Power Hold’em Strategy
Power Hold'em Strategy
|
 List Price: $34.95 Sale Price: $18.65 Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours Eligible For Free Shipping 
|
Product Description
This power-packed book on beating no-limit hold'em is one of the three most influential poker books ever written. Negreanu headlines a collection of young, great players - Todd Brunson, David Williams, Erick Lindgren, Evelyn Ng and Paul Wasicka - who share their insider professional moves and winning secrets. You'll learn about short-handed and heads-up play, high-limit cash games, a powerful beginner's strategy to neutralize professional players, how to mix up your play, bluff, and win big pots. The centerpiece, however, is Negreanu's powerful and revolutionary small ball strategy. You'll learn how to play hold'em with cards you never would have played before - and with fantastic results. The preflop, flop, turn and river will never look the same again. A must-have!
Details
- ISBN13: 9781580422048
- Condition: USED - VERY GOOD
- Notes:
Incoming search terms for the article:
No related posts.
Tagged with: great poker books • holdem • Poker • Power • Strategy • texas holdem • Tournament
Filed under: Cardoza • Poker Books
Like this post? Subscribe to my RSS feed and get loads more!
Rating
The reason to buy this book is, as others have related, for Daniel’s chapter on small-ball. I don’t know if the others chapters are good or bad, as I got it after reading reviews on 2+2 forums and simply skipped straight to that chapter.
I’d been playing mostly a Harrington on Holdem, tight-aggressive style, especially early in tournaments when there seems to be little in the pot worth fighting over. That approach had me coming to the middle or end of tournaments with average to slightly below average stacks and needing to make good use of the M charts and figuring out when to just shove.
With just my first few tournaments using some small-ball ideas, I’ve been coming into the middle and end of tournaments at or near the chip lead. Those early pots that don’t seem worth fighting over are the ones that are so easy to take down. I’ve noticed that many people realize that you’re raising so often that you can’t always have a hand and are sometimes willing to call your small raises. This is even better because those same people are just as willing to lay down their marginal hands when the flop misses them (and likely me too) when I make a nice little continuation bet. Not only are you picking up the blinds, you’re picking up the chips from the people who called your raise and fold on the flop probably 75% of the time. You just fold when you get played back at too much…or you crush them when you flop a real hand and they get completely blindsided.
I’ve been rarely calling raises and NEVER limping. It’s basically either raise or fold. The only time I’ll call a raise from in front of me is when I’m mining for a set. Even then, if I don’t hit it, I’m in position and can often win when it’s checked to me. Because I’m playing small-ball and in a lot of pots, people realize I could have almost anything and, because I have a lot of chips, are scared to play back at me. And I haven’t even finished going through the entire chapter yet. LOL
Basically I think small-ball is about winning a lot of small pots with small bets that don’t incur much risk to your stack, then winning huge pots when you get played back at when you actually have the goods. In that way I guess it’s basically a loose-aggressive style which minimizes risk.
Even having read just most of the Negreanu chapter, it’s been well worth the money.
Rating
This book is the best book I have read on hold’em and I have read most of them. This book is a great way to improve your cash game skills but an even better way to improve your tournament strategy. The way Daniel Negreanu presents the information and examples is very clear. You learn how to think like a pro and have a better understanding for what they are thinking. Hope this helps.
Rating
Really helpful strategies for every type of player. This is a book every level of poker player should have.
Rating
They use Daniels name to sell the book as hey only writes one chapter but it’s very good. They give a lot of examples and the illustrations are very good. I suggest it anyone at any level!
Rating
This is a pretty good book.
Aside from the Evelyn Ng chapter, this is really more of an intermediate to advanced book. For people just starting to play no limit tournaments, though, her chapter is very good, and does present a system that will neutralize some of the trickier players at your table…
For people who have played some, there is some great stuff in here, though…. Paul Wasicka has a real nice chapter on 6-handed no limit hold-em on the internet, lots of good insights there… David Williams has a nice chapter on mixing up your play…
Daniel Negreanu has a long chapter about his “small ball” theory of poker… While I don’t agree with all of it, it offers some great insights into the mind of the small-ball player, and he does have one of the best breakdowns of play on the turn and river that I have read…
A real good investment in your poker library.
