Tournament Poker For Advanced Players Book Review

Are you a grinder? Do you spend hours every day putting your stack at risk for a few big blinds an hour? I used to do that. I used to grind away at the cash tables, but one day something caught my eye. It was a $5 re-buy with add-ons and first prize paid over $1,500. Fifteen hundred dollars for a five dollar buy-in ($15 after the add-ons). That was when it hit me. The real money is in tournaments.

Now I had a problem. I wanted to play tournaments, but all my experience was in cash games. I didn’t know much about tournament play, but I knew enough to know that it’s significantly different from cash games. So I went looking for a book that could help me make the transition. The book I found was David Sklansky’s Tournament Poker for Advanced Players.

Don’t let the name mislead you. You don’t have to be an advanced tournament player to understand this book, but you do have to be an advanced poker player. This book won’t build a tournament poker from scratch. In fact, the information in this book will make a new player’s head spin. But the player with a strong foundation in poker fundamentals will learn how to translate their skills from cash games to tournament tables.

In Tournament Poker for Advanced Players, Sklansky starts by reviewing the basics of expected value. That’s about as basic as this book gets. From there, Sklansky teaches you how expected value changes when you’re in a tournament situation. This simple concept gets extremely complicated when you apply a tournament payout structure to it.

Another situation that new tournament players have to be prepared for is raising blinds. You need to know how to adjust your play to account for the rising blind structure. You’ll learn when to hold, when to fold, and when to shove.

Like most Two Plus Two Publishing books, Tournament Poker for Advanced Players has an entire chapter dedicated to testing your knowledge. This chapter will present situation after situation for you to apply your newly found knowledge. After you can confidently answer the questions in this chapter, you’ll be ready to test your skills in the field. But poker play isn’t the only thing Sklansky will teach you.

Did you know you can make deals at a final table? You don’t have to play to the end to get your money. You can always cut a deal. But how do you negotiate the split? How do you use stack sizes to determine the split? Does the skill of the players factor into the negotiations at all? If you’re not sure how to answer those questions, don’t worry; Sklansky will show you the way.

Tournament poker is a different animal. You could be one of the world’s greatest cash players and still get clobbered in tournament play. There are a lot of extra factors in tournament poker that complicate the game. It takes specialized knowledge to win at tournament hold’em and Tournament Poker for Advanced Players will teach you what you need to know to beat your new game.