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Phil Gordon's Little Gold Book: Advanced Lessons for Mastering Poker 2.0
Since reigning poker expert Phil Gordon’s Little Green Book illuminated the strategies and philosophies necessary to win at No Limit Texas Hold’em, poker has changed quickly and dramatically. Today, Pot Limit Omaha is the game of choice at nosebleed stakes. The players are aggressive, the games are volatile, the decisions are tough, and the pressure is relentless. This is Poker 2.0. In his Little Gold Book, Phil Gordon reexamines the game from the ground up. The key to competing with today’s top players is finding the post-flop edge, but to really understand this new playing style, you need to get comfortable with the underlying math. Don’t be intimidated. Gordon makes this challenging material as approachable and simple as possible. Beginning with the foundations of Poker 2.0, he unpacks the modern poker player’s tool kit, rigorously examines the new lines of play in No Limit Hold’em, dissects the fast and furious strategies of Pot Limit Omaha, and explores the winning poker mind-set that will take your game to an entirely different level. The golden age of poker is upon us. Phil Gordon’s Little Gold Book will shorten your learning curve, and if you’re willing to put in the time and the work, big bankrolls await.
- GenresNonfiction
400 pages, Kindle Edition
First published October 11, 2011
30 people are currently reading
119 people want to read
About the author
Phil Gordon
33 books8 followersPhilip Stewart Gordon is an American professional poker player, commentator and author.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
May 3, 2023
I’m reviewing my poker library after re-reading each of the books and formatting them for ease of reference.
Poker player experience level required: BEGINNER
Original publication date: 2011
Reviewed: 2023
Game: No Limit Hold‘Em / PLO
Book information is relevant at time of review: LITTLE
Content:
Gordon's Final Thoughts at the end of the book summarize the book as a whole in today's poker world, "if you're reading this book in 2013 or beyond, it wouldn't surprise me in the least if the strategies I've espoused here have been completely discredited and won't beat a $2-$4 game."
There are a few timeless aspects of play that will always be fundamental, and a few of those concepts and mathematics are addressed. Although the area that also lacks is making the mental jump between concepts that are presented and the method a player can actualize those concepts.
The shining point of the book is with Annette Obrestad, who does a better job explaining the why of a play than the author does throughout his whole book. That's unfortunate.
Still worth a read, but the majority is out of date, including the online play discussions.
Poker player experience level required: BEGINNER
Original publication date: 2011
Reviewed: 2023
Game: No Limit Hold‘Em / PLO
Book information is relevant at time of review: LITTLE
Content:
Gordon's Final Thoughts at the end of the book summarize the book as a whole in today's poker world, "if you're reading this book in 2013 or beyond, it wouldn't surprise me in the least if the strategies I've espoused here have been completely discredited and won't beat a $2-$4 game."
There are a few timeless aspects of play that will always be fundamental, and a few of those concepts and mathematics are addressed. Although the area that also lacks is making the mental jump between concepts that are presented and the method a player can actualize those concepts.
The shining point of the book is with Annette Obrestad, who does a better job explaining the why of a play than the author does throughout his whole book. That's unfortunate.
Still worth a read, but the majority is out of date, including the online play discussions.
August 9, 2016
So, despite my full knowledge that I am nowhere near ready for it, I went and read Phil Gordon's Little Gold Book: Advanced Lessons for Mastering Poker 2.0. Phil Gordon had promised me on Twitter that it would break my heart, but probably only because there is no emoji for breaking your brain.
Sometime, somewhere, back in the day—like, WAY back in the day—I actually quite liked math. Sometime before it got all abstract and it was fun actually seeing how things went together. Sometime when I was young enough that my teachers actually understood the math they were teaching me, before I hit the age where anyone who actually understood this stuff could get a higher-paying job than being a schoolteacher, and I started to not only lose interest but get sour about it, figuring a) that if my teachers didn’t need to know this stuff in order to be math teachers then I certainly couldn’t need it for anything, and b) if I can’t rely on my teachers to be able to help me with stuff I have questions about then fuck all of you I’m going to read trashy vampire novels in the corner. (You get no points for correctly guessing around what age this phase was. It was exactly what it sounds like.)