Rating
I loved this book daniel’s part on small ball is great. I have read most sections and they are good as well. It taught me how to play hands i never would have played before make big hands and win a lot of chips from players that did not think i would have those hands. For example i played 3-5s in the cutoff coming in for a raise made trip threes on the flop and a full house on the turn and busted someone with pocket aces. Thank you Daniel.
Rating
Negreanu’s attempt at the next Super System with his “Small Ball” strategy taking the place of Doyle Brunson’s aggressive, take no prisoners approach. This book follows a similar model to SS with a variety of guest writers contributing a number of chapters before we get to Negreanu’s part. Though none of these are as good as the chapters Sklansky or Caro contribute in SS, they’re still worth checking out if you’re interested.
Of course the valuable part of this book is Negreanu’s chapter and the explanation of his particular, and particularly potent style of play, complete with statistical explanations, and guide for playing small ball.
Rating poker books is different than rating other books. If only half of a novel is good that’s a pretty lousy book. But a poker book is important if it provides invaluable information that you can’t get elsewhere. A lot of people here have dropped the rating on this book as if people can’t just skip around the fluff. The fact is, this book is one of the top books worth owning for what you can learn from it. As they say, “nuff said.”
Rating
WHAT A DIFFRENCE I WAS OK PLAYER BUT AFTER READING THIS BOOK I TURNED 100 DOLLORS INTO 47,000 IN 3 WEEKS I STILL CANT BELEIVE IT DANIEL GIVES YOU SO MANY DETAILS THAT ARE VERY HELPFUL I FOLLOWED EVERYTHING HE SAID TO THE DOT AND TURNED MY GAME AROUND COMPLETELY . I CANT SAY ENOUGH ABOUT THIS BOOK IVE READ IT TWICE ALREADY. DANIEL YOUR THE BEST
Rating
Great for the daniel negreanu small ball section but everything else in the book wasnt all that helpful. Ng section was amateurish at best. Davids williams area was decent…….lots of window dressing around negreanus coveted small ball strategy chapter. I gave it 4 stars just for that.
Rating
I pre-ordered this a long, long time ago and had almost given up on it when I got the the email that it was being shipped.
The funny thing about this is that the most important thing I learned from this book wasn’t in the book at all..
First of all: this really isn’t a book for beginners. There is a chapter by Evelyn Ng that lays out a strategy for beginners, but that’s not the main thrust of the book. This is about power tournament no limit poker and it’s the absolute best book I’ve read yet.
The problem with many other poker books is that you sometimes can’t tell what game they are talking about: pot limit, limit, cash games? The strategies for all of those are much, much different than those for tournament NL so the lessons learned can be very harmful. Daniel makes it very clear what he is talking about.
Here’s another thing: most poker books aren’t really written well. The authors aren’t writers, and it shows. Daniel Negreanu writes very, very well and that makes a big difference. I really appreciated that.
There are several other chapters by important players: Brunsen, Lindgren, Ng, Williams and Wasicka all contributed material. Frankly, they could have left all of that out and I would have been just as happy. I don’t mean that those are bad chapters, but for me the meat of this book is Daniel’s.
So what’s that most important thing I learned here? Simply, that I was right.
That is, over the few years that I’ve been playing, I have slowly come to the same place that Daniel outlines: “small ball” is the path to winning tourneys. But every time I’d express any opinion along those lines, the old-style Doyle Brunsen high-aggression players would insist that I was wrong. Well, if I’m wrong, so is Daniel and I don’t think many are in a position where they have any claim to question his play.
Not that I’m in Daniel’s league, of course. But so much of what he said caused me to say “Yeah!” and feel vindicated and of course the rest helped me refine and improve the things I have been thinking about.
Of course the thing about poker is that if “everyone” started playing small ball, the old style Doyle Brunsen aggression would once again be the best play. You always have to remember that primarily you have to “play the player” and be ready to switch your style as circumstances dictate. However, right now a lot of the lesser wannabees still know nothing about small ball so the few that really apply these lessons will benefit greatly.
I feel a little funny recommending this book. If everyone I play with read it, I might not do as well as I do. Well, unless they all took this as cookie cutter recipes (something Daniel warns against, by the way). The big lesson here is that good poker is smart poker – that it’s not about “always do this if that”, but only about looking for (and creating) opportunity.
I’m not a great poker player. I’ve only been playing NLHE a few years and may never get beyond mediocre, but if I ever do, I know that Daniel’s book will have had a lot to do with it.
