Small Stakes No Limit Hold’em – Ed Miller, Sunny Mehta and Matt Flynn.
This is the book I’ve been reading the past few days, Skelm passed a copy onto me and told me to get onto writing a review about it, which I’m basically doing now.
I know I’m going to rant so as a preemptive strike for those TLDR’ers, the book is great. Buy it and put it on a shelf. Don’t buy it, read it and use the knowledge contained to crush me online, just buy it so the authors get their deserved renumeration for the awesomeness they bestowed upon us in this literary masterpiece, put it up somewhere high, and leave it alone. The voodoo contained within its pages is too much for you.
Seriously, this book was great, I’ve put a few books down recently because a better one has come along, one that was more attuned to providing me with the information specific to my situation, and this one topped them all. Every time I found something worth noting, I would type it out in my own words, and before long found I was basically just re-writing the whole book. Seriously. Fucking. Good. Shit. My skill level hasn’t really been tested, but I feel this book was aimed directly at where I’m at, I understood everything in it, nothing was over my head, and nothing was dumbed down, right on the money.
Ok, onto the content, this is basically a guide how to beat 200nl, most of the examples given are 6-max, but a lot can easily be translated into FR pretty easily. All of the critical parts of a good TAG style play are addressed here, with emphasis on online play with the use of HUD statistics and how it affects your decisions. 3bet-4bet-5bet, position, player types, barelling, stealing, and isolation are well covered, and can easily be used as a reference. I don’t know how the games are going to be in 5 or 10 years, but I’m sure this book will play a part in getting the edge on the opponent in all of these areas for a long time.
If you’ve been reading my blog, you would know I’m fond of making things to put on my wall for quick reference. I’ll be adding about 10 pages of stuff because of this book everything is just really at my level. You might not find it as useful if you are crushing the Mid-stakes, since there’s not too much number crunching or talk of level upon level upon level, but for us grinding the lows, this is the new bible.
To be honest I havn’t heard of Sunny Mehta or Matt Flynn, but Ed miller is a favourite of mine, Skelm got me onto his teachings the first night we decided poker was going to be the direction I took my life, and from then on, his teachings were the basis for a large percentage of my knowledge. And it’s easy to see where he influenced this book, many of the prinicples he speaks about in his stoxpoker videos are summed up in this book (with less video obviously), and many principles are expanded upon.
All in all… this being the first book review I’ve ever written about anything ever, I’ll just sum it up.
Buy it, you need it.
