I seem to have trained my brain to retain astonishingly little detail of what I read.

Anyway, the book is split into sections for cash games, early in tournaments, in the middle of tournaments, late in tournaments, final tables (for the optimistic), online play, and even a section on tips for playing satellites. Obviously, it's mostly the cash game section that I'm going to be rereading until I finally absorb something, but the late-in-tournaments and final-table sections are the most thrilling reading, featuring more big-name pros and with the most tricky psychological stuff. My favorite story is the one where Phil bases his decision-making on an episode of Seinfeld for a hand against Phil Hellmuth, and does the opposite of everything he's initially inclined to do. Phil manages to both outplay and out-jackass other Phil, and it's enormously satisfying to read. (It is also never, ever going to have any utility for me as a player.)

This book does not have charts at the end -- those are in the Little Green Book and it is assumed you've got that one already -- but it does have a very nice glossary.

My only concern about this book is the same as the one I've got about the Little Green Book, which is that the game has evolved a lot since it was published. This book was released in 2006, making it a full decade old. I can tell a lot of the terms you hear these days are missing -- it doesn't discuss game theory optimization, which is currently super hip, and it talks about putting opponents on hands rather than on ranges of hands -- but I've got no way of knowing how that translates into concrete differences in the expectations you should have for opponents' behavior and how you should interpret or play back against said behavior. But I think overall the book is heavy enough on "how to think things through" over "in X situation, always make play Y" that it should still be a valuable resource.

I'm still going to run right out and buy the Little Gold Book, even though that one has "Advanced" in the subtitle and I am clearly actually not ready for advanced anything, just because at this point I really like Gordon as an author. While I'm waiting for it to get here, I'm going to go back and review some things.

Originally posted at http://bloodygranuaile.livejournal.co...

Loved this book and the Little Green Book as well. I like how he walks you through multiple scenarios and gives you his mindset as he decides on a course of action.

Not nearly as good as the green book. A lot less poker info and more poker stories.