Phil Hellmuth - Play Poker Like the Pros

Phil Hellmuth, Jr.

Thanks to my amazing wife, Kathy, for supporting me as I travel around the world playing poker for a living. Thanks to my children, Phillip III and Nick, for putting up with Daddys line, Dont talk to me while I write my book. Thanks to Andy Glazer, who was the single biggest help to me in writing and editing this book. Andy gave me two weeks of full-time help with this book and made it much betterand much more readable. In fact, Andys fingerprints are all over this book. Thanks to Jason Karl for the illustrations and charts that he created. Thanks to Annie Duke for reading and editing Chapter 14. Thanks to Jon Karl for smoothing out Chapter 15. Thanks to University Coffee Cafe in Palo Alto for putting up with me while I wrote for six hours a day for two months. A special thanks to my agent Sharee Bykofsky and my editor Matthew Benjamin for understanding how great a book this could be.

Phil Hellmuth, Jr., a seven-time winner of the World Series of Poker, has put together a powerhouse of a bookthe culmination of more than 17 years of tournament play. Play Poker Like the Pros will teach you how to play and win the most popular casino and family poker games.

Phil begins by laying out how to set up and play each game and then moves on to explain basic and advanced strategy for each game. Phil teaches exactly which hands to play, when to bluff, when to call a bluff, when to raise, and when to fold. He demonstrates how to play against a mouse (a timid player), a jackal (a crazy player), and an elephant (a player who always calls). In addition, Phil provides priceless strategies for reading other players and being patient and cool under pressure.

Depending on how good you already are, how much poker you play or want to play, and how high the stakes are that you play for or want to play for, this book could help win you thousands of dollars.

In order to use any poker book effectively, even this one, and before risking lots of hard-earned dollars at the tables, the reader probably should understand the following:

Your reading process should be active, not passive. By active, I mean that you shouldnt read the book the way you might read a novel, hurrying on through because the book excites you so much that you want to get to what promises to be a dazzling conclusion. If you read or skim Play Poker Like the Pros , the lessons may make sense as youre reading them, but youre extremely unlikely to remember them; and even if you remember them, youre unlikely to be able to apply them successfully at the tables, because every hand is different, and subtle changes in circumstances can easily change the correct approach to a situation.

Instead, as you read Play Poker Like the Pros , you should move more slowly than youd probably prefer, and you should ask yourself questions about what youve just read. Could you explain it to someone else? If the situation changed slightly, what effect might that have on the advice? What if the stakes were higher or lower, your opponents were stronger or weaker, you were tired or sharp, your table image of tight or loose had changed because of the way youd played some recent hands, you did or didnt have any knowledge of how your opponents played (or vice versa)? The list is almost endless. In poker, context is king, and you need to take the time to consider various contexts.

Although Phil offers numerous examples and demo hands throughout the book, if you can stop and try to think of another hand while youre reading, and discern how the advice youve just read might affect how you play that hand, you will learn a great deal from Play Poker Like the Pros .

Dont try to do too much at once. Although you might enjoy Play Poker Like the Pros so much that you want to read it cover to cover from the first moment you pick it up, youll be asking too much of yourself, unless you plan to go back and reread individual sections carefully. Phil covers a lot of territory in this book, and its just not possible to absorb it all in one sitting, even if that sitting is an active one.

Just how you break the book down is up to you and your current level of understanding poker. You might want to read all the holdem material in one day, or you might move much more slowly. Youre the one who knows your capabilities. Trust your judgment.

Dont assume that an introductory section or chapter is beneath you, just because youre an experienced poker player. You might be surprised at some of the matters Phil Hellmuth considers introductory. If youre already a hotshot, you can probably move through introductory sections pretty quickly, but youre doing yourself a disservice if you just skip them.

If possible, try to integrate your book learning (as the old pros disdainfully call it) into your game by alternating active reading with playing. Until you take what you read here and try to apply it in a real game with money at stake, you cant really be sure that youve learned what you think youve learned.

It wouldnt hurt that integration process one bit if you applied a bit of scientific method to your poker experiments. By this I mean that using a control base in your experiments will allow you to understand what sort of effect your experiments are having on your results. Perhaps the best control base you can use is integration of new concepts one at a time. For example, suppose that in reading the intermediate holdem chapter, you come across seven fairly major new ways of thinking about the game. If you try to apply them to your game all at once, its going to be difficult for you to understand which of these new approaches is helping you (or for that matter, which of them you even understand). If you add one at a time, it will be easier for you to see how that one change affects your results.

You shouldnt carry this piece of advice too far, however, because its likely that you will encounter hundreds of new concepts in Play Poker Like the Pros , and if your plan is to integrate one new concept for each playing session, you will be investing too much money in too many poker games without enough weapons in your bag of tricks. You can try something new for half an hour, or if the changes are relatively minor, you can probably try several new ones simultaneously. Just dont change everything about the way you play all at once, or you wont have any idea of what changes are working, or why.

Incorporating seven major changes in your game simultaneously might well improve your results, but it could be that five of the changes are helping and two are hurting, because you arent applying them correctly. If that happened, your results would improve, but not as much as if you could figure out which changes are helping and which arent. If a change isnt helping, you might want to reread the section, or you might simply decide that this is one case where what works for Phil doesnt work for you.