Title: Harrington on Hold’em – expert strategy for No-Limit Tournaments
Author: Dan Harrington and Bill Robertie
Facts: A volume of two books. Volume 1 handles strategic play and volume 2 the endgame.
Volume 1 has 376 pages with text and Volume 2 has 444 pages. These books are published by Two Plus Two Publishing LLC.
About the authors: Dan Harrington is a well known tournament player and have hade huge success playing the WSOP (he won the wsop in1995, reached the final table1987, 2003 and 2004). So you can be confident that the author knows what he writes about. He goes by the nickname “Action-Dan” because his tight play and his table image are normally very tight.
Bill Robertie is also a good tournament player. He have won several tournaments around the world. Former world champion in backgammon and also a chess master.
Review: These tournament books handle al type of different tournaments and stages of both small tournaments and large and well known tournaments as the world series of poker and world poker tour. The main focus is to show the tactic and strategy you need to become a master tournament player. Both books are well written and explain the theory for the single situations very well. Both volume 1 and 2 also have great examples how to act at the different situations that can arise at the poker table. And the examples are real hands played at different tournaments, both live and online.
The first book handles starting requirements and different types of players and styles. It also shows how to read the table and how to calculate your odds and outs. It takes you through hands showing how to bet, raise and call in different situations. When you should slowplay and when you need to end the hand quickly. He has borrowed the Gap concept from Sklansky. And this is an important concept used a lot in this book. It’s one of the under laying theories that al the great pokerplayers understand and uses.
The second book covers how to make moves in tournaments, and that is the perfect overlap from volume 1 to volume 2. Moves like bluffing, continuation bets, probe bets and a lot of other ones is covered and leaves the reader with a complete set of tools to use at the table. By taking you into the later stages in tournaments, volume 2 completes the tournament guide. When you are closing in to the final table and the blinds are getting larger and your stack is shrinking the nature of the game changes and forces you to change your play. When do you need to act, when can you wait? Sometimes you can’t wait to get good cards and just need to pick a hand and go with it. When is that? Well, Harrington show you a structured way to analyze the situations and adjust appropriate to the changes when you getting closer to an end.
Heads up play is one of the last chapters in the second volume. This chapter can help a lot of tournament players that doesn’t feel comfortably playing heads up. This chapter is a bit different from other ones we have read on the same subject. You get a chance to get inside the head of Phil Ivey and see how he plays hands heads up in a sequence of 25 hands, and after that you get a chance to play heads up in an online tournament! Great chapter!
We can recommend everyone that has a goal to play tournaments to read these books. It doesn’t matter if you play Sit & Go tournaments online or the smaller tournaments in your local casinos or maybe the televised world poker tour. We believe that you can learn something new from these books no matter what level you are at.