Winning Poker Tournaments One Hand at a Time (Volume II) -- Review

A year ago or more at this point, I remember posting here that I really enjoyed the first volume of "Winning Poker Tournaments One Hand at a Time", the first book by internet poker pros Eric "Rizen" Lynch, John "Apestyles" Fan Fleet and Jonathan "PearlJammer" Turner. Like Gus Hansen's "Every Hand Revealed", these books ultimately take the same approach that I have been for years with my own tournament recap posts, focusing on several hands over a long period of time in the same tournament, using those true-life summaries to help show how these guys won a few of their biggest tournaments. I find this style of teaching very effective personally, and I thought Rizen, Apestyles and PearlJammer used it very well in their first book. There were even several scenarios posed to all three authors, and you could read the differences in how each player would consider and approach the same poker situation. It was really a pretty cool book and I'm sure I wrote here how I was alerady looking forward to Volume 2 coming out, which it was said would focus more on end game as compared to the first book which focused more on early and middle mtt play, accumulating a stack, etc.

Well, Volume 2 finally did come out a month or so ago, and I was among the first to order a copy from Amazon to add to my extensive collection of poker literature. And today I can report here: this book kinda sucked.

Yep, it was bound to happen, and I should have seen it coming. The same exact thing happened with Dan Harrington, eventually, although both of the first two volumes of his seminal books on nlh tournaments (including the second one, also focused on "end game" considerations) were pretty amazing, but eventually even he went to the well one too many times, made the easy money grab, and his Volume 3 ("the Workbook") is about as useless of a poker text as you will ever find, replete with poor examples, poor analysis, and just generally nothing new compared to what he'd already said once if not twice before.

To be clear, Volume 2 of "Winning Poker Tournaments One Hand at a Time" isnt even close to bad like Harrington's third volume, but there is just not a whole lot of great tidbits in there like I recall the first book being chock full of. The one very interesting focus I take from reading this book is how much each of the three successful online poker playing authors seem to focus on stack sizes when getting down to the endgame. This is definitely not something I focus enough on in my own game, and I think just the fact that each author appears to be sizing up the stack sizes of his opponents as well as himself before each and every decision they are making when a big-field mtt really gets down to the nitty gritty is something that itself I can incorporate better into my own game. I mean, each one of the authors probably makes stack sizes their primary focus throughout this book, even moreso than position, even more than the absolute strength of their own cards in most cases. That was the one aspect that I will definitely take from this book that will make me a better poker tournament player going forward.

But that's basically it. Otherwise, it is clear to a guy who has done as many tournament recaps as I have that these three authors took only a short period of time in which they recorded all of their hands (like I do most nights) in a tournament in which to find one that they actually won. I say this because, in the end, in each author's section of the book (each author writes one section of about a third of the book which details one particular mtt run from the point where the ITM positions are reached right up until the author wins the tournament) is basically full of hands that are not necessarily representative of good poker logic and skill, are full of what each author in retrospect admits were probably sub-optimal plays made by the hero, and ultimately each one of the three mtt runs described in the book are chock full of stoopid suckouts and unbelievably lucky draws that would have eliminated the author but instead held on to eventually lead to victory.

Unlike Harrington, who basically made up each of his poker scenarios in his books in an attempt to create a specific set of circumstances that perfectly illustrate the point he was trying to make, these authors were restricted by reality in that they wanted (like I do) to use real-life examples hand from real-life tournaments that actually happened to them, and as I mentioned above, coming up with sufficient real-life hand examples to illustrate the many moves necessary to win a large-field online mtt takes many many many trials and many many months of research and of recording every hand you play, and these authors just did not spend enough time amassing great hands from real-life mtts where they ended up winning. Instead, it is easy to see from reading this book that they picked a nice tournament win that occurred for them over, maybe, a 1-month period, and then went back and reviewed every hand that happened to them from ITM to the end. Even it it meant that they showed themselves making a dumb tournament play, semi-justifying it in the analysis in the book but then showing themselves luckdonking their way to victory. In Apestyles' mtt that he depicts in the book, for example, he limps into the ITM positions with barely a stack at all, among the bottom couple of players left in that tournament, and proceeds to make a highly dubious play with an only semi-strong hand, and luckflonks his way into a huge suckout triple-up on the first hand after reaching the money positions to the give him the chips to move on.

Although I imagine that the authors think that their semi-justifications of these plays in the analysis in Volume 2 makes it ok to show them, the bottom line is that, for a guy like me, seeing these authors make what I know to be poor poker decisions and then suck out big time really does cheapen the overall significance of the advice they provide in the books. Sure, everybody makes mistakes from time to time in their poker play, but writing a book that features those mistakes but then attempts to justify them because in reality these authors had no other tournament runs to choose from, is going to take away from the overall value the book brings to readers who are looking to learn how one wins an online large-field mtt. Honestly, other than the interesting focus paid to stack sizes as I mentioned above, I do not see where Volume 2 of this series is going to help that guy who hasn't really quite figured out how to win yet.