Win Your Way Into Big Money Holdem Tournaments

How to Beat Casino and Online Satellite Poker Tournaments

Brad Daugherty and Tom McEvoy Reviewed by Stallion on Aug. 16, 2005. Overview Win Your Way Into Big Money Hold' Em Tournaments focuses on the variety of satellite and super-satellite options available to poker players. These tournaments represent opportunities for people to play their way into big tournaments for a relatively small investment. McEvoy and Daugherty begin their book by describing the different sorts of satellites that one can enter. Although this section only occupies about the first 55 pages of the book, it is an incredible drag. The rest of the book is stage-by-stage advice for how to play the different types of satellites. Poker Advice The beginning of the book contains very little poker advice, as the authors instead waste time detailing the different types of satellites held by individual websites and on-land casinos. If you want to know what sort of satellites holds, you can find out for free by going to their website, rather than paying McEvoy and Daugherty to do it for you. Much of the actual no-limit hold'em advice here is recycled from McEvoy and Daugherty's book No Limit Texas Hold'em, some of it word-for-word. While that book was written for the beginning poker player, this book is supposedly written for the player ready to win his way into the Main Event of the WSOP. That makes the fairly basic advice considerably less valuable than it was in No Limit Texas Hold'em. Even though some unknown players have won the WSOP, they still played at a level far above that of the average poker player. The advice for limit satellites is of a similar caliber. There does happen to be some decent advice for re-buy tournaments, concerning when you should re-buy and when you should just walk away. Presentation The presentation of this book is hurt by the reality that the authors don't really have enough to write about to construct a 300-page book on satellites. The fact that "Moneymaker parlayed $39 into $2.5 million in 2003" is referenced time after time, sometimes for no apparent reason. Similarly, the authors keep going back to the idea that in most cases, they think a player should only attempt to win his way in to a tournament through a single-table satellite two or three times. This manages to make the book drag while also insulting the reader's intelligence.