Books like No Limit Hold 'em: Theory and Practice

I'm going to have to come back to this and reread it (probably multiple times) to absorb all the lessons. Everything is laid out in very clear and explainable fashion, but there is so much to keep track of when you are actually playing.My own poker game has only started to improve slightly (I still only play in a bar poker league), and the problem with poker is that you can only tell if you're actually getting better over a long period of time, since anyone can have a lucky or unlucky streak. David Sklansky and Ed Miller run you through the poker basics, like Expected Value and pot odds, and then provide a lot of a practical advice taking into account all the various factors that need to be considered.Which is probably what keeps most people from becoming good poker players, because once you get past basics like "What are the odds of drawing to an inside straight" and "What is a semi-bluff?" it's a lot easier to keep playing by "intuition" (i.e., losing) than to actually master the mathematical strategies that lead to better results over the long term. And of course, even if you master the math, you can never crunch the numbers perfectly for any given situation, because too much is variable.This book will get you started, though. How to bet differently depending on position, pot size, stack size, and type of game. When to play tight and when to play loose. The exact odds you need to know when to go all-in in a heads-up match. There are a lot of clearly drawn examples of when a check, raise, bluff, semi-bluff, check-raise, or fold is most profitable, bearing in mind that all such calculations are again, highly dependent on many more variables than just what cards you have, and that even a mathematical genius like David Sklansky doesn't actually crunch these numbers with this precision in his head. (At least, I don't think he does.)Some of the more valuable, if elementary chapters are those on bluffing and semi-bluffing, and on multiple levels of thinking. (I.e., thinking about more than just what you have, but what you think your opponent has, and what you think your opponent thinks you have, and what you think your opponent thinks you think he has, and so on.)This is really a foundational poker book. I checked it out from the library, but I'm sure I'm going to acquire my own copy.It covers No Limit, with only a few notes here and there pointing out how NL differs from Limit Hold'Em. It doesn't distinguish much between cash games and tournaments, other than a few observations about when you might change your strategy slightly for a tournament (i.e., when simply surviving longer may be more advantageous than a move that is mathematically more profitable, but riskier).