Poker Player Stats Tracking Software

King Yao

Weighing the odds in Holdem Poker

I purchased this the other day after it sat on my wish list for many months. If you could ask my bankroll, it'd tell you there were 200 big reasons for why I should have bought it earlier. King Yao provides us with an engineer's eye view of poker as told by a master technician who had the tenacity to forego a successful career as an options trader to become a full-time professional poker player.

There's no fluff or rhetoric in this one. It's fact after fact after fact and that's exactly what is most helpful to poker enthusiasts. The reader receives essential insight that is central to the game.

Before reading this book, I thought I understood pot odds much better than I actually did. In the past, I was not calculating them effectively as I played. The method he uses for game determination of pot odds, DIPO, is extremely easy to practice while seated at a table or at a virtual one. Making quick, but accurate, determinations as to whether it is profitable to remain playing is essential to victory, and Weighing the Odds provides us with many tools with which to do so. His treatment of starting hands was masterful, and I'm not using hyperbola when I say so.

The four pages of specific recommendations as to how to play each hand given early, middle, or late position are sterling. Helpfully, the author makes use of detailed charts and analysis to illustrate those hands highest in EV. Specifically, his discussion of AQ and JJ benefited me as they have proved challenging hands again and again.

This one's for everybody, but an advanced player will examine it for a moment and immediately recognize its value.