Monday, November 13, 2006

Play Poker Like the Pros


Play Poker Like the Pros - - Reviewed by Phil Diamond

In poker you never stop learning. Even the greats of the game will tell you this. The Top 10 ways of doing this are probably:

1. listening to other players talk about their bad beats
2. listening to players at your table telling you how you should have played that last hand
3. playing for play-money online
4. playing in low-stakes tournaments online
5. playing in low-stakes cash games online
6. playing in live tournaments
7. doing your absolute b’ll’x in live cash games
8. reading poker magazine articles
9. reading blogs
10. reading books written by experts

Which is the best? Who’s to say. But having tried methods 1-9, I recently decided to tackle method no.10 on the list – reading books written by experts. And maybe some of it has sunk in. There certainly seems to have been an improvement in my tournament results. Notably, my recent successes in some quite big tournaments at The Big Slick in Purley, near Croydon, including a £1,088 win in the Sunday evening £50 semi-freezeout. (Don’t worry. I’ll soon be writing a blog about this win - which had some very interesting moments in it - for all my readers to enjoy.)

Anyway. Back to ‘reading books written by experts’.

The two I’ve tried so far are ‘Super System 2’ by Doyle Brunson (still quite a way to go on that one) and the one I’m featuring in this review – ‘Play Poker Like the Pros’ by Phil Hellmuth Jr.

A quick word of warning about Super System 2 - it is quite expensive. (Luckily, I got mine free.) And it’s very long. I’ve read chunks of it, though it does go on a bit. But then again, it does cover it all. There’s even some really wild psycho stuff in there by a mad guy called Mike Caro. Very interesting. Anyway, I’ll tell you more about that when I review the book in a future blog – though that could be some way off. As I said, it’s really long and it’s gonna take a while to get through it!

Okay. Let’s review ‘Play Poker Like the Pros’. I’ve read most of it. Well, quite a bit of it. Enough to tell you what its about. So here goes…

The author is, my namesake, Phil Hellmuth Jr. If you’ve never heard of him, he is American and he’s won about 100 WSOP bangles and tons of money. ‘He’s the best poker player I’ve ever played against,’ says Johnny Chan on the front cover. (Johnny Chan? Yeah, I know. I’ve never heard of him either. But, apparently, he has won loads of jewelry too). So, I figured, there could well be some highly useful nuggets of wisdom lurking within the pages of this book. It cost over ten quid and I didn’t want to blow that much money on anything less than the very best. Luckily, I was not to be disappointed!

But first things first. Phil Hellmuth Jr’s book is 394 pages long and weighs-in at a substantial 457g. So, not a light read, but pound-for-pound pretty good value for money, I reckon. And much more suitable for reading in the bath (where I do most of my reading) than Brunson’s Super System 2, which weighs an absolute ton and really makes your arms ache after a few pages.

Tip: Super System 2 is also very bulky, making it difficult to handle, especially after it’s been dropped in the water a few times. This has made a lot of the pages go funny – sort of corrugated-up, if you know what it mean – and now the book has swollen-up even bigger than it was in the first place, further adding to its overall unwieldiness and unsuitability for the bathroom. So, for this reader, Playing Poker Like the Pros certainly scores more highly on that count.

So, what can we learn from the so-called ‘poker brat’?

To begin with, if you want success in poker, it has nothing to do with the cards really, or outs, or percentages, or any of that stuff. Which is a relief. That mathematical stuff leaves me cold, I must admit.

No. Success begins with a dream.

The book starts off with a poem actually written by Phil Hellmuth. You can read the full thing at the end of this blog. Basically what Phil’s saying, I think, is: You’ve got to have a dream. Cos, if you don’t have a dream, how you gonna have a dream come true? Very moving and quite inspiring, I thought.

After that, apart from learning a lot about how great a player Phil truly is, he cleverly shows you the different types of players you will run across at the poker table by likening them to animals. This seems to be one of Phil’s great strengths – an ability to understand the character of his opponents that enables him to get a great read on them. So much so, it’s almost like he can actually see their cards!

The animals he uses are:

The Mouse – plays very conservatively
The Lion – skilled and tough to beat
The Jackal – crazy and unpredictable
The Elephant – plays too many hands
The Eagle – Phil Hellmuth, I think he means.

He then goes on to put you in different situations and how you should play your hands against the various aforementioned animals. Really, quite innovative and informative, if a little hard to keep track of in places. And this, I would say, is the main weakness of the book – trying to remember what each animal is supposed to play like. I found that I had to keep going back to the page that tells you - a bit distracting.

