I recommend that if you’re considering purchasing this book, you should get your hands on a friend’s copy or one at a bookstore and leaf through the practice hands in the back. Practice hands are supposed to be the part of a book where all of the concepts that may have seemed unclear to you are made concrete, but I was still confused after reading these practice hands. Cloutier’s explanations are very incomplete and they don’t always relate to a portion of the text. He writes about playing two aces as “second-hand low”, which is a way of trapping with aces, but it’s the first time in the book he mentions the tactic. I also think he makes a mistake when explaining it (puts the player in the wrong position in the hand), but it’s impossible to know that since he didn’t teach the play earlier. Instead of learning a valuable tactic, the reader of this book reads the passage three times, scratches his head, and flips the page. What a shame.

I don’t want anyone reading this review to think Cloutier’s book is worthless. It preaches chip conservation, which is an underrated tournament concept. So many of today’s tournament players want to know how to be aggressive. They dream of pounding their opponent into submission with raise after raise. That’s a recipe for disaster if you don’t choose your spots perfectly. Cloutier helps you see that. He says his goal in every tournament is to make the final table, then get to the top three and then win it. Often the way to make it there is to make sure your chips aren’t in the pot in marginal situations. One observation I’ll always remember about this book is that if you go all-in you must win the pot. Once again, if you put all your chips in the middle, you HAVE to win the pot or you’re gone.

Overall, I think this book is much more simplistic than it should be. Pot odds, implied odds and other mathematical concepts that help you make decisions aren’t mentioned, except for in an indirect way. Cloutier mentions that in pot-limit, you can take more flops with small pairs and connectors because you can break a man with a big pair and he can’t put too much pressure on you before the flop, because of the pot-limit. The only time he mentions math directly in the text is in a one-and-a-half page section title “Math and Poker” in which he says all good players are aware of math and pot odds, but they don’t let it become the most important factor in their decisions. Also, fictional opponents in the text aren’t given characteristics. Instead, Cloutier just spews cliches like “you have to know your man” and “timing is everything in poker.”

Speaking of timing, in the section he titles “Timing is everything”, he uses an example to prove a point the never makes. He recalls a hand he played in Dallas where five players limped in front of him and he raised to $400 with a 72, because he thought everyone was weak. To his dismay, everybody called. Then the flop came a beautiful 7-7-2. He goes on to say this is a matter of good timing. It’s difficult to figure out his point here. If it’s that sometimes you get lucky when you bluff, point well taken, but what does that teach us. If it’s you have to have some kind of clairvoyance about what cards are going to come out, to know that it’s time to play now, that’s just silly.

Anyone who doesn’t know how to play pot-limit hold’em well can get something out of this book, because there are two sections on the game. One is on general pot-limit strategy and the other is on how to win tournaments. In the no-limit section, Cloutier skips right to tournament strategy, partially because you don’t need to learn how to build a pot like you do in pot-limit. That happens naturally in no-limit hold’em. That section is followed by a chapter entitled “How to Practice for Winning the World Series of Poker,” which doesn’t provide many revolutionary ideas. Basically, he says to play a lot of cheap tournaments and one-table satellites until your skill level improves. Then comes the section of 20 practice hands, 13 of which give you AK, AA, or KK for hole cards. The book ends on a light note with amusing anecdotes from Cloutier’s days as a road gambler.