Recently we were going through old issues of Blind Straddle and noticed a glaring omission in our coverage of current poker literature. We have not posted a book review of the brilliant work on no-limit cash games No Limits:The Fundamentals of No-Limit Holdem by Chris Wallace and Adam Stemple. This was a big surprise to us for two reasons.
1. The book is really good and would be of interest to our readers since nothing like it has been published before.
2. This magazine is owned by Chris Wallace and Adam Stemple, authors of the aforementioned (and magnificent) book.
These two reasons seem like more than enough reasons to present you with a new feature called Review Your Own Book.
Review Your Own Book #1 – One author’s impartial critique of his own work.
First of all, let me thank BlindStraddle, of which I am half owner, for allowing me to review this book. It’s an honor to be able to write a review of such an important piece of poker literature for the finest online poker magazine in the business.
The first thing you notice about No-Limits is the excellent cover design and printing quality. Stemple did a great job with the layout and design of the book, something that an astute reader will notice often throughout the book with the color illustrations used for the hand examples.
After talking to a number of other poker players who have read the book, the only complaint seems be that at 227 pages, there simply isn’t enough of it. The writing is concise, without a single word wasted, so 227 pages is in fact a great deal of information, and the book provides a nice blueprint on how to beat no limit holdem games, but most readers enjoy the book so much that they yearn for more, and requests for a second volume are frequent.
Chapter 1 starts with a very simple and easy to use preflop system based on millions of hands from expert players in online games, simple game theory equations, and the authors’ own experience. Because it does not offer starting hand charts to memorize, the simple system requires very little work from the player to build a solid foundation for preflop play. This is complimented well by the information provided in Chapter 2 on how different types of hands play in different preflop situations.
Chapter 3 – Knowing Your Opponents, makes excellent use of hand examples to show how much you can learn about an opponent from a single hand and how that knowledge can add up to putting a player into one of the preflop categories listed at the end of the chapter. Good stuff, and important knowledge to have if you are going to use the knowledge gained in future chapters.
I could go through each chapter, discussing how well written they are and how the knowledge builds throughout the book, but the internet only has so much space and I don’t want to use all of it praising my own book, so we’ll skip right to an overall view of the book.
The goal of this book is not to provide a system for playing no-limit, but to help the reader understand how to make their own decisions in the moment. By the end of the book the reader should have a good understanding of how the game works and how to spot and take advantage of weakness in an opponent. This book will make an average player who is willing to spend some time on his game into a dangerous foe for even the most experienced grinders.
I can find only two things to criticize about the book. It will make games much tougher if a significant number of players read it, and a few more hand examples might be useful, though there are at least five examples in most chapters.
Conclusion - Five Stars! Buy it now!
