Review of Professional Middle Limit Hold'em

Title:

Professional Middle Limit Hold'em

Author:

Tristan Steiger

Publisher:

D&B Publishing

Date:

2009

ISBN:

978-1-904468-47-9

Pages:

336

Price:

$25.95

Reviewed by Nick Christenson, npc@jetcafe.org

December 23, 2009

The D&B Publishing folks in the UK have rolling out books on limit hold'em recently. These have ranged in quality from decent to excellent. Their latest one, Professional Middle Limit Hold'em by Tristan Steiger, focuses on limit games in the $30-$60 range. Obviously, I set the bar a little higher for middle limit books than for low limit books. While advice to "not play stupid" can suffice for beating many low limit games, that's not enough to get the money at the middle limits.

Many books take a "theory and practice" approach, instructing readers on winning principles and then showing how to apply them using real hand examples. In Professional Middle Limit Hold'em, Steiger takes what I would describe as a "practice and theory" approach. The first half of the book is spent going hand-by-hand through 33 hours of play in the $30-$60 limit hold'em game at the Bellagio. The second half of the book provides strategic suggestions on how to beat this game. I have no problem with an untraditional way of organizing this material, but in this case I don't think it works so well. The nice thing about doing the theory up front is that you can then easily refer to appropriate sections when you get to the practice portion. The way this particular book is laid out makes this awkward.

On the other hand, one advantage to putting the practice portion of Professional Middle Limit Hold'em up front is that it's the part I expect most readers will find more valuable. Basically, it's much like Gus Hanson's Every Hand I Played applied to a week's worth of cash games. The author lists all the hands he was dealt along with all the salient details of the hands he played. This is much more difficult to actually do at a poker table than it would first appear, so I applaud Steiger for the effort.

The author has partially anonymized his players. While some people are described but not named, others have names attached to them in the book. Many of these, such as well known authors Barry Tanenbaum and Mason Malmuth, are identified explicitly. Some regulars in this game appear in the book, but under fictitious names.

The book is well written. While we get very little background information about the author, I suspect that English might not be his first language. If so, either he's very fluent or he had a terrific editor. In any event, the ideas are clearly presented and well organized. There are some typos and occasionally the author gets some aspect of the play wrong (such as labelling cards with obviously incorrect suits and misidentifying a double gutshot straight as a regular gutshot straight draw.) I don't believe any of these are unforgivable, especially considering the large number of hands that are presented.

However, early in the book the author makes an egregious mistake during a hand. At the time this gave me serious doubts as to whether the advice in Professional Middle Limit Hold'em was going to be any good at all. Later in the book, the author acknowledges his error. Since everyone makes mistakes at the poker table, doing so in one sample hand doesn't necessarily doom the book as long as the author addresses the issue. I imagine I'm not the only reader who felt concerned at that point in the narrative, though, so the author could have done his readers a service by strongly calling attention to his mistake immediately rather than later on.

I'd evaluate the author's play as mostly solid. He makes a couple of somewhat createive plays, but none that I don't think would occur to a player on that level whose game I respect. As someone who is familiar with the cash games at the Bellagio, I believe Steiger's approach is better suited to winning in the $15-$30 game, where straightforward, solid play will take down the money, than it is to the $30-$60, where being a little more imaginitive is required to be a big winner. I do like the quantitative analysis he provides of his results, though. I believe this sort of analysis could be beneficial for many serious poker players.

Basically, my opinion of Steiger's annotated hand histories also applies to his strategic sections. There are some places in the book where I disagree with the author, but these are mostly quite minor. The problem for me is that there aren't any new suggestions. I've read all his good advice somewhere before. There are many footnotes referring to a great many poker books, so I'm sure he's quite widely read. Consequently, I'm a bit disappointed that there's not much here that's truly original. In some places he's refuting bad advice, and pretty much every time I agree with Steiger, but then again, so do other authors.

While this book was sitting on my shelf waiting for me to get around to reading it, a friend of mine who regularly plays mid limit hold'em aske me if it was worthwhile. He was specifically interested in a new book with hand examples, and he didn't really care whether the analysis was all that great, as he could learn almost as much from disagreeing with what he felt was bad analysis as he could from something insightful. As it turns out, this book definitely fills this role, and that's no mean feat, as logging and commenting on this many hands requires considerable work. I'm also quite sure that the author is fine with the notion that one could disagree with his analysis, especially since he explicitly encourages the reader to read all poker books, including his, critically.

Fifteen years ago, I wouldn't hesitate to recommend Professional Middle Limit Hold'em to any player looking for a book to help their play at that level, despite some flaws. The problem is that there's a lot more to choose from these days, and I think that many of the alternatives are better. I wouldn't suggest that someone actively avoid this book by any means, I just can't rank as a top book on the subject. Of course, for those readers who have read and reread the other books on this topic, Steiger's provides another potential source of insight.

Capsule:

The first half of Professional Middle Limit Hold'em does for a week of play at the Bellagio's $30-$60 game what Gus Hanson's Every Hand I Played did for tournament poker. The book is a complete chronicling of over a thousand hands of cash game hold'em as experienced by one player. Additionally, the book explains the author's notions of what it takes to beat the game. Despite some errors, I believe the analysis in both parts of the book is decent, but uninspired, making the whole book worthwile in a vacuum, but not as good as many other books already on the market. There are many readers who can benefit from this book, but I'd advise picking it up only after some of the other better sources of information have been digested first.

Note: I received a free review copy of this book from the publisher. I have no other interest, financial or otherwise, in the success of this book.