Lately I have been trying to learn more about poker, and while I'm practically swamped with Twitch coverage, I'm reading books on a "whatever's most easily available" basis—and not that much is easily available; the BPL has been letting me down on this front. I'll have to start asking real people if they've got books.
One book that was immediately to hand for me was Phil Hellmuth's Play Poker Like the Pros, which my cousin lent me. Phil Hellmuth is the all-time World Series of Poker bracelet winner and has won nearly $20 million in live tournament cashes, plus God knows how much money in cash games. In theory, he should be a pretty solid person to learn poker strategy from, which is probably a large part of why he gets book deals.
There are, however, a number of problems with this theory, which become apparent when you read the book as an actual thing that exists now. They fit into roughly three categories: 1 is datedness, 2 is questionable editing, and 3 is Phil Hellmuth. Many of the criticisms I have of this book could be considered type 2 or type 3, in that I think I a tighter editorial hand could have done more to rein in the Phil Hellmuth-ness of the book.
The dated stuff couldn't possibly have been avoided, considering that the book was written in 2002, and back in 2002 that was about as modern as you could get. That said, 2002 is a really hilariously bad year to be dated from, since 2003 was the year Chris Moneymaker won the World Series of Poker Main Event and the "poker boom" went into overdrive. A lot of the numbers Hellmuth throws around look adorably small, and a lot of the people he mentions, while still highly respected, are undoubtedly the "old guard" of poker now. There are also a couple of people he mentions who are, uh, less highly respected now than they were back then (you can probably guess who they are if you know about the Full Tilt scandal). Most cringe-inducingly, Hellmuth spends a fair amount of time plugging Ultimate Bet, one of the online card rooms at the center of the "superuser"/"God mode" cheating scandal. And it's sort of sad how confident the book is that easily accessible online poker will only ever grow more popular and widespread, because what a wonderful thing is the Internet.
(Man, I still can't believe I missed the entire poker boom. It sounds like a fun time.)
The second class of errors I cannot blame on 2002. Editing existed in 2002; it was probably in better shape as a field than it is now. AND YET. There are about eleventy billion exclamation points in this 350-page book. There are way too many parenthetical asides. There is a GLARING mathematical error on page 63, in which a percentage is calculated but the "convert to percentage" step is skipped. (It is a copy editor's job to double-check arithmetic, alas, even though most of us are English majors.) On the upside, I did not catch any hand histories/examples in which the card notations were wrong, which is not necessarily true for all poker publications, I have found. There is a misnegation on page 200, which, considering it is right in the middle of explaining starting hand strength in Omaha Eight or Better (High-Low Split) to an audience who has presumably never played Omaha Eight or Better (High-Low Split) before, is extremely confusing. (After rereading the paragraph I am sure he meant to say that A-2 as a starting hand can't be overstated and shouldn't be underestimated; i.e., that is is an extremely strong hand; not actually that it cannot be underestimated, i.e. that it is a garbage hand and the proper estimation of its utility is zero.)
Bridging the gap from error class 2 to error class 3, it appears that Hellmuth either convinced or stetted his editor into accepting his own personal, idiosyncratic definition of the word "megalomaniac." In the book it is defined as "poker slang" for an extremely "maniac" type of player ("maniac" actually does seem to be a term for people who raise all over the place). Fourteen years later, Phil Hellmuth is still the only person in the poker community I have heard use the word "megalomaniac" in that way, and poker editors far more veteran than myself have grumbled that that is not what that word means, dammit. My guess is still that somebody called Hellmuth that way back in the day and he decided something self-serving about table image instead of looking it up in the damn dictionary, and has just stuck with it ever since.
Error class 3 consists of things that are not really errors so much as reasons Phil Hellmuth is annoying. His nickname is "the Poker Brat" for a reason, and the reason is that he is egotistical to the point of comedy—if you have not already had your lifetime fill of male egotism being passed off as cute and funny, a point that I and every other woman I know has passed by the end of our first year of college at the latest. Anyway: Phil Hellmuth likes to drop names about all the cool people he hangs out with and brag about how much money he has won and lost. He likes relate his internal monologues to himself a lot—and while he usually refers to himself as "Phil," there is at least one occasion where he addresses himself as "baby." He's made up his own system of "animal personalities" to refer to different types of players instead of using existing community terminology, which might not necessarily be a terrible writing crime in and of itself, it's just that the result sounds really freaking goofy.
As far as being an introduction to the games goes, the book is just fine. It introduces a number of different games on a basic level, first the rules, then a little bit of advice on approaching play. This is good if you're totally unfamiliar with the games. The most attention is given to various forms of Hold'em, both limit and no-limit, which also makes sense. The more basic Hold'em strategy given is pretty easily actionable—like, "Here are the 10 best hands"—and it's pretty light on the math, which is probably OK.
The more advanced strategy given seems like it'd be more useful for following the action when watching poker on TV than actually playing, since a lot of it basically comes down to "this works great when you do it right," and in order to get to a point where you can do it "right" you'll probably need to either do a lot more reading or play a lot more poker, or most likely both. Frankly, the "advanced" section is largely just an excuse for Hellmuth to tell stories about tricky plays he's pulled off or witnessed. It is even lighter on the math than the basics section.
I would be unsurprised if some of the strategy advice isn't actually somewhat dated by now too, since the game has evolved so much since 2002, but I'm supremely unqualified to comment as to how. For me, the most useful portion of the book was probably the bits on Hold'em strategy that overlapped with the material covered in Phil Gordon's Poker: The Real Deal, so I could get a sense of what's the same and what was approached differently. For example, the Phils group what they consider to be "playable hands" differently, but overall there's not much disagreement over how strong various starting hands are. It would have been interesting to look at the advice side by side, but I gave the Gordon book back to the library.
To be frank, for me, the most enjoyable aspect of the book was reading the section about playing in fancy high-roller tournaments while simultaneously watching Hellmuth lose his shirt to Cate Hall on Poker Night in America's Twitch channel. I would read the hell out of a poker book by Cate Hall, by the way.
I think this book may be interesting to people for whom poker is an entirely foreign country that they're curious about (and who have a high tolerance for gregariously smug tour guides). But I think my next poker book is going to have to be something a bit more in-depth—and, alas, probably much heavier on math. Recommendations and/or things I could borrow would be most welcome.
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