Ed Miller's Small Stakes Holdem
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This book is the graduate course in beating low limit games.
If I had known when I bought this book how much money is would make me, I would probably have paid 10X the cover price. It's that good.
Ed Miller is a smart cookie. He used to work as a software developer for Microsoft, and he's one of a select few people who have co-authored a book with David Sklansky (who is almost certainly the leading poker thinker of the last decade or two). He is very capable of beating bigger games (he usually plays between 10/20 and 30/60) but has been fairly recently spotted crushing games as low as 2/4.
This book is not an easy read. There is a lot of information, and mathematics, and important concepts to process. It's also not an easy read because it challenges a lot of assumptions you might have had about how to best play in low limit games.
The book covers all the usual poker concepts - pot odds, bluffing, semi-bluffing, value betting, position, starting hand selection, slowplaying, and so on, but it does so with a very specific focus on low limit (loose and generally fairly passive) games. If you want to make money playing poker, these are the games to look for, but it takes a certain set of skills to do well at them - a set of skills that this book provides.
A word of warning about this book - misapplying these concepts, or using them to justify poor play will end up costing you a lot of money. I went on tilt recently (poker-speak for angry and playing badly) and found myself twisting a lot of mister Miller's good ideas to provide excuses for some lousy play. Thankfully I realised this before I did too much damage to my bankroll.
Overall, this is not a good first book, but it is pretty much a must read if you want to be something more than a slight winner.
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