So I was a little surprised to find that a lot of the math in this book was actually enormously fun to read about. And it all stuck to involving real numbers, so I could mostly follow it! Of course, it’s easy enough to do that since Phil does all the math for you; the reader just has to see how it fits together, not do the calculations themselves. But I found myself wanting to do the calculations myself even though I am dreadfully out of practice on any math more complex than calculating a restaurant tip (I have just enough pointless pride not to use a tip calculator). Clearly I need a workbook of some sort, especially since there is always a considerable gap between when I read about a concept and when I can start recognizing it in live play, even the easy stuff. As in, I think I am just now starting to see results from the Little Green Book, and I have gone back and reread some sections of that several times, in addition to now reading two more Phil books and an Ed Miller book on top of it.
Weirdly, one of my favorite things about this book is that there are large chunks of it that I do not really need. For example, nearly a third of the book is dedicated to PLO, and I have not ever played PLO and probably won’t anytime soon, so it is good that I read it so I can understand other people a little bit more when they’re talking about PLO, but I don’t have to worry about going back and studying that part. Some of the Hold’em advice is geared toward online play, which is currently illegal in Massachusetts, but again, it’s good to know what all the HUD stats and such mean so that I can understand what other people are talking about better. This all leaves me with a much more manageable page count of things I actually need to go back and study.
I do want to master the math because I think it would be great if I could learn to like math again. I think a lot of the advice on specific plays will eventually become more useful if (hopefully, when) I “graduate” from the $0.25/$0.50 game, which is explicitly introductory, but in the meantime I certainly have plenty of work I can do to get a better grasp of exactly what is going on in that game, in terms of learning the math and hand reading and remembering odds so I don’t have to try to do actual calculations at the table (because that takes forever and also I’m bad at it) and sometimes even keeping track of how much money is in the pot besides “small pile of chips,” “medium pile of chips” or “big pile of chips.” And there absolutely are more experienced players than myself in the $0.25/$0.50 game that I will have to do a lot more work to figure out how to beat, because it’s really not hard to have more poker experience than me.
Another fun thing about this book is that we get some guest lectures from other pros, so we get a look at the learning process itself as Phil gets private lessons from “Internet Whiz Kids” like Annette Obrestad and Dan Cates. Multiple perspectives are always a plus, even though as far as strategy stuff I’ve read so far goes, I still like Phil as teacher better than anyone else. His style is very concise and approachable and, above all, friendly, which is tough because poker writing involves a lot of “lol these people are bad” and I’m like “but I’m bad too!” This book has fewer jokes than the Little Blue Book (the Blue Book was positively silly in places), but it’s still light in tone and the hand histories contain a large enough proportion of hands that Phil misplays or loses to make the reader feel like it’s OK to fuck up sometimes; see, poker is hard. And honestly, walking through mistakes is at least as instructive as walking through doing things perfectly. That said, this is still a book full of technical stuff for people who are actively working to develop a skill; it’s not something to be read for fun, even if you generally find poker interesting and possibly even if you like math more than I do. I was markedly in over my head for a lot of it, and I am highly motivated to learn this stuff as rapidly as I can because I am a deeply money-conscious person and cannot afford to be bad at poker for very long.
The book ends with a warning that if it’s later than 2013, it’s probably outdated already. Since it is, tragically, 2016, I will assume that at least parts of it are. If I ever get to a point where that matters, I am sure I’ll find something else to catch me up, but for now, I’ve got plenty of homework.
Originally posted at http://bloodygranuaile.livejournal.co....
Sometime, somewhere, back in the day—like, WAY back in the day—I actually quite liked math. Sometime before it got all abstract and it was fun actually seeing how things went together. Sometime when I was young enough that my teachers actually understood the math they were teaching me, before I hit the age where anyone who actually understood this stuff could get a higher-paying job than being a schoolteacher, and I started to not only lose interest but get sour about it, figuring a) that if my teachers didn’t need to know this stuff in order to be math teachers then I certainly couldn’t need it for anything, and b) if I can’t rely on my teachers to be able to help me with stuff I have questions about then fuck all of you I’m going to read trashy vampire novels in the corner. (You get no points for correctly guessing around what age this phase was. It was exactly what it sounds like.)
