Exciting (Mini)-News!

And let's make it a tradition...

I’ve got a short book on the way! It’s called TWENTY-THREE NLHE TOURNAMENT HANDS FROM 2023: Review, Analysis, & Stories, it’s about 70 pages, and I hope it’s fun, cheap, and informative.

Fingers crossed, we’ll have a cover reveal and links to purchase soon (still dotting the letters that need dots, also changing my mind about certain hands at the last minute—the usual!). Fingers also crossed, I’d like to make this an annual release for as long as I’m playing poker: a relatively short year in review from a learning standpoint. Good, right?

But it’s not available yet. It should (I hope) be available as a holiday gift for the poker player in your life. For now, consider giving the gift of private poker lessons for yourself or others! I have availability, and it’s never too early to start prepping for WSOP.

Finally, I do have some actual content for you all. Please enjoy the Introduction to TWENTY-THREE NLHE HANDS below. It may end up changing slightly in the published version. If so, you can say you had an early look behind the scenes.

Happy Thanksgiving, and good luck with the rest of your poker in 2023!

INTRODUCTION

I used to love talking poker hands. Talking shop. Throwing out different ideas, no matter how silly they sounded. Listening to opinions wildly divergent from my own. Getting exposed to nonstandard approaches to the game. Questioning whether all those other players out there were really doing it right.

Were we really supposed to be open-raising to three times the blind every time? Was it really right to only exercise your option from the big blind with a premium hand? Could it really be OK to flat against an opening raise rather than three-bet?

These questions have long been decided by the community at large (the answers, of course, are no, no, and yes, respectively), but those of us who figured out how to buck the conventional playing style in advance enjoyed a significant edge back then. The same can be true now.

While fundamental errors in basic strategy are rare these days, there are still plenty of places where the average tournament player consistently makes mistakes. For me, talking through real-world hands is still the very best way to recognize these opportunities and later put them into practice.

Plus, it’s fun! No one wants to hear your bad beat story, but everyone wants to hear about the time you overbet bluffed, or the time you called the river check-raise with third pair and won, or the time you attempted to bluff your opponent off a full house because of “blockers.”

That hand narratives are both fun and instructive is not a coincidence. I hate staring at charts and solver outputs, as necessary as that process is in this day and age. I still love talking hands. And any teacher will tell you that it’s a million times easier to learn something if you’re actually, actively enjoying yourself.

All the hands in this book are actual NLHE tournament hands I played over the past year. Most (but not all) are from online events, since that’s still where I log the majority of my play. All were chosen because I found them interesting and insightful. I hope you do too.

I considered presenting the hands chronologically, thinking that we could all observe some kind of evolution in my play. But jumping around from one entirely different context to another proved too cumbersome.

Instead, I’ve grouped the hands thematically, so now there’s at least some logic as to why one hand follows another in the story of my poker year. To that end, I’ve placed the hands in five sections:

1) Range versus Range.

The idea that you’re not just playing your hand against your opponent’s hand, but your range against your opponent’s range, is crucial to a modern understanding of our game. I’ve started with a couple hands that illustrate that concept, to make sure we’ve all got our poker brains attached correctly before we really dive in.

2) Blockers.

Blockers are a wildly popular topic among even casual poker players these days, yet I find that many of my students still have a poor understanding of exactly how and where they apply. I’ve included some hands to help nail down the concept, and hopefully make it more accessible to those who might have found it too intimidating to dive into.

3) The Bubble.

Strategy changes drastically on the bubble, to the point where if you’re only thinking about maximizing your chip stack, you’re potentially leaving a lot of money on the table. I’ll look at some bubble hands I played this year, and show the kind of dramatic adjustments they require.

4) Anatomy of a Victory.

These hands aren’t as closely related as the ones in the other groups—but they’re from a tournament I won so I took some liberties! I do think it’s instructive to see how a tournament win comes together, and how luck and skill can interact every once in a while to justify the long droughts we inevitably go through. Also, you’ll see that you don’t have to win every big pot to win a tournament.

5) Table Dynamics.

This is the shortest section, containing only one hand (well, two if you count the set-up), as in-game adjustments based on table dynamics aren’t a major part of my overall strategy. But when the opportunity presents itself I want to be able to take advantage of it. And I want you to do the same.

The central aim of my last book, The Poker Brain, was  to explain some advanced theoretical concepts in an understandable way, and show how they applied in actual play at the table. I think I did a decent job (and please check out that book if you haven’t already!), but the work of converting theory into practice is unending, and there are fresh applications every day.

With this new project, I set out to write something fun and instructive that continues the mission I started with The Poker Brain. I also wanted to do something scalable. My idea is to put out a similar short book (booklet? pamphlet? missive? almanac?) every year that goes through my hands and analyzes how concepts and real-world play interact. Crazy? Only time will tell.

For now, please enjoy this first edition, as you take a ride with me through my year in NLHE tournaments. The variance of playing a year’s worth of events is huge, but the variance of reading about them is, thankfully, zero.