Cash Games (How to Win at No-Limit Hold'em Money Games) Vol. 1 [Paperback]

Dan Harrington (Author), Bill Robertie (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 14, 2008

The first years of the poker boom were fueled by the interest in no-limit hold em tournaments. Recently, however, players have been gravitating to another, even more complex form of hold em no-limit cash games.

In Harrington on Cash Games: Volume I, Dan Harrington teaches you the key concepts that drive deep-stack cash game play. You ll learn how to tailor your selection of starting hands to your stack size, how to recognize the increasing deception value of supposedly weaker hands as the stack sizes increase, and how to use the concept of pot commitment to your advantage as the size of the pot grows. After laying out the general concepts behind deep-stack cash game play, Harrington shows you a complete strategy for post-flop play, and then teaches you the difference between post-flop play against a single opponent and post-flop play against multiple opponents. If you play no-limit hold em cash games, you need to read this book.

Dan Harrington won the gold bracelet and the World Champion title at the $10,000 buy-in No-Limit Hold em Championship at the 1995 World Series of Poker. And he was the only player to make the final table in 2003 (field of 839) and 2004 (field of 2,576) considered by cognoscenti to be the greatest accomplishment in WSOP history. In Harrington on Cash Games, Harrington and two-time World Backgammon Champion Bill Robertie have written the definitive books on no-limit cash games. These books will teach you what you need to know to be a winner in the cash game world.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Dan Harrington began playing poker professionally in 1982. On the circuit he is known as Action Dan, an ironic reference to his solid but effective style. He has won several major no-limit hold em tournaments including the European Poker Championships (1995), the $2,500 No-Limit Hold em event at the 1995 World Series of Poker, and the Four Queens No-Limit Hold em Championship (1996).

Dan began his serious games-playing with chess, where he quickly became a master and one of the strongest players in the New England area. In 1972 he won the Massachusetts Chess Championship, ahead of most of the top players in the area. In 1976 he started playing backgammon, a game which he also quickly mastered. He was soon one of the top money players in the Boston area, and in 1981 he won the World Cup of backgammon in Washington D.C., ahead of a field that included most of the world s top players.

He first played in the $10,000 No-Limit Hold em Championship Event of the World Series of Poker in 1987. He has played in the championship a total of 15 times and has reached the final table in four of those tournaments, an amazing record. Besides winning the World Championship in 1995, he finished sixth in 1987, third in 2003, and fourth in 2004. In 2006 he finished second at the Doyle Brunson North American Championships at the Bellagio, while in 2007 he won the Legends of Poker tournament at the Bicycle Club. He is widely recognized as one of the greatest and most respected no-limit hold em players, as well as a feared opponent in both no-limit and limit hold em side games. He lives in Santa Monica where he is a partner in Anchor Loans, a real estate business.

Bill Robertie has spent his life playing and writing about chess, backgammon, and now poker. He began playing chess as a boy, inspired by Bobby Fischer s feats on the international chess scene. While attending Harvard as an undergraduate, he became a chess master and helped the Harvard chess team win several intercollegiate titles. After graduation, he won a number of chess tournaments, including the United States Championship at speed chess in 1970. He also established a reputation at blindfold chess, giving exhibitions on as many as eight boards simultaneously.

In 1976 he switched from chess to backgammon, becoming one of the top players in the world. His major titles include the World Championship in Monte Carlo in 1983 and 1987, the Black & White Championship in Boston in 1979, the Las Vegas tournaments in 1980 and 2001, the Bahamas Pro-Am in 1993, and the Istanbul World Open in 1994.

He has written several well-regarded backgammon books, the most noted of which are Advanced Backgammon (1991), a two-volume collection of 400 problems, and Modern Backgammon (2002), a new look at the underlying theory of the game. He has also written a set of three books for the beginning player: Backgammon for Winners (1994), Backgammon for Serious Players (1995), and 501 Essential Backgammon Problems (1997).