So I was a little surprised to find that a lot of the math in this book was actually enormously fun to read about. And it all stuck to involving real numbers, so I could mostly follow it! Of course, it’s easy enough to do that since Phil does all the math for you; the reader just has to see how it fits together, not do the calculations themselves. But I found myself wanting to do the calculations myself even though I am dreadfully out of practice on any math more complex than calculating a restaurant tip (I have just enough pointless pride not to use a tip calculator). Clearly I need a workbook of some sort, especially since there is always a considerable gap between when I read about a concept and when I can start recognizing it in live play, even the easy stuff. As in, I think I am just now starting to see results from the Little Green Book, and I have gone back and reread some sections of that several times, in addition to now reading two more Phil books and an Ed Miller book on top of it.
Weirdly, one of my favorite things about this book is that there are large chunks of it that I do not really need. For example, nearly a third of the book is dedicated to PLO, and I have not ever played PLO and probably won’t anytime soon, so it is good that I read it so I can understand other people a little bit more when they’re talking about PLO, but I don’t have to worry about going back and studying that part. Some of the Hold’em advice is geared toward online play, which is currently illegal in Massachusetts, but again, it’s good to know what all the HUD stats and such mean so that I can understand what other people are talking about better. This all leaves me with a much more manageable page count of things I actually need to go back and study.
I do want to master the math because I think it would be great if I could learn to like math again. I think a lot of the advice on specific plays will eventually become more useful if (hopefully, when) I “graduate” from the $0.25/$0.50 game, which is explicitly introductory, but in the meantime I certainly have plenty of work I can do to get a better grasp of exactly what is going on in that game, in terms of learning the math and hand reading and remembering odds so I don’t have to try to do actual calculations at the table (because that takes forever and also I’m bad at it) and sometimes even keeping track of how much money is in the pot besides “small pile of chips,” “medium pile of chips” or “big pile of chips.” And there absolutely are more experienced players than myself in the $0.25/$0.50 game that I will have to do a lot more work to figure out how to beat, because it’s really not hard to have more poker experience than me.
Another fun thing about this book is that we get some guest lectures from other pros, so we get a look at the learning process itself as Phil gets private lessons from “Internet Whiz Kids” like Annette Obrestad and Dan Cates. Multiple perspectives are always a plus, even though as far as strategy stuff I’ve read so far goes, I still like Phil as teacher better than anyone else. His style is very concise and approachable and, above all, friendly, which is tough because poker writing involves a lot of “lol these people are bad” and I’m like “but I’m bad too!” This book has fewer jokes than the Little Blue Book (the Blue Book was positively silly in places), but it’s still light in tone and the hand histories contain a large enough proportion of hands that Phil misplays or loses to make the reader feel like it’s OK to fuck up sometimes; see, poker is hard. And honestly, walking through mistakes is at least as instructive as walking through doing things perfectly. That said, this is still a book full of technical stuff for people who are actively working to develop a skill; it’s not something to be read for fun, even if you generally find poker interesting and possibly even if you like math more than I do. I was markedly in over my head for a lot of it, and I am highly motivated to learn this stuff as rapidly as I can because I am a deeply money-conscious person and cannot afford to be bad at poker for very long.
The book ends with a warning that if it’s later than 2013, it’s probably outdated already. Since it is, tragically, 2016, I will assume that at least parts of it are. If I ever get to a point where that matters, I am sure I’ll find something else to catch me up, but for now, I’ve got plenty of homework.
Originally posted at http://bloodygranuaile.livejournal.co....
October 7, 2017
Worth the price of admission for Galfond's PLO section alone
April 13, 2025
One of the best poker book to go from amateur to good poker player (there's more asvance book tho). It would need a refresh however cause poker has evolve fast in the last years.
February 6, 2017
Very simple, but detailed concepts spanning various scenarios that you may encounter in the game of poker. Nice quick read.
October 11, 2013
Not memorable, but then again, I haven't played cards in a year
December 22, 2015
Pretty good poker book. I mostly liked the range vs range concept
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews