Why read poker books?

The other day I looked at my book shelf. Actually I had to look because my wife wanted to move the furniture once again. This desperation happens once every quarter and I have given up in regards to not follow her directions during those times.

I figure it is better to just move a few books, tables and chairs a few times a year instead of having to move to a whole different house if my wife does not get her need for new looks stimulated.

Anyways moving more than 120 poker books are quite boring and I decided to see if I should get rid of any of them to ease my pain. Oh boy – I could actually throw away a lot of those poker books.

Not the brightest

The legendary Tom McEvoy might be a splendid poker player and even be endorsing online poker site PokerStars but he will never be awarded the Pulitzer Prize or even come in the top 500 best poker books around.

I wondered why on earth I actually bought and read 7 of his books. What a waste of money. Then it struck me. It is totally unfair to look upon Toms McEvoys books out of a context. If only one little sentence in his 7 books gave me new knowledge then all the time and money spent reading these books would be worth it.

After considering this I looked at all the titles again and decided to keep all my precious poker books for at least the next 3 months as well.

When looking at the poker titles it became clear to me that Dan Harringtons book Harrington on Hold’em volume 2 most likely is the one book who gave me the most benefit reading.

In his book he decides to reveal how the “squeeze move” is used.

In short the squeeze move can be used when a player raise and he gets a caller behind him. If you are in the big blind and now reraises then you put the original raiser in the middle between you and the caller.

Either you or the caller could have a good hand and the original raiser will have to fold his hand unless he holds KK or AA.

The caller is not likely to have a good hand since he did not make the reraise. Therefore you could take down a handsome amount of chips with more or less any 2 cards.

I enjoyed using the squeeze move for a long period and soon understood that more and more online poker players had begun to use the squeeze move.

A best selling poker book

Dan Harringtons book is one of the best selling poker books in the recent 5 years and poker players all over the world had noticed how to exploit the squeeze move. The new poker tournament trend is of course to just flat call a raiser with your big hands. The young aggressive players in online poker today will certainly make sure to reraise from the blinds often enough to make this a profitable way of playing aces.

The original raiser will most likely fold and now you have the positional advantage in the hand. You have a genuine good chance of getting a big pot now with your aces instead of just a small one. Your opponent will never put you on that strong a hand.

Using books to learn tricks are great. Using books to understand which tricks your opponents learn and then find a counter move against it is greater.

So back to Tom McEvoy- his books might have givent me some knowledge I would have missed out on not reading them. I can only recommend all players to read as many books as possible. One sentence might be the difference between winning a little in poker or a lot.

Buy Harrington on Holdem from Amazon: