New books!

Well, new to me anyway. The first was an Abebooks.com purchase - Seven Card Stud for Advanced Players by Sklansky, Malmuth, and Zee. I'm not sure what enticed me to pick this one up, other than its affordability (like less than seven bucks including shipping) and the fact that I want to sharpen up my non hold'em games a bit. Unfortunately, I don't know of any stud games that take place in town! Even a local "dealers choice" cash game that I know of only allows games with flops, and almost everywhere you go, games are played no-limit (in some cases pot-limit). Still, the few times I've played it it was a lot of fun, and I'd like to at least increase my knowledge of the game a little bit. The book assumes the reader is familiar with some of the basics of stud, which is perhaps today a bolder assumption than before 2003 when no-limit hold'em became so much more popular. Still, its sections on ante stealing and third street play provide a good foundation (there must be some adjustment made for the ante stealing strategy when considering short-handed games, since there are less antes in there. If anyone has good advice regarding this, let me know).

The second poker text I've begun reading is 2+2's new text on Sit'n'go (single table tournament) strategy by Collin Moshman. So far, I've only made it into the beginning of the book, but it's advice on how to play when the blinds are low relative to the starting chip stacks seems solid. In a nutshell, it advises that you stay away from risky spots early on, playing good hands when you are a clear favorite, and raising with reasonably good hands when you are opening the pot in late position. The game-theoretical reasoning behind avoiding big all-in confrontations early on seems like a no-brainer, but is in fact complex.

Due to the fact that there are payouts (that is, first place gets less money than the face value of his chips in the tournament, which would have been all of them, since other places have been paid pieces of the prize pool already), the more chips you have, the less each individual chip is worth (see Tournament Poker for Advanced Players). Therefore, even if you double up and eliminate a player, you're not quite gaining equal value. The example in Sit 'n Go Strategy is of a player with a $100 stack eliminating a player with an equal stack. Though he has eliminated a player and gained $100 in tournament chips, he has gained less in equity (long term actual cash value), "say $90." but the extra $10 in value is distributed to the other players, since their chances of cashing have increased slightly as well (all of this is explained and can be further read about in the first 16 pages of the book). Hopefully I'll be able to apply its concepts to both the Monday night game and online single-table games.