Posted by Johnnymac 9:33 PM
I finally finished the Feeney book this week and I still wholeheartedly recommend it. If you haven't been playing for a while or if you're new to holdem or poker generally, you might want to start with another book, but if you do have a fair amount of experience playing there are quite a lot of eye-opening concepts in there.

Now that I'm finished I moved on to a new book, or rather, I went back to an old book for a new look: David Sklansky's Theory of Poker. The copy I am reading is fairly stiff and new - a long time ago I had an old copy that I lent to Dr Fro and he loaned me Sklansky's Advanced Holdem book in return. We never returned our books to each other and instead agreed that since we each were going to buy a copy of the other book anyway, we might as well just keep the other's book and buy new copies of the ones we lent. As such the copy I have now is in near-new condition, though I read the book itself a long time ago.

I just started tonight and I had forgotten just how good a book it is. Even the preface is good, including this profound passage (note especially the wonderful use of the word "aberration"):

Jokers, wild cards, and special rules may be introduced into any of these games to create such aberrations as Baseball, Follow the Queen, Anaconda, and scores of other variations that have spiced up home poker for decades. Paradoxically, the two types of players who favor these exotic poker variations are generally amateurs who want a lot of action and hustlers who prey on these amateurs because their long experience allows them to adjust more easily to unusual games than their amateur opponents can. However, before a player can become an expert at exotic games, he must understand the basic concepts of standard games.

Take that, Chris Canonico!

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