Rating
I really was interested in Negreanu’s writings about small ball and it did not disappoint me. It’s written well and it’s witty. But wait, why do you have to go throught 200 pages of written material by other writers, whose work does have almost nothing in common than… well, that it’s about poker. I did not find their work very inspiring. It all seemed rather some bits of this and that. And what the … is it that entire pages are used to illustrate one hand vs the other hand, like what hands dominate a certain hand. What a waste of trees.
All in all, the book is worth it’s money. But I would have paid it too for 200 pages of Negreanu solo (and than I would have some spare space on my bookshelve too).
Yope
Rating
I’ve notice a lot of the complaints here are from players who seem to have read every other poker book, and there’s nothing wrong with that, but one has to realize the more you read about a particular subject, the more ‘recycled material’ you are going to come across. Was this book perfect? Absolutely not. Did it have a lot of good information in it? Absolutely. I’ve read the Super System’s, and a few other books, and didn’t feel like everything I had read in PHS was just ‘reahashed material’. As a matter of fact, I think it fits in well with the Super System’s as a ‘compliment’ or extension.
Rating
Other books go over basic preflop guidelines with little explanation for the intricacies of postflop play. They never move beyond “mix it up,” “value bet,” “catch over-aggressive players in bluffs,” and other basic sayings few authors go very far to explain. Aside from a few gems from Sklansky and his team, not until Harrington’s tournament and cash game series did we see detailed examples of postflop strategies. Earlier authors focused on the simple line of thought associated with world class play: outplay your opponent.
What they failed to do was discuss the variables necessary to determine:
1.If we have the best hand in murky situations
2.If we do have the best hand, what lines of play extract the most value?
3.If we don’t have the best hand, what situations and players can we exploit to turn our hand into a successful bluff?
4.What kinds of variables are necessary so we can exploit similar situations?
What we need is a book that addresses the weaknesses so many other books promote.
That’s where Daniel Negreanu’s Power Hold’em comes in, and where we jump ahead to it’s real gem: Small-ball.
Small-ball is a style meant to confuse your opponent and give you maximum value. It is a style employed by many of the smartest, most successful tournament players including Gus Hansen, Phil Ivey, and our author, Daniel Negreanu. As Negreanu states, when you watch a small-ball player, “you will notice that he appears to be in control of the table, yet at the same time, seems to be playing with reckless abandon, giving little thought to the strength of his starting hand.”
Daniel Negreanu’s small-ball section details a myriad of complex postflop decisions. He wants us to play as many hands as possible to put us in as many profitable situations as we want. The more hands we play, the more situations we must be able to exploit or we will become exploited ourselves. As such, the author must provide vivid examples of how to take advantage of common but complicated streets based off specific player tendencies, board textures, and typical methods of exploiting how certain hands react to different boards.
Once we move beyond the monkey play of getting it all in with the nuts, a player’s skill becomes dependent not just on how to play his hand but on how to play his opponent. The message of other advanced strategists has been to read what hand your opponent has. Small-ball takes this a step further with the axiom: Don’t play what your opponent has. Play what your opponent doesn’t have.
Building on this axiom, Negreanu explains perhaps the most revolutionary concept in his book: “bluffing outs,” a strategy that calls for us to determine the true odds of drawing out on our opponent as well as what cards we can bluff with. Negreanu stresses that advanced plays such as these require advanced reads. We must observe if an opponent is capable of folding, and if so what hands will he fold to what situations. Unless we have noticed a player can lay down pocket Aces to a low, 4-card straight board, it’s best to just concede the hand and pick a better spot. But given we have a read, adding bluffing outs into our decision can turn a difficult fold into a clear call.
Players immersed in Negreanu’s later sections may misconstrue some of the plays he suggests as too passive to succeed, but it’s a style that’s allowed him to go deep in numerous tournaments while his opponents’ over-aggressive styles often lead them to either build a big stack, or more often to just bust out. Small-ball wants us to get maximum value for our legitimate hands as well as our bluffs, and Negreanu insists that sometimes means taking a small risk with big hands for bigger rewards.
For example, Negreanu suggests often just calling a preflop raise in position with big pairs like Jacks or Tens, while common discussions of such situations almost always advocate reraising. In his section on Turn play, he suggests check/calling or checking behind big but marginal hands that unfortunately cannot withstand a bluff.
