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Phil Gordon's Little Blue Book: More Lessons and Hand Analysis in No Limit Texas Hold'em
In The Real Deal and Phil Gordon's Little Green Book , Phil Gordon -- a world-class player and teacher -- shared the strategies, tips, and expertise he's gleaned during his phenomenally successful career. Now he shows players how to apply those theories to actual hands in order to make smart, confident decisions with every move.
Gordon walks readers through hands that he's encountered in cash games; early, middle, and late tournament play; Sit & Gos; satellites and supersatellites; and the final table of the World Series of Poker , revealing not only what plays he made but also why he made them. He relates what goes through a pro's mind in every situation, whether it's a timely bluff or a questionable call, and helps players calculate their own best moves in the most pressure-fueled of situations. In analyzing specific hands, Gordon also imparts important lessons in key poker skills such as calculating odds, shorthanded play, and discovering tells. And he discusses memorable plays -- the good and the oh-so-bad -- explaining why certain moves were made and, in many cases, how the hands should have been played differently.
Insightful, witty, and filled with real-life pro secrets, Phil Gordon's Little Blue Book is required reading for every player looking to make a profit and raise his game to the next level.
Gordon walks readers through hands that he's encountered in cash games; early, middle, and late tournament play; Sit & Gos; satellites and supersatellites; and the final table of the World Series of Poker , revealing not only what plays he made but also why he made them. He relates what goes through a pro's mind in every situation, whether it's a timely bluff or a questionable call, and helps players calculate their own best moves in the most pressure-fueled of situations. In analyzing specific hands, Gordon also imparts important lessons in key poker skills such as calculating odds, shorthanded play, and discovering tells. And he discusses memorable plays -- the good and the oh-so-bad -- explaining why certain moves were made and, in many cases, how the hands should have been played differently.
Insightful, witty, and filled with real-life pro secrets, Phil Gordon's Little Blue Book is required reading for every player looking to make a profit and raise his game to the next level.
- GenresNonfictionGames
416 pages, Hardcover
First published August 1, 2006
20 people are currently reading
129 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 - 14 of 14 reviews
March 7, 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: 2006
Reviewed: 2023
Game: No Limit Hold‘Em
Book information is relevant at time of review: NO
Content:
The third book in Phil Gordon's series begins to highlight the progress modern poker players thinking when compared to the early 2000's mindset. Of course, the math never changes, but the approach to opponents does. Gordon superficially touches on combinatorics and ranges, but this wasn't prevalent in players' mindsets at the time.
Current players should be thinking in terms of range vs range, how the community cards interact with that range and exploitative strategies. This book doesn't touch on that even at the $2/5, $5/5, $5/10 levels and upwards. It is amazing to the gamer's mindset and how far forward things have come in twenty years.
I cannot recommend this book due to the concepts being outdated. There are small nuggets to glean from the analysis, but so few and far between for the modern poker player to actualize any real value.
Poker player experience level required: BEGINNER
Original publication date: 2006
Reviewed: 2023
Game: No Limit Hold‘Em
Book information is relevant at time of review: NO
Content:
The third book in Phil Gordon's series begins to highlight the progress modern poker players thinking when compared to the early 2000's mindset. Of course, the math never changes, but the approach to opponents does. Gordon superficially touches on combinatorics and ranges, but this wasn't prevalent in players' mindsets at the time.
Current players should be thinking in terms of range vs range, how the community cards interact with that range and exploitative strategies. This book doesn't touch on that even at the $2/5, $5/5, $5/10 levels and upwards. It is amazing to the gamer's mindset and how far forward things have come in twenty years.
I cannot recommend this book due to the concepts being outdated. There are small nuggets to glean from the analysis, but so few and far between for the modern poker player to actualize any real value.
July 1, 2020
Entertainingly written background into the game of Poker. You think Poker's about luck? How do the same 9/10 people make the final table of the World Series year after year?
March 15, 2023
Excellent reading and if you pay attention you may win some money.
June 28, 2016
After reading and enjoying Phil Gordon's Poker: The Real Deal and Phil Gordon's Little Green Book, I debated whether to pick up Phil Gordon's Little Blue Book or wait until I felt I'd mastered the concepts in the Little Green Book better (read: at all). Eventually, I remembered that it's never good when I decide to deliberately derail my own momentum at something, so I ordered the Little Blue Book while I still felt like it, and picked it up and started reading it as soon as I felt like it.
