For newcomers to the Hold'Em scene it is pretty bewildering trying to find a place to start. There are so many books and so many "expert" voices competing for attention that it is understandably difficult to choose a starting point. For those readers I say this: in a world seemingly full to bursting with books on poker David Sklansky's Hold'Em Poker is like no other. It is the survival knife of books on Hold'Em: bare, tough, serious and no bull. It ain't fancy but if you absorb the concepts in this book it will save your butt at the poker table!

The heart of Sklansky's approach to Hold'Em is "Hand Groups" based on the pocket cards the player draws at the beginning of every round of Hold'Em. He gathers these two card combinations into "ranks" based on their strength and betting value. Did you draw AA? Needless to say that's in Group One, the strongest group, along with KK, QQ, JJ, and AKs (suited). How about AT? That's a lot lower in the grouping than you might think, Group Six, and as Sklansky points out it should be approached with caution.

"Ok" you're thinking, big deal, anybody can group cards together. Ah, but can they then go on to tell you when to Check, Call, Raise, Re-Raise or Fold based on those groups? Sklansky can and does. In doing so he gives the player a very strong backbone on which he then proceeds to build a solid and methodical Hold'Em strategy that encompasses pretty much everything: the high power of table position, the significance of the number of opponents faced, the dangers of "second best" hands, strategies such as slow-playing and "semi-bluffing", the getting and giving of "free cards", and the all-important skill of roughing out the odds and probabilities faced at the various points in the game. The list goes on but I'm sure you get the idea.

In effect the Sklansky "groups" give him, and the player, a shorthand way of analyzing the game. For instance, in the all-important "Strategy" chapter he can say "if no one has yet called, and you are in middle position, it is now correct to raise with hands in Groups 1, 2, or 3. However, if there are already some callers, raising with a Group 3 hand may not be correct ..." and so for.

For the beginning player this concise, pointed discussion of hands and play options is invaluable because it allows them to begin viewing the game as a whole, a unified set of play and strategy concepts, as opposed to simply being faced with random cards, a table full of aggressive players and some half-formed impressions about what to do and when to do it.

In my opinion one of the most significant services that this book offers is re-education. For example, I came to Hold'Em from a Draw and Stud background. I'd played for years in home games and online and managed to do okay for myself but when it came to Hold'Em my play was pretty mediocre. It came down to the fact that the skills I brought to Hold'Em from the other games were not that useful. Sklansky's book gave me the tools to rewind my thinking a bit and follow a methodical approach to embracing and understanding what to me was a more complex game than I realized.

Ok, that's the up-side of Sklansky's book but there is a bit of a downside too, at least for the average beginner. This is one dense book! Unless you've got a natural aptitude for cards and probabilities --which I do not-- it can be a bit of a tough read the first time around.

When I first encountered the book years ago I had to read and re-read some sections several times. Re-reading it again for this review I realize that even then I only picked up about half the material. There's no doubt that this is a good and powerful book for the newcomer but they'd better bring some patience and perseverance to it too because Sklansky is not a hand-holder when it comes to delivering the goods. He dishes it out pretty thick and it's up to the reader to keep chewing on it until they digest enough to move on.

Another slight word of caution: read the footnotes carefully because the early versions of this book pre-dated today's double blinds. The footnotes indicate when the strategies described in the main text need be altered in order to address the higher dollar demands of the modern game.

As all Hold'Em players know Sklansky followed this book with his even more well known book "Hold'Em Poker For Advanced Players", aka HPFAP, where he continues and extends his use of the "Hand Groups". That book will be the topic of our next Hold'Em book review.

Hold'Em Poker by David Sklansky
Published by Two Plus Two Publishing; 1976, 1989, 1996, 2000
Softcover, 113 pages
ISBN 1-880685-1326