Critics of these sections may note that not betting the turn fails to protect our hand as well as misses potential value, but as Negreanu points out, noting player tendencies and board textures allows us to put our opponent on a hand and determine spots in which we are well ahead or way behind. If our opponent only has 3 or 4 outs, it is pointless to create a situation that could deter our opponent from proceeding with the worst hand, or worse, failing to convince him to bluff with what he or she thinks is the best hand.
A small-ball player utilizes a mix of aggressive and passive strategies because, at the end of the day, the small-ball player wants to still be in the tournament with a stack that seems to have grown on its own.
Unfortunately, the rest of the book does not stack up. With all due respect to the contributing authors to Power Hold’em, their sections fail by following the same trend as their predecessors. Too many poker players are beyond learning a hand ranking chart, and those that aren’t have many other books and websites to learn such basics. Televised poker games until recently utilized sports commentators. At best poker amateurs, those commentators are dropping off, replaced by professional poker players, reflecting an overall trend of increasing sophistication in both players and viewers of the game. The poker audience includes more than trained monkeys, and they are hungry for the advanced strategies found in the small-ball section of Daniel Negreanu’s Power Hold’em.
If you’re frustrated because you rarely go deep in tournaments, confused because your bluffs never work, sad because no one ever pays off your big hands, and eager to join a group of players that make poker seem effortless, you need to buy this book.
Rating
With the game growing so rapidly, there is always a need to get that edge on your opponents. Daniel is a master at his craft, teaching the lethal low ball strategy. I play online, home games, and casino. This book caters to all with sections on online, deep stacks, short stacks, high stakes, low stakes, on and on… it has it all. In my mind, this book is better than Super System I and II. A real must have for any serious poker player!!!
Rating
I am going to say essentially what everyone else on here has been saying… If you buy this book, know that you can use the chapters not written by Negreanu as toilet paper or kindling for your fireplace. What you are buying this book for is Negreanu’s explanation of “small ball” NL tournament poker. I noticed from reading the other reviews that everyone else is similarly interested in small ball, and have found this strategy to be quite effective. I also noticed that one guy on here seems to think Daniel is advocating a “weak, passive” approach to playing poker. This is far, far from the truth. Either he didn’t read the book well enough, or is just not intelligent enough to get what Daniel was trying to communicate. Here are some basic ideas behind the small-ball philosophy:
1) Keep the pots small, pre-flop. You don’t want to put a lot of your chips at risk before you even see the flop. Your aces may get busted by deuces post-flop, and you’ll be pot committed after a few big bets. Not good. Instead, you wait to see the flop, then evaluate the situation based on what your opponent is doing. By keeping the pots small, you will pick up more pots that people don’t really care about after the flop and not risk getting drawn out on by some crazy donk.
2) Play lots of hands that have big post-flop potential. That means opening up your starting hand selection by a large amount. This has been a big adjustment for me, but by doing so I have learned a lot about how to play poker in general. I have won a lot of big pots in tournaments and deep-stacked cash games by calling raises with mediocre hands that turn into monsters post-flop. Daniel expounds on which hands to call with under which set of circumstances.
3) Don’t let your opponents get a good read on you. By playing your big hands the same as you do your weak hands, it makes it very hard for your opponents to know what you are playing with. It forces players into a guessing game, and if you are fairly decent at reading other people’s hands, you can make some really good plays.
4) Playing the texture of the board. A good amount of Daniel’s small ball approach deals with making decisions based on the texture of the board. This is something that is key to any poker player’s success, I think. You don’t always have to have the best hand to end up with the chips.
Those are some main aspects to playing small ball that Negreanu pays a great deal of attention to. What I’ve noticed for myself and other players is that the people who consistently do well in poker tournaments rely on more than luck and aggression. They rely on skill and discipline. I think this book will help you in both areas, if you aren’t a small ball player already.
Rating
Danny, I’m coming after you boy!! Its a good book, but the majority of it was written by other players. Danny doesn’t give up too many secretes
Rating
I am not going to write the detailed review, as I agree with most of the reviewers.
To sum up:
Good:
1. Daniel’s chapter is excellent with a lot of quality info
2. Finally, we have some decent information and tips on small ball. And from one of the best poker players.
3. Chapters by other authors have some good tips, but if you are above beginner, you will not find much of value.
4. Daniel’s writing style is very easy to read, and I swallowed the entire chapter in under an hour. Time to read again, and then reread.
