Tournament Poker for Advanced Players

by David Sklansky

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Reviewer:  kegTAP14

Most poker players never really understand the difference between tournament poker and ring game, or cash game poker. The concepts of ‘You’re Broke – You’re Done’ and They’re Broke – They’re Done’ sound fairly simple and obvious when applied to tournament play. The problem is realizing just how those two concepts turn into a change in playing style from a cash game to the tournaments. In the book Tournament Poker for Advanced Players, by David Sklansky, these concepts and others that seem to escape, or are not considered, by your everyday cash game player are discussed and analyzed.

Sklansky divides this book into 3 basic parts. The first is the discussion of tournament theory, this section includes things as simple as tournament structures and goes on to discuss everything from ‘Just out of the money’ to ‘All-in Strategy’. I found this section to be by far the best and most helpful part of this book. He introduces a concept called EV, or expected value, which I have used many times successfully during online tournaments. He also touches on how satellites and re-buy tournaments differ from your standard freezeouts in the opening section. He ends this part with probably the most interesting topic in the book, ‘Why the First Day leader at the WSOP never wins.’

The second section is a series of quizzes that Sklansky has put together to test what you have read in the earlier sections. Depending on the blinds, antes, position, and information you are given you are asked to decide what the right play would be. Each quiz has an answer that Sklansky provides at the end to see what he says is the correct play. The middle section in my opinion is extremely speculative. While these quizzes do give you a decent look at how to apply some of the concepts written about in the book it is impossible to say what is the ‘correct’ play in any given situation. There are far too many factors that influence every decision that a player will have to consider to say that there is a cut and dry answer for the quizzes given.

The last section is a question section, with each topic from the first area covered. There are a series of questions and then the answer, basically an overview of the earlier topics and key points that should be drilled home. These are helpful to refresh points that may have earlier been missed or ones that just didn’t hit home the first time reading them.

Overall I recommend this book to any serious tournament player or those who wish to make the jump from cash games to tournaments. I don’t think this is a book for those who just play tournaments occasionally or casually though, as Sklansky holds true to his normal writing style, which can be fairly dry and hard to read.

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