Televised Hold'em tournaments has spurred a great deal of new interest in the game of poker. As a consequence, books aimed toward beginning poker players have sprouted up like weeds. Priced at five dollars, Learn how to Win at Texas Hold'em Poker by Mark Strahan takes a simple approach, attempting to explain the basics of Hold'em in 60 pages.
As is appropriate for an introductory book, Strahan begins by discussing the basics of poker, hand rankings, betting, and the structure of the game. In my opinion many beginning books underestimate just how confusing the mechanics of casino poker can be to a complete novice. I believe that anyone who needs to be told that a flush beats a straight probably also needs to be told how to buy in for the to a cash game or tournament as well. Information of the former sort is usually present in introductory poker books, the latter rarely is. This is the case in Strahan's book as well.
The introduction material runs about 17 pages in length. The balance of the book covers Hold'em strategy. Advice on starting hands, play on later streets, bluffing, and information on calculating odds is provided. Most of this goes by pretty quickly, as one might expect from a book in a small form factor with only 60 pages.
There are many problems with Strahan's book, but there are two huge problems that stand out. The first is that it riddled with typographical errors, especially in the first half of the book. In fact, I would expect that the ratio of the number of errors to the number of words is higher in this book than in any other poker book I've ever read, and probably by a large margin. The number of errors makes most of the examples of play essentially unreadable. I can only imagine the tremendous confusion this is likely to cause novice players learning about poker for the first time.
The second problem is the advice isn't consistent, and most of the advice isn't all that good. In the introduction the author states that the advice in this book is geared mostly toward no-limit Hold'em tournaments. Actually, it looks to me like most of the examples are geared more toward playing limit Hold'em. Either way, the advice is atrocious. In my opinion, advising beginning players to play hands like 7-5, a suited Q-2, or a suited 5-3 even in late position in an unraised pot is a recipe for ruin.
Overall, the book does not have a consistent feel, which is inexcusable since it's not as long as many chapters in other books. The author switches context quickly and without transition in such a way that it's a struggle for the reader to figure out what Strahan is talking about.
Another example of where the author's advice goes awry is when he provides bet sizing advice in no-limit Hold'em without giving any regard to stack sizes. Blanket advice to always raise one third of one's stack with jacks or tens shows a fundamental misunderstanding about big bet poker. Admittedly, some of the advice in the book isn't bad. For example, most, but not all, of what Strahan has to say about bluffing I agree with. Between the bad advice, overall lack of coherence, and the high number of typographical errors Learn How to Win at Texas Hold'em Poker for 5 Bucks! is almost unreadable, and this doesn't even consider the tiny type face used that will strain the eyes of anyone with less than perfect vision.
Sure, this book costs only $5 (and even costs the same in Canada), but several books exist that provide much more and better information that aren't that much more expensive. People looking for a brief, inexpensive introduction to poker would be far better off reading Fundamentals of Poker by Mason Malmuth and Lynne Loomis, although these two books don't completely overlap in terms of what they cover. Strahan's book just isn't any good. Don't buy it.
Learn How to Win at Texas Hold'em Poker for 5 Bucks! is short and relatively inexpensive, but that's about everything good that I can find to say about it. The flow of the book is tough to follow, it's jam packed with aggravating typographical errors, the advice it gives is often quite poor, and it fails to address many of the issues that I believe are likely to concern novice poker players. Even if it were free I wouldn't recommend this book to any audience.
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