A Chapter from Another Book that Doesn't impress me

Twoplustwo has book coming out some time or other on sit-and-goes, or one table satellites. The title says sit-and-goes and also says one table tournaments. -There's a difference between sit-n-goes and satellites in the payout structure. The title just doesn't make it clear.

Again, twoplustwo magazine has a sample chapter. Again, I'm not impressed.

If anybody wants to read it and comment on it I'll probably have something to say, but otherwise, I find it so confusing and incomplete that I'm just not in a mood to get into it right now. It looks pretty bad to me.

Maybe I just need to take more naps.

Update: What I don't like about the book?

1. To start with the title is confusing. I'm not sure what the book is about. One table sit-n-goes or one table satellites? Doe's he deal with different payout structures? I don't know, and if he's going that have a long title with a long sub-title it just seems like he could tell me that.

But that's not a big deal. My hold'em book gets a lot of grief from people who don't like the title and I don't really want to be one of those people.

But the second thing is really more substantive.

His start in the chapter is

Before discussing the crucial re-steal play of next section, we must learn how to classify a raise. When someone makes a raise during mid-blind play, his motive may be broken down into two components:

1. Desire to steal the blinds.

2. Wanting value on a superior holding.

Huh? I'm not sure what mid-blind play means, I guess it means the blinds are above the starting levels, but he never says.

But his two component list is very incomplete, very superficial, enough so to just make it wrong. There's lot's of other reasons someone might make a raise, even if he's only talking about pre-flop raises (which he doesn't say).

I guess he intends to talk about things within a very limited context and I'm supposed to figure out what that context is. I'm not a fan of that approach.

3. He somewhat clarifies things in his next section where he gives 4 situational examples in a Q/A format where he asks the reader to classify each as a steal or a value raise. Each of the 4 is a situation where the raiser is the opener pre-flop. So, although he never says, it appears he's going to treat someone who raises after a limper separately somewhere else.

That's fine, someone raising limpers is a different situation than someone opening with a raise. But when you don't tell me what the hell you're talking about, when you leave it up to me to pick up the bread crumb clues to figure out what the topic is, then I'm not going to be happy.

4. Then he goes through a bunch of structured examples of when you might want to conclude on opening raise is a steal attempt and try to re-steal. I don't really like the format of these examples, but they're okay, and I really have no complaint about them.

5. Until he gets to the end, that is. This illustrates what's really wrong with the whole chapter. He says.

There is a key restealing principle in this hand:


You should be much more inclined to resteal against a stealer and a caller(s) than against a single stealer.



This is because the pot grows enormously with each extra caller, yet no more strength has been shown. Sure, a tricky player might sometimes smooth-call a pre-flop raise with aces or kings. But in general, a second player who stays in the pot is showing weakness by not reraising, and you should attack this weakness when the pot is large and your hand has decent showdown potential.

That's just flat out wrong. It's very important to think about what kinds of players these are and what they think about you in this situation. That's one of the keys he just ignores in the whole chapter.

If you have an image of being an aggressive player with FPS (and his focus on re-stealing in this chapter suggests that might be the case), then you'll get called by that limper (who isn't bluffing, even if he's weak) hoping to hit a flop and check call you to the felt.

There are nuances to everything that he just ignores. It's a very hack oriented, formulaic approach to the game. Against weak opposition in small buy in sit and goes online it might work. But it's not a general approach that's going to really win a lot of money.

I think mostly I'm not impressed because that lead material is just flat out wrong unless you know he's talking about a very specific situation that he never clearly identifies. That kind of sloppiness in writing always suggests to me a sloppiness in thinking.

Update:
The thing that really bothers me about the presentation style has nothing to do with nolimit poker and is just more generally about the style of presentation of poker analysis. I talk about that elsewhere.