I think this was a good move on my part, because the Little Blue Book doesn't really introduce many new concepts, but instead applies the ones from the last book to a bunch of hand histories roughly grouped by game type. There's probably some people for whom "entire book full of hand histories" sounds like the most boring stuff on earth, but I found that format especially engaging and useful. One thing I like about poker is that it plays like a mystery story, so each hand history and its little box of "Key Analysis" points at the end felt like reading a bunch of little poker parables with clearly identified Morals of the Story at the end. This is how we teach tiny children the basic concepts for living in a society, and it's about the level of simplicity I seem to require for learning about poker. Also, Gordon is an entertaining writer, and his hand history-short stories contain plenty of amusingly drawn characters and absurd jokes, which also makes them more memorable. I'm still going to have to reread sections multiple times if I have any hope of remembering enough specifics to be able to recall them at a table, because due to my line of work, in which the stuff-I-read to stuff-I-need-to-know ratio is wildly skewed, I seem to have trained my brain to retain astonishingly little detail of what I read.
Anyway, the book is split into sections for cash games, early in tournaments, in the middle of tournaments, late in tournaments, final tables (for the optimistic), online play, and even a section on tips for playing satellites. Obviously, it's mostly the cash game section that I'm going to be rereading until I finally absorb something, but the late-in-tournaments and final-table sections are the most thrilling reading, featuring more big-name pros and with the most tricky psychological stuff. My favorite story is the one where Phil bases his decision-making on an episode of Seinfeld for a hand against Phil Hellmuth, and does the opposite of everything he's initially inclined to do. Phil manages to both outplay and out-jackass other Phil, and it's enormously satisfying to read. (It is also never, ever going to have any utility for me as a player.)
This book does not have charts at the end -- those are in the Little Green Book and it is assumed you've got that one already -- but it does have a very nice glossary.
My only concern about this book is the same as the one I've got about the Little Green Book, which is that the game has evolved a lot since it was published. This book was released in 2006, making it a full decade old. I can tell a lot of the terms you hear these days are missing -- it doesn't discuss game theory optimization, which is currently super hip, and it talks about putting opponents on hands rather than on ranges of hands -- but I've got no way of knowing how that translates into concrete differences in the expectations you should have for opponents' behavior and how you should interpret or play back against said behavior. But I think overall the book is heavy enough on "how to think things through" over "in X situation, always make play Y" that it should still be a valuable resource.
I'm still going to run right out and buy the Little Gold Book, even though that one has "Advanced" in the subtitle and I am clearly actually not ready for advanced anything, just because at this point I really like Gordon as an author. While I'm waiting for it to get here, I'm going to go back and review some things.
Originally posted at http://bloodygranuaile.livejournal.co...
I think this was a good move on my part, because the Little Blue Book doesn't really introduce many new concepts, but instead applies the ones from the last book to a bunch of hand histories roughly grouped by game type. There's probably some people for whom "entire book full of hand histories" sounds like the most boring stuff on earth, but I found that format especially engaging and useful. One thing I like about poker is that it plays like a mystery story, so each hand history and its little box of "Key Analysis" points at the end felt like reading a bunch of little poker parables with clearly identified Morals of the Story at the end. This is how we teach tiny children the basic concepts for living in a society, and it's about the level of simplicity I seem to require for learning about poker. Also, Gordon is an entertaining writer, and his hand history-short stories contain plenty of amusingly drawn characters and absurd jokes, which also makes them more memorable. I'm still going to have to reread sections multiple times if I have any hope of remembering enough specifics to be able to recall them at a table, because due to my line of work, in which the stuff-I-read to stuff-I-need-to-know ratio is wildly skewed, I seem to have trained my brain to retain astonishingly little detail of what I read.
