Review of The Raiser's Edge

Title:

The Raiser's Edge

Author:

Bertrand "ElkY" Grospellier, Lee Nelson, Tysen Streib, Tony Dunst

Publisher:

Huntington Press

Date:

2011

ISBN:

1-935396-48-X

Pages:

421

Price:

$34.95

Reviewed by Nick Christenson, npc@jetcafe.org

September 5, 2011

The play in today's poker tournaments is significantly different than it was just a few years ago. Loose aggressive play is far more common, as are smaller sized raises, and raises and reraises with weaker hand values. Many factors have led to this new style, with the situations and tools available to online players driving these changes. In The Raiser's Edge, the latest product of the Huntington Press poker book writing crew, "ElkY" Grospellier, Lee Nelson, Tysen Streib, and Tony Dunst explain the current state-of-the-art in no-limit tournament play.

In many ways we can consider this the third installment in HP's "Kill" poker book series, and, in fact, its French title is "Kill ElkY". The book is divided into several sections with some chapters primarily written by different members of the authoring team. The book begins with a qualitative exegesis by ElkY on how he approaches the current tournament scene. The strategy provided is designed to exploit what ElkY sees as weaknesses in most contemporary players' games. The explanation comes off as a bit jumbled at times, and it seems rather counter-exploitable, but there are a lot of interesting suggestions here.

The next big section comes from Tysen Streib, and it presents equilibrium strategies for some fairly complex no-limit hold'em situations. I'll repeat here a complaint I had with Kill Phil, that the authors fail to provide enough methodology to instill the readers with faith that the results are significant. Streib takes hands and play lines from the 2009 Annual Computer Poker Competition and used these to construct his equilibrium solutions. How much data was available? How many different times did each situation come up? Why use the computer poker data and not, say, hand histories from the higher stakes online games? Given this data, how are the equilibrium solutions calculated? I can understand not wanting to provide all this detail in the text, but at least put it in an appendix.

This is especially important since a significant number of the equilibrium strategies suggest some unorthodox things. For example, in the big blind against a mid-position raiser Streib suggests that one should sometimes jam with A5s but never with either A4s or A6s. Why should this be the case, and more importantly, why should we believe this result? I'm willing to bet that Streib's methodology is pretty sound, he clearly knows his stuff, I'd just like to know what it is. In any case, at least most of the time the strategies look fairly balanced, although occasionally there's an artifact that doesn't make sense to me.

Later in the book there's a section about adjustments online players should consider for live play. These suggestions all have at least a kernel of truth, but they way they're written displays some dangerous prejudices. As just one example, they suggest that live players are mistaken to be "highly concerned with their tournament lives." Quoting, "Additionally, a lot of the older poker literature places an inordinate amount of value on the concept of tournament life, leading those who follow outdated advice to believe that they're making correct folds." I can't be certain to which parts of the older poker literature the authors refer, but if this refers to the books I suspect, then I believe the literature is not outdated at all. Instead, if the authors were to state that many live poker players overemphasize tournament survival and this was exploitable, then I'd agree. In this instance, and in many others, I believe the book's statement is too strong.

While I found that each section of The Raiser's Edge has good material, overall the book lacks cohesion. I believe this is a direct consequence of having each of the authors take the lead on different chapters, especially within a given section. It's my opinion that this just doesn't work very well. I find it jarring to shift emphasis so drastically from one chapter to the next.

Despite these complaints, the good material in The Raiser's Edge makes the book worthwhile. While I think ElkY's tactical suggestions leave a player vulnerable to an aware opponent, he does a good job of summarizing the current state of online tournament play. While I'd like to understand Streib's equilibrium strategy methodology more completely, his charts are at the very least intriguing, and might lead to a next generation strategy. It's well worth reading, but the information it provides is better than the book as a whole.

Capsule:

I find minor flaws with the information in The Raiser's Edge, and major flaws with its cohesiveness as a book, but much of the material is quite good. For those who are seeking to understand the state of current best practices in poker tournaments or those who are looking for equilibrium solutions for more complex no-limit hold'em situations, The Raiser's Edge is worth reading.