Playing in a poker tournament for a first time can be intimidating. Since the vast majority of the participants of nearly any tournament are experienced players, tournament staff generally assume that the players know what's going on. If that's not the case, the rules, procedures, and etiquette can be bewildering. There is a definite need for a book that helps first-time players understand what's happening in tournament poker, and David Apostolico's The Pocket Idiot's Guide to Tournament Poker aims to fill this gap.
My first complaint with the book is trivial, and not at all the author's fault. The title of the books in this series should be The Idiot's Pocket Guide to Whatever. I don't know what a "pocket idiot" is, and I'm pretty sure I don't want to. This doesn't affect the quality of the material in the book, but in my mind this makes me suspect the series' editorial standards.
The book is obviously aimed at poker tournament novices. It begins with a chapter titled, "What Is a Poker Tournament?", before explaining the basics of No-Limit Hold'em and the basic flow of a poker tournament. Having the introductory material is entirely appropriate here, although given the title, I was a little chagrined to learn that only no-limit Hold'em is covered. That's a reasonable editorial choice, as it's reflects the primary interest of the book's audience, but the title promises coverage of a breadth of information on which the book makes no attempt to deliver.
The book moves on to discuss different tournament types, including those with rebuys, add-ons, satellites, shoot-outs, bounties, and online tournaments. All of this is entirely appropriate, and Apostolico does a good job of covering most all the bases here.
The book then provides several chapters on poker strategy before discussing poker etiquette. There's no way to do any semblance of justice to poker strategy in a book of this size, and what is in here resembles the sort of vague platitudes about poker that have been floating around cardrooms for decades. Moreover, even though all of these represent the "conventional wisdom" in some form or fashion, I believe that many of them are actually false, or at the very least misleading. By way of contrast, the etiquette chapter is absolutely excellent, probably the best in the book. This is information that should be truly useful to a novice player, and information that they may not learn from other sources.
My biggest criticism with the book is the general imprecision in the language used by the author. In a great many places he makes a statement that is often true, but for which there are significant exceptions. So, most of the time the situations faced by readers of this book will be what they expect, but sometimes they will not be, and I expect these situations may be especially confusing because the literal text of this book states that they won't happen. Making the extra effort to cover the rare cases wouldn't have taken that much additional effort and may have served to alleviate considerable confusion.
Additionally, in my opinion the strategy chapters are essentially useless, even for a novice player. If the publishers wanted to make the book short, they could have just covered the rules and mechanics of the tournaments themselves. There's a lot of stuff that the book doesn't cover that might be confusing to the novice, and could be included to replace the strategy sections. Some of these topics include chip racing, what happens when players get knocked out in the blinds, and side pots, and many other useful procedural discussions could have been mentioned as well.
An explanation of the roles played by each casino employee could have been provided. The etiquette chapter should have mentioned that players moving from one table to another must keep all of their chips in plain sight during the move. A chapter discussing the Tournament Director's Associations and the specific TDA rules would have been good. Limit as well as no-limit mechanics could have been discussed. I believe the readers would have been better served by replacing the strategy chapters with this additional information, then the bibliography could have been expanded to provide a reasonable set of recommendations for where players could now turn for strategy information.
If someone who had never played in a no-limit hold'em tournament before wanted to know how to play, it would certainly be less effort on my part to toss them this book and tell them to largely ignore the strategy parts than it would be to explain all the mechanics to them myself. For a complete tournament poker novice, I believe that they would, indeed, be better prepared for playing in a poker tournament having read this book. Still, I don't think that group is as well served by The Pocket Idiot's Guide to Tournament Poker as I might have hoped. It fills a niche, but I believe it could have done so better.
The Pocket Idiot's Guide to Tournament Poker provides a gentle, easy to digest introduction for complete novices to the world of poker tournaments. However, I don't think this book is nearly as useful as it could have been. I believe the strategy information is basically useless, and there's a lot on the procedures and mechanics that could have been included but wasn't. I also was bothered by the imprecision in the language used by the author. This book will help the true novice, but not as much as I might have hoped.
Note: I received a review copy of this book from the publisher. I have no other interest, financial or otherwise, in the success of this book.
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