Hold'em Wisdom for all Players: Simple and Easy Strategies to Win Money
by Daniel Negreanu

This book is mediocre at best. I doubt that Daniel Negreanu contributed a single idea to the writing of "Hold 'em Wisdom for all Players." There isn't one bit of unique advice in here that hasn't been seen in the poker literature for the past two decades. In fact, it feels like some ghostwriter all but copied and pasted large blocks of text from David Sklansk's works on hold em (but deleting the mathematical or strategic explanations for various plays).


Now don't get me wrong, I'm a fan of Daniel Negreanu. I was hoping to glean some sort of insight into his thought process at the tables while reading this book. But quite simply, none of that is here. "Hold 'em Wisdom for all Players" advocates a tight, weak style of play that I doubt Daniel Negreanu would ever employ. It focuses on basic card values, provides no particularly helpful guidance on reading your opponents, and is shallow in its reasoning and explanation for its various "bits of wisdom." I was hoping for a book that would provide some insight into how to play an intelligent, but aggressive game of poker; this book can only teach you how to play a truly conservative, borderline passive game. This might be enough to help you win a fair bit of money against drunken tourists at the $1/$2 ring games in Vegas, but this style of play probably will not work against more aggressively unpredictable online players.

For all that, I'll give the book three stars because "Hold 'em Wisdom for all Players" may be useful for rank amateurs in staying out of too much trouble while learning the game. The book also isn't bad in the sense that these bits of advice have been considered conventional truths in the poker world for decades now. And maybe I'm being nice because I like Daniel Negreanu and even read his blog on occasion. In any event, if you've read Sklansky and Harrington before, then this book is wholly duplicative, if not inferior, to those works. But if this is the first book you were looking at for learning Texas hold 'em, it wouldn't be a bad choice.

J. Gelling (New York) - See all my reviews


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