From 1991 to 1998 he edited the magazine Inside Backgammon with Kent Goulding. He owns a publishing company, the Gammon Press, and lives in Arlington, Massachusetts with his wife Patrice.

Product Details

• Paperback: 418 pages
• Publisher: Two Plus Two Publishing LLC; 1 edition (March 14, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1880685426
• ISBN-13: 978-1880685426
• Product Dimensions: 5.7 x 1.1 x 8.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (53 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #23,090 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #14 in Books > Humor & Entertainment > Puzzles & Games > Gambling
  • #19 in Books > Humor & Entertainment > Puzzles & Games > Poker

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

190 of 205 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Want to rate the book higher...but I can't April 3, 2008

By obediah

Format:Paperback

"Harrington on Cash Games" is a two book series that deals with full ring no limit cash games. Volume I deals with general concepts, preflop play and flop play. Part one of the book begins with basic ideas. Harrington recommends skipping this section if you are already familiar with the fundamentals of no limit hold 'em and I agree. This section of the book does not cover any new ground. Part two of the book deals with broad elements of no limit cash games. The section on stack size is excellent and explains how different stack sizes call for vastly different preflop and postflop strategy. The section on hand reading is good as Harrington goes through some of the thought processes required to break down and analyze a hand. There's a very brief discussion of metagame. This involves exploiting your image and making small costly plays which you expect will reap greater dividends in the future.

Part three is about tight aggressive preflop play. This is where the book starts to lose some of its shine. The book is stuck in what is conventionally referred to as "level 1" thinking, that is "What cards do I hold in my hand?". Different types of opponents require different strategies but the book plods on with many pages of "I have X hand in Y position. What should I do?". As a trivial example an opponent who is a "rock" and rarely tries to steal your blind requires a different strategy from a maniac who tries to steal your blind every time it is folded around. The book does not really address tailoring your play to your opponent preflop.

Part four of the book is about tight aggressive flop play. Once again the book falls short in a number of areas. To take an example, if you raise preflop and are out of position, Harrington recommends mainly checking KK on a rainbow K72 flop (that is you hold top set on a board without many draws). What Harrington omits to mention is how you should play your distribution of hands in this spot as part of a balanced strategy. For example if you are checking top set but continuation betting most of your hands that miss, this begins to create an imbalance that an opponent can exploit. All the examples are about "How do I play my hand" and the author does not address the question of "How do I balance my distribution of hands in this spot".

As in the preflop section, there is very little discussion of opponent type and this is where the book loses the most marks. Discussion of opponent tendencies is extremely limited. A typical example would be "Let's call 10 percent of the time and fold 90 percent, calling only against the loosest and most aggressive players". Given that you are supposed to randomize your actions using your wristwatch and that Harrington doesn't explain how to quantify "loosest and most aggressive players" these guidelines are difficult to follow. There are other quirks and inconsistencies that would be jarring to the astute reader. For example, after calling a bet out of position with 7h6h preflop and then leading out on a TT4 board and getting raised, Harrington recommends calling 10% of the time to "balance our value calls in other situations". To me this statement is rather obscure and although this volume specifically focuses on preflop and flop play, I feel it is an injustice to leave the reader in this predicament without at least a brief discussion of turn and/or river play. Another inconsistency occurs when at one point Harrington recommends raising with middle pair "to represent top pair" whereas throughout the rest of the text, Harrington recommends mainly calling with top pair. If your strategy is to mainly call with top pair, then it is difficult to try to represent top pair by raising. The last section of the book is tight aggressive play with multiple opponents. This is basically Harrington saying "Don't bluff, play more cautiously and people usually have what they're representing".

The book certainly has moments where it shines. The "problems" sections contains detailed and well thought out analysis. The text will provoke a lot of thought about the game even if there are some specific examples which seem unpolished or unfinished. Novice players will gain a lot from the text. Intermediate players should only expect to pick up a few gems every now and again. As a brief note there are parts of the text that apply to other forms of the game for example short handed online no limit. However these types of games have a lot of specific nuances that the book does not address at all (for example light 3 betting and light 4 betting preflop). Overall I still recommend this book as a buy even though the book seems to treat poker as more of "a card game played with people" rather than "a people game played with cards".

