- Publisher: Two Plus Two Publ Llc. Advanced Strategies for No-Limit Hold 'Em Poker Tournaments and Sit-n-Gos. Huntington Press.
- Applications of No Limit Holdem, Matthew Janda. Decent book overall for introducing a theoretical approach to the game. This is what I would say is a great first book because it doesn't use too much jargon and gives you a general mathematical intuition for how GTO works.
I recently finished reading Matthew Janda’s Applications of No-Limit Hold ‘Emand considered it one of the most helpful poker books I’ve read in some time. On a scale of 1 – 10, I give it a 9.5.
As the name describes, Mini-courses are poker lessons that don’t take too much time to study. Here you’ll get to analyse hands and improve your red-line play with GTO expert & poker author Matthew Janda. Examples of mini-courses covered in this section include.
Applications is a Two Plus Two book par excellence. It’s dense, it’s thorough, it’s mathematically rigorous, and the only thing keeping it from a perfect score is that the writing and editing are sloppy at best and downright confusing at worst. There are dozens of typos, some as significant as a missing “not” which of course completely changes the meaning of the sentence. The subject matter is complicated, and the prose doesn’t do as much as it could to elucidate it. If anything, it serves to make the material seem even more overwhelming, and I can imagine many bookstore browsers getting intimidated.
If you can get past all that, though, you’ll find the most thorough and practical guide there is to playing unexploitable no-limit hold ’em. There are no toy games here; Janda gets right down to business applying game theory concepts to real no-limit hold ’em situations.
His techniques for estimating optimal pre-flop ranges are ingenious, and it only gets better from there. He emphasizes repeatedly that the goal isn’t to construct perfectly balanced ranges – that’s generally beyond human capabilities and in any event the details matter very little at the margins – but rather to build intuition and to recognize spots where you should be bluffing, value betting, calling, or folding more than you currently are.
Perhaps the most eye-opening conclusion for me was that there are many situations where the optimal strategy likely involves multiple bet sizes. Although Janda doesn’t go into a lot of depth on this, it’s certainly inspired me to investigate these situations for myself.
That’s not to say that Janda never goes into any depth. One of the highlights of the book are the hand examples at the end, where builds ranges for both players across multiple decision points in a single hand. His wise decision to shift the focus away from how to play a particular hand and towards building range-based strategies is the best illustration I’ve scene of both how one ought to think about poker and also how, specifically, to do that in a given situation.
Matthew Janda Poker Book Pdf
This is not a book for the lazy or the close-minded. A quick skimming or surface-level reading won’t do much for you, and unfortunately the prose sometimes gets in the way of understanding already hard-to-grasp concepts. The effort is worth it, though.
Matthew Janda Bio and Books
Matthew Janda has had an interest in card games his entire life, and began playing poker with friends in high school before playing online cash games in college. While originally studying business economics at UCLA, a game theory course sparked his interest in poker theory and optimal play.
After Black Friday in 2011, Matt began transitioning from playing poker to pursuing medicine. He s now a 4th year podiatry student at Samuel Merritt University and studying to be a podiatric surgeon. While he has much less time for poker now than he did in the past, discussing poker theory remains his favorite hobby as it s too enjoyable to realistically call it a job. He currently makes theory oriented videos for CardRunners and teaches math and poker theory to players from all around the world.
This is his second book for Two Plus Two Publishing LLC. His first book, Applications of No-Limit Hold em; a Guide to Understanding Theoretical Sound Poker, was well received and is considered one of the most important book in this field by many players.