Obviously, Phil must know what he’s talking about. As he says, he is a great player. But sometimes the best doers are not necessarily the best teachers – if you know what I mean? And I’m not saying that it isn't a very good book. But, I must say, if I was writing a book like this, I would have included some other types of animal.

For instance, he seems to have left out the following…

DINOSAUR - waits for big pairs the way a giant lizard waits for the sun to warm its blood, before it can act. Very large, but so slow-moving you’ll see it coming a mile off. Likely to go extinct when the cards go cold.

RABBIT – can’t wait to get it in. Breeds prolifically early on, but usually ends up getting eaten.

CICADA (cricket) - never shuts up, all bloody night long. If you want to play poker, you’ll just have to get used to it.

PEACOCK – looks great and likes to be noticed. Rarely seen flying.

YELLOW DOG – rambles aimlessly from hand to hand. Whines whenever anyone kicks it, though by now you’d think it would be used to it.

HYENA - always on the look out for value and lame animals. A shameless adventurer that will run away when real danger threatens. Not pretty to watch, but you underestimate this brut at your peril. It can be hard to catch and is quite capable of bringing down animals bigger than itself.

OLD LION – a real bully this one. Growls at everyone and doesn’t like it when hyenas try to take its bone away. Not as fast on its feet as it used to be.

ZEBRA - bit like a donkey, but more clothes conscious. Herds of these roam the poker room seemingly oblivious of the lions and hyenas waiting to feast on them.

COBRA – sits quietly coiled and never blinks. Don’t prod this one unless you have a very long stick. When it strikes the result is often terminal. Better to wait until the blinds go up and the slippery little fellow has come out of the corner to shed it's skin.

MONKEY – always jumping up and down whilst making a lot of noise that can almost be mistaken for intelligible speech. Never quite evolved into a man.

WISE OWL – hates monkeys. Hoots in the dark, but the monkey never listens. Scrapes a living feeding off small rodents.

RODENT – they reckon that in London you are never more than three feet away from one. Mostly, they nibble away without causing serious damage. Some are rats and some are nice. Some are pink-eyed, particularly later in the evening when they’ve had a few.

SLUG – we all know this one.

So, what positives can you get out of this book? From what I’ve read, I felt I got a rare glimpse into the mind of a great champion, making me realize that such players live in another world and play at a level most can only ever aspire to. It showed me that if you have a dream (the dream of being a poker champion in this case) you must follow that dream wherever it may lead.

Will it give you an insight into how other players play? Will it help you raise your own game? Will it help you to play like a pro?

Difficult questions that are hard to answer. At the end of the day, you’ll get as much out of it as you are willing to put in, I’d say.

Is it value for money? Definitely.

Where can you but a copy?

amazon.com

Amazon sell it for £10.85 plus postage - if you want, you can buy mine for a fiver. There is a slight tear in the cover – no water damage.

Here’s the poem at the start of the book, which I found really inspiring.

The Universe Conspired to Help

The man had a dream
He knew what he wanted, it seems

Once he was sure in his heart this was it
He vowed someday he would achieve it

He wasn’t quite ready to do his thing
But he felt fairly certain what the future would bring

When one day the time was right
When he was ready to fight the good fight

He conquered all his excuses and set forth
To take the risk-fraught first step without any remorse

Once he took the first step down the line
The universe conspired to help make sure he was fine

He never dreamed he would accomplish so much
That the universe would give him so such incredible luck

Now older and wiser he understood the hardest part
Was convincing himself that it was time to start.

- Phil Hellmuth

After reading that, you get the feeling that whatever Phil had chosen as his path in life, he would have succeeded. If he hadn’t become a Poker World Champion, he probably would have ended-up a poet laureate, or something. He’d have followed his dream.

Learn more about Phil and poker at http://www.philhellmuth.com/phils-stuff.html

2 comments:

bertg77 said...

Hi,

i have just read the artcile play poker the Diamond way where you suggest folding aces against two other players who have gone all in on a final table... This is very bad advice. You can't be behind at this point? you could triple up and take command of the table. I don't think you should be folding here in case you get unlucky. Yes you lost but you are a 4-1 fav over a smmaler pocket pair and have a-6 dominated........... Surely a call is the best advice and over a period of time will win more than it will lose?

Phil Diamond said...

Hi bertg77,

Thanks for the advice. I guess, I'll have to think some more about this one. Maybe we'll cross swords at the tables some day. Best wishes, PD.