28 of 31 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars The quality is a bit uneven here, but still worth the price of admission April 18, 2008

By Poker Pro

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

Dan Harrington's three volumes on no limit tournament strategy became instant classics in the world of poker literature. No one before had ever attempted such a comprehensive discussion of optimal tournament strategy, with unique and extensive hand examples drawn from real-world play. Certainly no one with Dan Harrington's record and reputation had done so. Now, in this planned two-part series, Harrington tries to tackle cash game play in the same style and manner as his tournament books. In doing so, he has written a good, solid book, but not a great one, and certainly not another classic.

Harrington was destined to fall short tackling this subject matter. To begin with, no limit cash game play has been written about extensively, starting with Doyle Brunson in 1979's Super System and carrying on through a plethora of Sklansky's 2+2 books throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Thus, while Harrington was able to discuss several unique and unfamiliar ideas on no limit tournament strategy (including the importance of blind structure, the M number, chip management, inflection points, among many others), there's not much new ground here to cover. In fact, this book only contains two new "Harrington Laws", and both of them are lifted from Sklansky (the gap theory of calling an early position raiser and the unimpressive observation that more people in the pot means that a player needs a stronger hand in order to bet).

So basically there's nothing exactly new here. I agree partially with the review by Don Nguyen below; the book does indeed focus way too much on level 1 thinking (i.e. how strong a hand do I "need" given a particular flop and position). However, to its credit the book does indeed move beyond this level of thinking, at least occasionally, to discuss playing back at loose maniacs with marginal hands or taking advantage of a handful of "prime" bluffing/semi-bluffing opportunities. But mostly, the hand analysis is fairly straight-forward, conservative, and unimaginative in the extreme. Things are even further confused by Harrington's odd insistence on assigning an exact percentage to whether he would raise, call or fold in a certain situation (sometimes on the order of 80% fold, 15% raise, and 5% call). I understand the need to randomize one's play, and could see Harrington making a suggestion such as a player should "mostly fold, but consider raising as a bluff against some weak opponents", but the random percentages thrown out by Harrington seem arbitrary. And who exactly is really going to glance at their watch to determine whether they should perform the 70% call, or the 30% raise? In my mind it's much better to vary your play to your opponent rather than according to a random number generator.

All in all, this is a good, conservative tome on cash game play that's comparable to much of what's out there in the poker literature. However, many readers may remember that Vol. I of Harrington on Hold 'em Tournament Play was also very by-the-numbers and unimaginative, emphasizing a more or less rigid, tight aggressive strategy. I have high hopes that the next installment on cash game play will feature some of the same level of insightful thinking we saw in Vols. II and III of the Harrington on Hold em series.

I'd also recommend The Poker Tournament Formula and Poker Tips that Pay: Expert Strategy Guide for Winning No Limit Texas Hold em for readers that are looking beyond the Harrington series.

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Bridging the gap between tournament and cash game play May 15, 2008

By Michael A. Smith

Format:Paperback

While expectedly falling short of the tournament series which was always going to happen do to cash games being a much more complex topic, these books are perfect for someone wishing to start the transition to cash games from tournaments from a tournament player's perspective.

I for one have been reasonably successful in tournament play for 2-3 years, but have always struggled with cash game play and could never figure out why. This book was very helpful to me in that it explains WHY the two types are different, and the adjustment in perception that has to be made.
If you are a tournament player this will definitely introduce some ideas that you will not be comfortable with and hands that you have been quite happy to get all in with in a tournament are now hands that are very often beat by the turn and beyond. But if you are open minded and try the concepts introduced here, I think you will see an improvement in your results...As with the previous Harrington books, the hand problems are fascinating and provide a lot of insight...
These books will likely not help the experienced and successful cash game player much, but everyone else should learn a lot. Coupling reading thse books along with Professional No Limit Poker Vol 1 will improve your understanding. Well worthwhile