tl;dr (come on, what else would you expect from me?!)

Book Review: Harrington on Online Cash Games – 6-Max No-Limit Hold ‘Em (©2010)

Having dipped in and out of this book over the past couple of months, I figured it might be useful to provide a review of the book in case any FTR’ers or Google-ers are thinking about buying it.

Overall

This book is excellent for those 6-max players looking to move beyond the basics and out of the micro stakes. I doubt this book will teach anything new to intermediate players that have already read a fair few of the better books and FTR strategy articles however, but that’s not to say that this book still won’t help straighten out the study-jaded players like me from time-to-time when they need to get back to the basics.

First Section: The Basics

The first section of the book covers the subjects of position, probability, opening ranges, aggression and stack sizes amongst other things and is aimed at very inexperienced players. To his credit, Harrington explains these concepts well and the advice will be extremely beneficial to beginners. For anybody that’s moved well beyond these subjects however, I’d recommend skipping this section altogether.

Second Section: Online Games

As well as talking through site selection and multi-tabling, this section covers the tools of the online game. The sub-chapter on note taking provides a decent starting point for players that haven’t yet developed their own efficient and meaningful note-taking system and the section on HUD stats and how to draw inferences from the stats will offer a good starter to anybody thinking about purchasing tracking software.

This section also includes useful advice and on table and seat selection, which is often overlooked by most micro players at the expense of their win rate.

Third Section: Ranges and Distributions

This section of the book is excellent and delivers a fine introduction to range analysis and combinatorics for not only those that struggle with the numbers and algebra, but also those that pretty much have a broad understanding and can do the algebra, but have never really got stuck into the detail (hi!). The chapter breaks down a few starting hands for hero and % ranges for villain and plots the distribution of how both our range and villain’s range connects with a particular flop in an easy to understand table.

Working through some of the examples, it’s clear that without having a thorough understanding of the numbers and working through countless similar examples yourself, you’re only going to get so far in poker.

Fourth Section: Beating the Micro Stakes

Harrington defines the micro stakes as stakes up to and including 25nl. This section provides a reasonable introduction to constructing a 3-betting range and some problems (i.e. hand histories) that Harrington works through. The hand histories work quite well both in this section and the small stakes section by asking on each street “what would you do?”, with the answer being variable depending on the HUD stats, range analysis and player notes provided. Crucially, this section gets you to think through the problems logically.

One criticism with this book though is just how outdated Harrington’s view is on the micro stakes and the section should really be titled “Value Betting the Shit out of Donkeys and Folding to Aggression from Passive Fish”. Whilst the advice is therefore still useful for beginners, most winners at 5nl+ on Stars know how to beat the fish pretty well and should move on to the Small Stakes section after briefly working through the hand histories.

Fifth Section: Beating Small Stakes

Harrington defines the small stakes as 50nl-200nl and this section is really about beating shitty regs and decent TAGs and LAGs. Despite being for small stakes, I'd say that even 2nl players will find this section useful, with the“problems” section in this part of the book helpfully working through good spots to 4-bet, pot control, slow play and barrel based on range and HUD analysis.

If I was being critical of this section, I'd say Harrington lets the book down by not providing any decent examples of 3bet pots where hero is called and the flop and position is tricky. I’d expect most micro players are like me and struggle in 3bet pots post-flop, so adapting the problems would have been useful. Harrington also grossly overvalues suited connectors, with calling out of the bb seemingly standard for him as well as opening utg with them and calling 3bets oop (and I think anybody reading the book would struggle to do either of these things profitably).