Customer Reviews

No Limit: The Texas Hold'Em Guide to Winning in Business

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Hundreds of people play 'no limit' poker, but few realize its strategies can be used to get ahead in business and life. NO LIMIT explores connections between poker and business, showing how Texas Hold 'em, the most popular version of the game, holds many keys to business success. Any game players who know Texas Hold 'em well and are interested in business concepts, as well as business libraries, will find here a fine opportunity for success and strategic planning.

Once you pick up No Limit and start turning the pages, it will not be easy to put down. This book is extremely easy to read and more importantly, apply. Krause and Carter's clever use of acronyms and overall structure make the content very easy to pick up and maintain. After reading this book, I've been able to increase my level of performance at work through applying the No Limit strategies.

Poker, business, and life require a strategic decision making approach that positions you for the best possible chance for success. This book will help you enhance, transport and modify your Friday night poker methodology into your professional & personal relationships creating a competitive advantage over your competitors.

Everyone wants to be a winner but not all possess and nurture the skills necessary to win. This book is not about a one time, quick fix for success or the bluff that gets you the promotion or project you've had your eye on. It is about applying the skills addressed by Donald Krause and Jeff Carter to your everyday life in order to know yourself, know and understand the players in the game you play and increase your odds. It is about striving to be the winner, cultivating the attributes of greatness from within, and learning from failure-yours and those of others- to not just win the big pot but all those little ones that make us get up everyday and pursue our aspirations.

This book is not for the faint of heart. No Limit puts it out there for the reader. Millions will read this but few will have the will to act and make an impact on their lives.

The concepts described in No Limit are critical to success when the stakes are high. This is about the realities of business in today's hypercompetitive environment. .

Donald Krause and Jeff Carter combine to provide a unique and powerful set of tools that can dramatically increase one's ability to influence and lead. They seem to combine game theory, psychoanalysis and various negotiation models into an innovative analogous format that has yet to be documented.

From the back cover:

"If you ever wondered how some people are able to take risk and seem to win more than others, this is the book for you. Playing Hold'Em teaches skills that balance intellect with emotion, resulting in decision making competence that would otherwise take many years to develop" -- Ray Garcia, Strategy Coach, Alterwork LLC

I read the "The Art of War for Executives" by Donald Krause many years ago and wondered at the time how I could practice what I read and try out some of the strategies. It was an entertaining read and helped me reflect on the competitive business environment.

Mr. Krause teamed up with Jeff Carter in "No Limit" to help provide an understanding of how Poker, Texas Hold'Em, can be used to understand strategic decision making as an essential skill required to succeed in business. This could be generalized to playing strategy games of all sorts as a practice in exercising judgment, smarts, and control under specific rules of the game.

The Art of Was was about applying strategy at the macro level for the entire army or company within a market. No Limit gets at the individuals ability to think strategically within the constraints of the cards they are dealt, their own inner struggles with risk and expectations, when to halt and when to stay in the game, how to read the players and the table, and how to play the odds. This is not something that one can learn easily in business school or the work place. No Limit affords the reader insights into how to use the game of Poker to learn about their own strengths and weakness and how to work within those characteristics to achieve the goal of winning.

The book is equally interesting for the avid Poker player as it is for the readers of business oriented books. The strategies that can be practiced within Poker can be observed watching others play the game as well. Poker has an enormous following with regular Poker tournaments showing on Cable and Satellite TV.

Organizations like Global Poker Strategic Thinking Society (GPSTS) have formed to create a forum for using Poker to enhance business skills. This is a critically important missing aspect of most business school programs and unfortunately the workplace may not be conducive to experimenting with individual strategies. This leaves Poker as the safe haven to learn the strategies that can be put into use in a business setting.

The No Limit book will provide a way of thinking about the process of using strategy within the game but as in any learning activity you'll need to put it into practice to really have the impact. Fortunately it is fairly easy to get a Poker game going and Texas Hold'Em is a fast and easy form of Poker to pick up.

The books format is easy to read and employs a summary format for important things to remember. It has some background on Poker Texas Hold'Em, just enough for those unfamiliar with the game to appreciate its appeal. For those who are already Poker player the strategies you can use immediately and translate them into the workplace dynamics.

I personally know one of the authors, Jeff Carter, and I am quoted on the back cover so admittedly I'm biased. I can say Jeff is not only an avid Poker Texas Hold'Em player but an insightful business executive. He has an uncanny ability to read the table an figure out the best move to make given the cards.

You will not only enjoy this book but you will find yourself referring to it as you put into practice the many strategies you'll learn.

Ray Garcia

This is the first book that I read that accurately examines the practical applications of the Poker Paradigm. Finally a Handbook or guide,to stratigic personal interactions using Poker "philosophy". Anybody looking to refine their tactics of social influence,would do well by reading this book. An analytical examination of the Poker Paradigm for business or competative interpersonal relations. This book also confirms My belief-thru costly experiance-that Poker works as a stratigic paradigm,better, than it plays as a game.

