Championship No-Limit and Pot-Limit Hold'em

T.J. Cloutier and Tom McEvoy

Advice 79 Presentation 74 Strengths: Enjoyable anecdotes at the end. Weaknesses: Repetitive and unorganized. Year: 1997 Page Count: 304

Reviewed by TwoGun on Aug. 2, 2005.

Overview

Championship No-Limit and Pot-Limit Hold'em is a decent book that most will find helpful. Since the book is rather old, it focuses more on pot-limit hold'em than no-limit hold'em. The book has sections for both pot-limit ring games and tournaments. While it covers no-limit hold'em tournaments, it does not have a section specifically about no-limit cash games.

While the book is easy to read, its organization is somewhat lacking. The book sometimes fails to explain the bigger-picture strategic concepts to the reader. Nevertheless, the advice of the book is fairly useful for beginner players.

Poker Advice

While the book is lengthy, the actual amount of advice is fairly limited. The book often rambles and repeats the same advice over and over again. Most tips in the book are aimed at the beginner, and there is not much help in the book for intermediate and advanced players.

Furthermore, sometimes the advice is misleading. A lot of the practice hands leave out important information, such as blind size and stack size. Because of this, a lot of the practice hands preach a far too conservative style of play.

Presentation

The style of writing is very simple, which makes the book easy to read and understand. However, the book’s lack of organization makes it difficult for a reader to truly swallow a lot of the big picture concepts.

Cloutier also includes a lot of anecdotes from the poker world and his days as a traveling gambler. While they are enjoyable to read, he sometimes rambles on too much about them during the strategy portions of the book.

Availability

Championship No-Limit and Pot-Limit Hold'em can be purchased at Amazon