Poker Forum - “Internet Poker”

Review of "Internet Poker: How to Play and Beat Online Poker Games" by Lou Krieger and Kathleen Keller Watterson (ConJelCo, 2003).

Poker in general, and internet Poker in particular, is a hot topic these days. I read somewhere recently, might have even been in this book, that more has been written on Poker since 1990 than in all the preceeding years. That's hot!

Ok, so here we have an interesting sounding book by respected author Lou Krieger on an undeniably hot topic and you're wondering if this might be the book for you. Maybe it is and maybe it isn't. How much you'll get out this book probably depends a lot on where you sit on the learning curve.

Despite what the Table of Contents says this book is basically organized into three parts. The first part of the book, roughly a third of it, is basic introductory stuff: an introduction to Poker history, an introduction to the "cyberspace world", and introduction to the popular forms of Poker and an introduction to the most basic concepts of internet Poker software such as websites, downloading software, registering, etc.

If you are completely green to the Poker and/or online scene this material could be quite helpful to you. The advice to play in "Fun" mode in order to get the hang of playing online is particularly stressed while they don't forget to point out that "Fun" games are rather a poor way to learn Poker because they attract a lot of "on tilt" play action. However, if you are at all familiar with the internet and online gaming software you can just skip to page 68, the unofficial second part of the book.

Page 68 kicks off the Poker instruction part of the book and is based on a CD that comes with the book. The CD contains demo versions of the Turbo Poker training games published by Wilson Software. It, and the book, present you with 25 example hands for each of the five most popular forms of Poker --namely Omaha, Texas Hold'Em, 7-Card Stud, and the Hi/Lo versions of Stud and Omaha-- for a total of "125 Interactive Hands To Prepare You For Internet Poker". So far so good but be warned that without the software installed this segment of the book is quite useless because it is organized around, and wholly dependent on, the hands that are played in the demo itself.

I installed the Turbo Hold'Em demo from the CD and ran through the 25 Hold'Em hands. The software is an interesting idea --it has an Advisor to tell you what to do and you can peek at the other players hands-- but it's a pretty old-school piece of work. Although I learned a few things and found myself somewhat curious to see the full version of the software I was also happy to uninstall it at the end too. This software is 1990s vintage so it's interface is pretty plain by contemporary standards and it uses voice-overs --"Raised", "Capped", etc-- that get really annoying really fast due to the, umm, under-whelming voice work. Worse yet, I can get better hand analysis and statistics off the web for free so I'm not exactly going to rush out and snap up a copy of Wilson Turbo Whatever anytime soon.

The real question though is why the authors chose to run through a demo version of someone else's software as the core segment of their book. Obviously they're using it as a convenient training tool and strategy guide but aside from some hand-by-hand commentary they don't add a lot to the demo and the demo is merely saving them the effort of working through the hands in the book. All-in-all this promising idea ends up coming off as a rather low-rent effort on everybody's part.

The final third of the book continues the basic training that started in the first part. More details of playing online are discussed as well as a brief introduction to the legal issues of internet gambling and the basics of Money Management. Again though, I find myself at odds with the authors. For instance in the section on Money Management they take exception to the old ideas of "stop-loss" limits and quitting at a pre-determined win level. Their argument is that these old truisms don't apply unless you "quit playing poker entirely". What seems to have escaped their notice entirely is that for many players gambling is recreation, not work, so these win-lose limits play a real role in helping the recreational player manage their recreational budget. That said they do end the Money Management section with some excellent advice on record keeping and evaluating one's Poker performance by using Standard Deviation analysis of past game results.

Hopefully it's pretty obvious by now why I said at the beginning that this book may or may not be useful to you depending on your level of experience. At the risk of being blunt I'd have to say that this is a great book for complete newcomers to internet poker and probably not so great a book for anyone else.

As to the claim that you'll learn to "Beat Online Poker Games" as stated in the title of the book I'd have to say that I've read it cover to cover and found none of that sort of thing. Perhaps it's just flowery language included to sell the book but it could also be seen as a bit of false advertising. For a book that already has a strike and a half against it that's a deception that could easily bump this book off the discerning shopper’s “Buy” list.