Theoretical

EXTRAS GRAPHICS FROM THE BOOK The Myth of Poker Talent is a unique book and is the culmination of renowned poker trainer Alex Fitzgerald’s work with over 1000 students over a 10 year period. Alex has discovered what makes a winning poker player and here’s the good news… It has nothing to do with poker talent.   If you want to excel at the game you’ll need to buy this book, study Alex’s method and work hard – but you don’t need talent. Alex’s method focuses on understanding generic poker situations and not specific hands. As a highly experienced teacher, he expresses his ideas in simple, easy-to-understand language. The Myth of Poker Talent will teach you: A “model of poker” built from scratch An understanding of every poker tool Why much of what experienced players think they know is actually wrong. … and much, much more.

EXTRAS Bonus Chapter Spreadsheets (20KB, XLS) GO TO HOLD’EMBOOK.COM FOR FULL DETAILS. Excelling at No-Limit Hold’em is a sensation in poker publishing. Renowned poker professional and author Jonathan Little brings together 17 of the greatest no-limit experts in the world to discuss all aspects of the game. These experts include superstars such as Phil Hellmuth, Chris Moneymaker, Mike Sexton and Jared Tendler. In Part 1 strategies are analysed for topics such as understanding the fundamentals, satellite play, lower-buy in events, analysing tells and moving up in stakes Part 2 sees a thorough technical breakdown of the game including sections on range analysis, game theory optimal play, short stack strategies, value betting and final table play. As any serious poker will confirm, the technical side is only half the battle and so Part 3 deals with mental toughness, psychology and understanding tilt. Excelling at No-Limit Hold‘em provides all the tools that an aspiring player needs to understand no-limit hold‘em. It is a must buy for anyone who is serious about wanting to improve their poker. CHAPTER DETAILS Chad Holloway - The post-boom evolution in poker Evan Jarvis - Equity, position and aggression Chris Moneymaker - Lower buy-in strategies Ed Miller – Moving up in stakes Scott Clements – General tournament concepts Matt Affleck - Advanced tournament strategies Bernard Lee – Satellite play Zachary Elwood - Understanding tells Alex Fitzgerald – In-depth range analysis Phil Hellmuth/Liv Boeree – Short stack strategies Jonathan Little - Value betting and Final table play Olivier Busquet - Heads-up play Will Tipton – Game theory optimal play Patricia Cardner – Mental toughness Jared Tendler - Eliminating tilt Elliot Roe - Poker hypnotherapy Mike Sexton – Great plays from great players

Many poker players can make good decisions at the table with a reasonable frequency. Nevertheless, there are numerous situations where even very experienced players behave in predictable ways. These deeply-ingrained habits lead them to make mistakes. The problem is that these situations won’t often arise at the table by chance – you have to make them happen. Exploitative Play in Live Poker is a ground-breaking work that teaches you how to create the circumstances where your opponents will be likely to blunder and how to exploit them when they do. To achieve this you will need to put to one side starting hand charts, balance and GTO (Game Theory Optimal) play. Instead you will incorporate new concepts that may well place you outside your comfort zone. However, your style will now be forcing the other players at the table outside of their comfort zone and, unlike you, they won’t know how to adapt. Learn how to: Counter the auto-continuation-bettor Develop a powerful donk-betting strategy Use the overbet, the check-raise and the three-barrel effectively As well as being a highly successful player, Alex Fitzgerald runs a poker consultancy that serves more than 1,000 professional poker players in 60 countries. As part of this work, he has very likely trawled through more hand history databases than anyone else. This gives him a unique insight into how players really play, especially when placed under pressure and forced into unfamiliar situations. 

So, you want to get better at poker? You are committed to this and you are prepared to spend time on it. You ask advice and what do people tell you? Probably something along the lines of “just keep working on it and you’ll get there.” This is wrong. “Just working on it” will not help you. Randomly analysing hands, watching poker on TV or vaguely looking at equity equations won’t cut it. The only approach that will work is the right sort of practice based on a relatively new area of psychological investigation – the science of expertise. This book identifies precisely what this “right sort of practice” entails. It is based around what has become known as purposeful practice. Purposeful practice is the gold standard for anyone who wishes to take full advantage of the remarkable adaptability of the human brain and is the fast track route to improving your poker skills. This book will give you: A clear theoretical understanding of the science of purposeful practice Numerous techniques by which this can be adapted to improvement at poker Specific exercises designed to create an infallible Plan for Poker Improvement