Bad:
1. Only one chapter is written by Daniel. I feel some of the rainforest has been wasted.
2. The publisher of the book in Preface called it “the best poker book ever released”. He put it next to Brunson’s SS and SS2. Let us decide if the book is any good, mkay? I just thought it was kind of bad taste.
3. Did I mention that Daniel only wrote one chapter?
Anyway, I highly recommend it. Just understand that the chances are you are only buying it for one chapter, as 70% of the info in this book you have seen elsewhere time and time again.
Thank you for reading my review, I hope it was helpful.
Rating
Negreanu really hit a homerun with this one. While he doesn’t really go into the depth of WHY survival is more important, and why i’s okay to give up a little edge and play more passively at times to avoid losing the tournament, in principal it makes a lot of sense, and it really can improve your game.
I love the way Negreanu just takes so many concepts to fine detail. For example, he talks about “bluff outs”. He shows an example where you might actually make what seems like a really loose call with only a gutshot draw, or even a backdoor draw, knowing that there are so many scare cards in the deck that the odds are that if your opponent knows that you might play a draw in that situation and can fold if it looks like he’s beat, it makes sense to call. If one of your “bluff outs” hits, you can bluff and take down the pot. But he goes into situations of how it might work andreally takes that concept and makes it really work with the rest of his strategy. He then talks about calling with nothing, or just a backdoor straightflush draw, knowing you can bluff the turn if your opponent shows weakness. Then if you DO pickup a backdoor draw, you can take the freecard, and if you hit,the odds are your opponent wont be able to put you on it, and will probably pay you off.
But that’s just Negreanus section which makes up about half the book. The other half of the book is written by several top pros Todd Brunson, Evelyn Ng, Erick Lindgrin and others and this book is definately worth a read. A very good book especially for postflop play.
Rating
This book gives you a different view on how to play no limit poker. Have been trying these different strategy’s and they are working very well! I have made the final table six times in a row. What the book is saying so far has worked excellent!!
Mike
Rating
I have always been A Negreanu fan, so when I saw this book, there were no options. I read the first chapter (for beginning players) and agreed with the vast majority of what Evelyn Ng had to say; she has a smart approach for beginners and lays out simple strategy and decision making principles. Where most books have beginners learn the math of pot odds, implied odds and hand odds, she makes it very easy to learn as you play, enabling the beginner to develop their hand reading ability as they learn the math, which I think is very effective. I scanned the others chapters, which I will go back and read, but was more interested in the last chapter, which was my main reason for buying the book – Daniel’s small ball playing style. While I have been employing some forms of the small ball theory at different points during tournament play, I now realize the full potential of the small ball approach. Learning how to better play marginal hands in position and to maximize earnings while doing it is invaluable information, and it is spelled out here for any level of player. He describes each of his concepts in great detail with examples – from hand selection, pre-flop, flop, turn and river play, betting amounts based on situation, when to fold ‘em and when to hold ‘em. Everything is covered in terms that anyone can understand. The bottom line is that this book is absolutely a must have for any serious NLHE tournament player. I rank it with Super System and other renowned books that are considerd “must haves”. But I emplore you – DON’T buy it…it’ll give me the edge!!!
Rating
Daniel’s books are good reading and easy to understand. His style in book writing is as good as his style in playing poker…..winning results!
Rating
Negreanu’s section on “small-ball” has helped my tournament play greatly. Although, if you do not have the discipline to play in position, give up hands to resistance, and avoid big pots with small hands you’re going to take a beating playing with a “Small Ball” style. Also, it is difficult to apply it to poorly structured tourneys where you don’t have the chips to make numerous moves over a long period of time.
The small ball style that Negreanu shows you will open up your play without taking huge risks, and develop a style that will get you paid off on your huge hands without it being obvious that you have the best of it. It also allows you to take advantage of your greatest edge when you are playing lesser experienced players, post-flop play with a confused opponet. While negating the novice players greatest edge, pre-flop aggression with small odds advantages.
A word of advise though, skip straight to Daniel’s small ball section, the ~350 pages leading up to it is basically a mix of crap and regurgitated concepts. Davids Williams section on “Mixing it up” is especially craptacular, and while he did a good job I have to imagine that they could have found someone better than Todd Brunson to write a section on high stakes cash games. Basically the only other portion of the book with any value is 3 pages by Brunson titled “Dealing with Mega-Loss”.