Review of Harrington on Cash Games, vol. 1

Title:

Harrington on Cash Games, vol. 1

Author:

Dan Harrington and Bill Robertie

Publisher:

Two Plus Two Publishing

Date:

2008

ISBN:

1-880685-42-6

Pages:

418

Price:

$34.95

Reviewed by Nick Christenson, npc@jetcafe.org

July 13, 2009

In 2004 Dan Harrington and Bill Robertie released the first volume of their Harrington on Hold'em series. It was greeted as a sensation and immediately became widely regarded as a classic on the topic of tournament no-limit Texas hold'em. In 2008, these authors produced their much anticipated books on no-limit hold'em cash games. This is a review of their first volume.

I'll cut to the chase here. I think this is a great book on no-limit hold'em, but it's not the breakthrough that the first volume of Harrington on Hold'em was. Harrington on Cash Games, vol. 1 is well worth reading for no-limit hold'em cash game players, but as an incremental supplement to already available literature. Also, I take issue with three general recommendations the authors provide.

First, Harrington rightly points out that it is important to play deceptively, and that this becomes more important the deeper the money in the game. To provide this deception, Harrington on Cash Games, vol. 1 recommends sometimes playing certain situations in different ways. This certainly accomplishes the goal of making one's play hard to read, but there is another way to play deceptively. Instead of deceiving opponents by playing a hand in a different way at different times, one can also deceive opponents by playing multiple different hands in the same way. I believe that deception via the second method should be emphasized over the first form, yet Harrington and Robertie never mention it explicitly.

Second, in Harrington on Cash Games, vol. 1 the authors often suggest playing hands in a certain way some percentage of the time and in other ways some other percentage of the time. For example, when flopping a set in an unraised pot on an innocuous board where one's opponent bets, the book might recommend raising 20% of the time and just calling on the flop 80% of the time. By itself, these recommendations are fine, but there are a large number of situations where the authors recommend a conventional play about 80% of the time and an unconventional one about 20% of the time. The thing is, these 20%s add up. If you're making 20 decisions an hour that are 80/20 situations, that means making 4 unconventional plays during an hour of play, and that seems like a lot to me. I suspect that some of the 80/20 decisions really should be 90/10, and some of the 90/10 decisions should really be 95/5, but Harrington's big-time poker resume is far more impressive than my own.

The third issue I have with the book is with Harrington's randomization recommendations. Harrington feels that when faced with an 80/20 situation, it's important to use some external randomization mechanism, such as the second hand of a watch. The authors express the concern that human beings aren't very good at mixing up their play in this manner, and that opponents might be able to discern patterns in their behavior. At the same time, Harrington recommends at times that players vary their bet size based on the strength of the hand they hold. For my part, I'm much more worried about giving away information about my hand strength by varying my bet size due to this factor than I am due to an inadequate random number generation.

The book is filled with many examples, and I found reading these to be beneficial. Even though I occasionally disagreed with some of the factors that went into the recommendations Harrington makes, I almost always agreed with his conclusions. Moreover, on many occasions I found the authors' analysis to be quite insightful.

Despite the fact that I have some questions about some of the recommendations I found in Harrington on Cash Games, vol. 1, I still think it's a very strong book, it's just not the breakthrough book we got from these authors when they released Harrington on Hold'em. I think there are few who play no-limit cash games who won't find significant value in this book, so I recommend it.

Capsule:

Harrington on Cash Games, vol. 1 is a very good book on playing no-limit Texas hold'em cash games. There are some strategic recommendations that I don't completely support, but there are so many good recommendations here that I think this book will assist almost everyone with an interest in its subject matter. I recommend this book.