As a poker player and a businessman I have for years realized the close correlation between the skills needed to succeed in both arenas. Krause and Carter do an outstanding and insightful job of making these correlations quite clear for the reader and their use of keywords to assist the reader in digesting and recalling these skills is very useful.

This book touches on a number of topics that are considered by some to be taboo in business today. I would like to thank them for being so open and blunt about these topics. Even if one's character does not allow them to use all of these tactics in pursuing their successes at least they should be informed enough to recognize when some of the more questionable tactics are being employed against them.

Success in business and poker require an understanding of the game, an ability to react quickly to uncertain situations, and be prepared to take calculated risks knowing when the reward justifies such risk taking. The authors do an outstanding job at pointing out to the reader how to recognize these opportunities, determine the risk/reward payoff, and identify which tactics and strategies can be employed to achieve optimum results.

Krause and Carter have successfully defined the game in business today and given readers the foundation for success. All that is needed is the strength of heart to understand yourself, your opponents, and which tactic suits you for the attainment of your goals. This book is not about a quick fix or even a big one time score it is about making the changes that can positively impact you over the long haul. Just like poker, success is not measured by your performance on a particular night or during a specific tournament, it is measured by your long running results from the time you began playing the game until you ultimately stop.

Read this book, apply what suits your own character and player type, then go out there and get in the game with confidence in knowing that you are equipped with the tools of success!!

It was a good read. Very clever of you guys to center it around the national phenomenon of poker playing. I happen to be the worst poker player ever to attempt the game - I used to be pretty good at bridge tho' - but my son plays, my nephews play, my brother-in-law plays, etc. Even in JAX there are several thriving poker rooms with more opening all the time. I can see why college professors would refer to and use the book since a large portion of their audience probably plays poker.

The book was easy to read and kept my attention. I like the use of acronyms to help with retention. I guess that's why we use them so much in our field. I also enjoyed the off-hand buried references from the OZ books. I guess the chapters on The Land of Oz and Getting to Know You were two of my favorites - probably because I do a lot of that intuitively. I think I am a mutated Wizard. I truly lack the "keen desire to dominate and wield power" (more about that later), but a lot of the rest of it sounds like me.

I am not sure if these next paragraphs have more to do with my X chromosome, my ENFP Myers-Briggs, or my somewhat limited spiritual gifts of mercy, service and encouragement; but this wouldn't be an honest and complete review without this part.

I am not personally motivated by winning. I think this is probably an X chromosome thing, but please never quote me by name on that - I'll get drummed out of my gender. What motivates me is service and gratitude. What keeps me going is believing that I have made a difference. If someone actually thanks me - that's the gravy. That's one reason why I loved working for you so much - you were always so good about thanking. The reason I blame it on the X is that my son, who is also ENFP, cares deeply about winning. He is in law school now, and even though he has a highly defined sense of justice, etc., at the core of it he just wants to WIN. He loves to compete in his areas of highest confidence, like moot court and trial team competitions. I really believe that a high percentage of women in the work force are motivated more like me than they are by WINNING. They probably would never admit it though. The ones who try hard to compete and make winning central tend to be the least happy and the most bitter. I think we take losing more personally than the Y crowd. We internalize it (I'm a bad person) and it makes us miserable. I think the book was important for me to read because, even though I'm not energized by the winning thing, I need to understand the people around me. I have always worked and I will be working for some time still. I need to understand other people's motivation and behavior in order to survive.

On the ENFP front, I am not big on planning and life-time commitments (the P) and I lead with my gut A LOT (the F). Parts of the book made me tired and a little depressed because they depend on characteristics I don't possess. I guess I could do it (like anything else) if I were willing to pay the price, but I'm not. The good news is that the book affirms that my highly developed intuition (the N) will probably keep me in the game even if I don't win much which I don't really care about anyway. I learned some things I can keep though - things where the value of the hand comes up positive for me - and I'm going to work on those.

On the "mercy and encouragement" side, the parts about manipulation, subterfuge, intentional disruption - that all creeps me out. Setting somebody up to fail is not something I would consciously do, even though I probably have done subconsciously. My least favorite parts were the ones about exploiting character flaws and the D-I-S-C-A-R-D. That said, I am a realist and I do believe in the doctrine of Total Depravity, so I have rather low expectations of the human race (including me). It is important for me to be reminded that there are people out there who would do me harm in order to advance and it's good to study exactly how they might do it. I do like to be safe and understanding where the threats are and what I need to do to parry the blows is great information.

Summary: Good read - clever, smart, entertaining, thorough. Imparts a lot of information in relatively few pages. Is designed for take-away action. I recommend it for everyone who has to interact with other humans (grin). Even if you wouldn't plan to use the offensive strategies and tactics, the defensive possibilities are invaluable. I plan to order it for my son. He grew up in an X household and I think it will feed his Y soul.