Review of Real Poker: The Cooke Collection
- Title:
- Real Poker: The Cooke Collection
- Author:
- Roy Cooke with John Bond
- Publisher:
- Mike Caro University of Poker, Gaming, and Life Strategy
- Date:
- 1999
- ISBN:
- 1-880069-50-8
- Pages:
- 400
- Price:
- $19.95
November 14, 1999
Roy Cooke is one of the better known columnists for
Card Player Magazine.
Since 1993 he has been writing insightful articles on Poker Strategy,
and Real Poker: The Cooke Collection is a compendium of
his articles up through 1998. Overall, I find Cooke to be one of the
more insightful Card Player columnists, and while not all
of his articles are gems, a significant number of them reveal an
important, intrinsic truth about the game of poker.
The book is divided into five sections: Introduction; Play of Hands;
Theory, Strategy, and Tactics; Philosophy of Life and the Game, and
Miscellaneous Topics. Truth be known, these divisions are rather
arbitrary, as they were not on Cooke's mind as high-level topics when
the articles were originally written. These sections do serve to
break up the book a bit, though. Unhappily, few changes were made from
how they appeared in magazine form to this book. Many of Cooke's key
concepts are stated repetitiously. This isn't so bad when the reader
will have a two week gap enforced between reading successive articles,
but in a book like this the repetition and seasonal context often appear
awkward at best.
As one might imagine from any collection of articles that span six years
of a writer's career, the essays range in quality from the banal to
the sublime. Although I feel much of Cooke's best work has been in
1999, there are a lot of winning strategies expressed in these pages.
It is quite clear that Cooke is a successful professional poker player,
and he manages to impart a great deal of his winning methodologies
in his articles. Many authors try to communicate their strategies
by presenting them as universal truths. Cooke tends to avoid this, and
in his best articles, he presents one specific situation in extraordinary
detail, and describes his thought processes as this situation unfolds.
By doing so, he doesn't create a magnum opus like Sklansky's Theory
of Poker, but he often succeeds in imparting wisdom.
This examination of poker strategy through microcosm is effective, and
given the number of poker authors who have aimed for and failed to
deliver a general strategy for their readers to follow rote, Cooke's
methodology is quite successful.
Of course, this style is not without it's down sides. This book is not
intended for beginners. Cooke not only assumes that the reader knows
how to play, but that they know how to play well. Further, Cooke,
correctly in my opinion, strongly emphasizes that the correct play
in a given situation depends on a large number of variables, and with
the same cards, the same betting, and sometimes even the same players,
the same hands should often be played quite differently. Every great
poker player undoubtedly agrees with this, but in the hands of a poor
player, the "it depends" mantra can be greatly abused. I believe the
solid player will benefit greatly from following Cooke's analyses of
many poker situations, but some losing players might use Cooke's words
to reinforce their worst tendencies. Consequently, there are many
players that probably won't benefit from Real Poker, but
that's not the fault of the book.
There are two issues that bother me about this book that I wish to
raise. The first is that while I have not had this book fall apart
on me, the binding does not appear to be very sturdy, and I wonder how
it will hold up over time. However, the fact that this is 400 pages
of quality material at, for poker books, the quite reasonable price
of twenty dollars substantially mitigates this.
The second complaint I have is
with one of Cooke's tendencies. He quite rightly points out that
players who berate the "live ones" at the table and run them off are
costing themselves a great deal of money and would be well advised
to cease this practice. Nonetheless, Cooke often describes players
he's playing against who make bad plays in enough detail that if
the descriptions were accurate and these people read the article,
some of them would surely recognize themselves. In my opinion, there
is little to distinguish these two practices, and neither is worthy of
a player of Cooke's stature. A lot of players feel the need to
demonstrate their own superiority at the expense of others. Some
do it at the table, some do it on other forums. Real professionals
don't need to do it at all.
Overall, though, the information contained in this book is quite
good and I believe it is well worth reading by any seasoned poker
player, although I would recommend that most beginners primarily
study other books until they have become at least a break even player.
If one already owns all the issues of Card Player since
1993, all this volume does is put Cooke's articles in between one
set of covers, but that by itself might be enough to make
Real Poker: The Cooke Collection worth picking up.
Capsule:
Real Poker: The Cooke Collection is an aggregation
of Roy Cooke's articles that appeared in Card Player
from 1993 to 1998. This book has some flaws, but overall it presents
good value to experienced poker players looking to improve their game.
Novice players may want to defer its purchase until their game has
become more fundamentally grounded.
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