Harrington on Hold’em – Volume II: The Endgame |
Author: Dan Harrington Publisher: Two Plus Two Pages: 450 Pub. Date: 2005 Price: $19.77 |
Book Review: Part 2
| Perhaps no section of all the Harrington books is more vital to success that Volume II’s Part Nine, Inflection Points. Every player in every tournament experiences a few key moments and decisions, with the sum of all these individual moments and decisions providing the shape of the event itself. In any tournament, all but one player eventually falls by the wayside, whether due to bad decisions or bad luck or a combination of both. In this section, Harrington introduces tools to help analyze whether a seemingly innocuous decision point might indeed be the fulcrum for a deep tourney run. The concepts of [Paul] Magriel’s “M” and Harrington’s own “Q” formulas are explored, as well as the means to apply them to one’s own tournament situations. And of course, a truism of tournament play is that the blinds eventually catch up to the chip stacks, forcing players at some point to revise their decision-making trees. In his pages on “zone concepts”, Harrington boils down this porridge to its basics, and helps players to understand not only exactly where they are at any given moment in a tourney, but where they need to be.As always, the problems accompanying these sections hammer home the section’s specifics time and again, taking up fully half of the book’s pages. It’s in these examples that one sees the tournament master’s edge and begins to understand why professionals carve up weaker opponents time and again.Part Ten, Multiple Inflection Points, helps to tie all the major concepts of the previous sections together. Even with all the vital situational information offered, Harrington takes pains to remind readers that the focus must be outward – every player at every table faces his own inflection points and opportunities. With opportunity comes motive: Knowing that the best players understand these concepts and are capable of making certain moves in a given situation is vital to figuring out one’s own proper play. Is that thin value bet really a weak post-oak bluff? Is the player targeted by the suspicious move the type of player who can fold in this situation? Poker is a game of multiple thought levels, and in tying together various concepts this section exposes the way this deep-thought process is constructed. It’s one of the hidden secrets of the Harrington books; they’re not so much about how to play as they are about how to think.Given all these new tools, arriving at a final table becomes a matter of when, not if. Harrington Volume II’s final sections detail this most crucial time of the tourney. First comes an examination of short-handed play, then it’s on to heads-up, and finally there’s a section on other considerations, such as making deals and playing satellite qualifiers. Short-handed play, for example, radically alters the typical starting-hand requirements, and this change in starting points evolves in the context of players facing their own short stacks and crucial decisions.
Harrington on Hold ‘em Volume II was greeted enthusiastic by the poker world upon its release, and probably stands as the most important poker-strategy sequel ever, with only Doyle Brunson’s Super System 2 a challenger for that honor. At its time of publication it was absolutely cutting-edge material, forcing tens of thousands of players to absorb the lessons taught, to apply those lessons to one’s own game, and to modify one’s own play slightly to react to other players who had suddenly gained the same insight. Even though these lessons are no longer new, they remain vital, and Harrington on Hold ‘em – Expert Strategy for No-limit Tournaments Volume II: The Endgame is likely to remain a poker “must read” for decades. |