Anyway, the book is split into sections for cash games, early in tournaments, in the middle of tournaments, late in tournaments, final tables (for the optimistic), online play, and even a section on tips for playing satellites. Obviously, it's mostly the cash game section that I'm going to be rereading until I finally absorb something, but the late-in-tournaments and final-table sections are the most thrilling reading, featuring more big-name pros and with the most tricky psychological stuff. My favorite story is the one where Phil bases his decision-making on an episode of Seinfeld for a hand against Phil Hellmuth, and does the opposite of everything he's initially inclined to do. Phil manages to both outplay and out-jackass other Phil, and it's enormously satisfying to read. (It is also never, ever going to have any utility for me as a player.)
This book does not have charts at the end -- those are in the Little Green Book and it is assumed you've got that one already -- but it does have a very nice glossary.
My only concern about this book is the same as the one I've got about the Little Green Book, which is that the game has evolved a lot since it was published. This book was released in 2006, making it a full decade old. I can tell a lot of the terms you hear these days are missing -- it doesn't discuss game theory optimization, which is currently super hip, and it talks about putting opponents on hands rather than on ranges of hands -- but I've got no way of knowing how that translates into concrete differences in the expectations you should have for opponents' behavior and how you should interpret or play back against said behavior. But I think overall the book is heavy enough on "how to think things through" over "in X situation, always make play Y" that it should still be a valuable resource.
I'm still going to run right out and buy the Little Gold Book, even though that one has "Advanced" in the subtitle and I am clearly actually not ready for advanced anything, just because at this point I really like Gordon as an author. While I'm waiting for it to get here, I'm going to go back and review some things.
Originally posted at http://bloodygranuaile.livejournal.co...
February 25, 2008
I read this book in preparation for possible World Tour of Poker participation this summer in Vegas! I liked Phil Gordon's first book (Little Green Book of Poker) so well that I followed up with this one. This book continued where that one left off and contains lessons about various situations and problems that come up regularly in the course of tournament poker. My poker style is pretty consistent with his, so reading all three of his books has helped my game a lot. Of course, there's no substitute for the real thing -- see you all at the tables soon. Fun fact: Phil Gordon donates a portion of all proceeds from his poker winnings and writing royalties to the charity, Cancer Research and Prevention Foundation (CRPF), and encourages poker players in the World Series to "Put a Bad Beat on Cancer" by donating 1% of their winnings to the CRPF. So far they've raised over one million dollars!
December 18, 2012
My poker playing has been pretty minimal as of late and the little bit I've played not so productive so I felt it was time for some poker academia. Phil Gordon is a good read - his self-deprecating style and willingness to admit there are many different theories to how to play hands is what I appreciate most. This book is basically a collection of hands he's played over the years - I got a great deal of enjoyment, and hopefully education, out of playing out these hands in my mind myself. Usually I agreed with Phil's assessments, but not always. An easy read and I would recommend to anyone that loves the game of poker.
August 9, 2015
I'd say the book is fun more than anything. I first read the book before i knew anything about poker, but came back to it after i had learned i fear bit. And both times i found it easy and fun to read. Phil makes it easy for you to see each game he explains from the eyes of the player, and teaches you along the way. He also ends each little story of the games with a summary of what happened, what he did right and wrong.
The book is easy to read and is good for beginners to learn about hold 'em poker, but also fun for anyone, just see what it's like to play professional level poker.
The book is easy to read and is good for beginners to learn about hold 'em poker, but also fun for anyone, just see what it's like to play professional level poker.
February 11, 2014
Only read the tournament pages (from 94 to 266, in a 322 pages book). It was very interesting. Nicely contextuLized. Both winning and loosing hands, makes it real. Phil gordon makes us feel the poker with his well written (known and) interesting style. Makes a player evolve.
November 6, 2007
Picks up where his Little green Book leaves off. I'm not too enamored with Phil Gordon. He seems to be somewhat of a jack-ass
June 18, 2009
Like the Little Green Book, this is a must-read for anyone who wants to improve their no-limit hold'em game. I will be reviewing, highlighting, and studying this book for years to come.
June 17, 2009
This poker book was terrific . . . . . the stories of the hands are definately there to give you an idea how a professional thinks and plays the game. That level is what most seek to attain.
August 5, 2011
Not nearly as good as the green book. A lot less poker info and more poker stories.
October 13, 2011
Loved this book and the Little Green Book as well. I like how he walks you through multiple scenarios and gives you his mindset as he decides on a course of action.
June 17, 2007
One of the better poker books I've read.
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews