Winning at Internet Poker for Dummies

Mark Harlan and Chris Derossi Reviewed by Stallion on Sep. 10, 2005. Overview As you might expect, Winning at Internet Poker for Dummies is not written for the high-level poker player. However, even this title is a bit misleading. There is very little information that can help the reader win at internet poker. Instead, the book mainly provides basic instruction on how to set up and fund an online account. Poker Advice The poker advice here is sparse, to say the least. Much of the "advice" is limited to encouraging newbies to be very conservative as they select the limits to begin playing at. Although Harlan and Derossi do suggest beginning with play-money tables, they do a good job of cautioning that playing these tables can lead to the development of bad habits. The end of the book contains some basic strategy for single-table tournaments. To be fair, the authors make it clear in the introduction that this is not a full-scale poker strategy book. Still, one wonders why this book needed to be printed in the first place. Presentation The book is organized fairly well, with an extensive table of contents. The authors encourage the reader to jump around from chapter to chapter, and this is easily done. Of course, the Winning at Internet Poker title is deceptive, given the information contained in the book. You could easily picture a girlfriend or mother buying this as a gift for a poker player, thinking that it would help improve his game. Of course, this is not the case, since this book contains almost nothing of value to anyone who knows how to use internet poker software.