A lot of poker books promise instant success, screaming “Crush the online games” or “How I won a million dollars playing poker”. They suggest that poker is actually rather easy and that anyone with five minutes to spare can quickly gain expertise in the game. But you know that these claims simply aren’t true. To achieve mastery of poker is not easy – it requires a great deal of deep thinking. Expert Heads Up No Limit Hold ‘em is a unique and remarkable book, providing a clear framework with which to analyse the game. The author Will Tipton, a PhD candidate at Cornell University, demonstrates how decision trees can be used to model complex poker decisions. Starting with simple preflop-only situations, he moves on to consider deeper concepts such as balance, the analysis of ranges, and the theory behind optimal bet sizing. Why study Heads Up No Limit? Because a deep understanding of this format is crucial for the modern poker player. It’s a very exciting game in its own right, but it’s also critical for the final stages of tournament or sit’n’go play. If you find yourself playing for first prize, you will be playing heads up for a great deal of money. Perfecting your play will give you the edge to maximise your expectation whether you are competing for the big money or grinding out your profit in heads up cash games or SNGs. Expert Heads Up No Limit Hold ‘em will give you that edge by: helping you identify and maximally exploit opponents’ tendencies giving you a clear explanation of the practical application of theoretical ideas developing your intuition about game theory so that you can apply its lessons directly at the tables FOREWORD TO Expert Heads Up No Limit Hold ‘em I’ve been publishing books for over twenty years and poker books for more than ten. In that time I have commissioned hundreds of books and also received a great many unsolicited manuscripts. As you will probably guess, these have been – shall we say politely – of varying quality. If you’ve ever watched the X Factor auditions, you’ll probably get the idea. I was therefore not unduly excited when a manuscript on heads up no limit hold’em was forwarded to me earlier this year. I have been a serious poker player for ten years but I had never heard of the author. However, he seemed to have already written the whole book – which is unusual in itself. Unsolicited contributions are normally just a few pages or, at most, a chapter. So, I started to read through it. Within about ten minutes I had experienced what X Factor aficionados might call a “Susan Boyle moment”. I was reading one of the very best poker books I had ever seen and I knew absolutely that we would definitely want to publish it. Furthermore I could see that – quite remarkably – the book was already very close to the finished product. Heads Up No Limit is...

D&B Poker are pleased to be able to bring you the Expert Heads Up No-Limit Hold’em video series - an extension of the book. The video series is 12 hours long, and is recommended viewing after reading the book. Expert Heads Up No Limit Hold’Em, Volume 1, was quickly identified by poker commentators as a ground-breaking work. By paring the game down to its bare essentials, Volume 1 provided a framework for analysing any poker situation and finding the most profitable response to any opponent strategy. In engaging these ideas, you understood important concepts such as equilibrium and balanced play. Volume 1 applied this methodology to preflop-only and river situations, and clearly explained a number of useful analytical techniques and deep poker concepts along the way. What is more – it showed why these ideas are crucial for implementing expert-level thought processes at the table. Will Tipton’s recently published book Expert Heads Up No Limit Hold’em will surely redefine the literature of HU NLH Jack Welch, Pokerheadrush.com, on Volume 1 Volume 2 picks up where Volume 1 left off, this time concentrating on early street play. It develops tools for planning strategies to be executed over multiple streets and provides careful analysis of situations that arise when smart players’ strategies interact. This will prepare you to execute pseudo-optimal and exploitative strategies in the myriad situations which can arise on the turn, flop, and pre-flop streets. If you are a heads-up NLHE player, or are looking to learn the increasingly popular format, then you finally have a book you can turn to. Steve Ruddock. PokerNewsboy.com, on Volume 1 Expert Heads Up No Limit Hold’Em, Volume 2, also features detailed discussions of the reads-gathering process and the principles behind winrate-maximising play. This book will give you the understanding and help you to develop the HUNL skills necessary to face whatever an opponent can throw at you. VOLUME 2 VIDEO PACK Anyone who has read Expert Heads Up No Limit knows that there is tons to learn from solving model games and analyzing the GTO strategies that result. The ability to solve large poker games was directly responsible for many of the insights in EHUNL and set it apart from poker advice available elsewhere. Unfortunately, this sort of work involves large computations, and software to perform these calculations was not publicly accessible – until now. This new video series will walk you through the development of computer code to solve for maximally exploitative and equilibrium strategies of arbitrary HUNL decision trees, to visualize the trees, and to investigate the resulting strategies and the EVs of playing them. You will learn to leverage the powerful but user-friendly iPython (interactive python) programming enviroment and create a tool that allows you to perform many of the calculations described in the books. Moreover, in learning how to build it rather than how to use a pre-existing software package, you will gain the understanding necessary to go beyond published work and to perform game theoretic studies of your...

Do you suspect that your poker skill is insufficiently well rewarded? Do you wonder how the professionals always get the money? Would you like to know how top players study and refine their game? If you have ambitions to join the ranks of the consistently winning players, this book will help you plan your campaign. Poker is a strange and fascinating game. There is a great deal more to being a successful player than simply knowing how to play a good game. Playing good poker is largely a technical skill which can be learned. Being a consistently successful player is much harder and necessitates acquiring expertise in many other areas. Byron Jacobs has been a successful online poker player for seven years. In this book he identifies precisely how this can be achieved and shows how much of the battle actually needs to be conducted away from the table. If you already play a fair game of poker but want to become one of the very few players who consistently “play well”, then you need this book. The concepts discussed in this book are brought into clear focus on the accompanying 180 minute CD of videos where the author can be seen explaining his decision-making process. Here is an extract: