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Review: The Poker Blueprint

Poker e-books have exploded as a category over the last year or so. We review the latest entry to the market, a collaborative effort of Aaron Davis and Tri Nguyen.

Exclusive – read a chapter excerpt from The Poker Blueprint here.

Overview
Grinding the small NLHE stakes online? Then you’re the target audience for this excellent e-book. The 170-or-so pages are crammed with advice, analysis and examples that will benefit anyone who is currently stuck at .10/.25 – 1/2 NLHE online.

Davis’ approach is simple: he spends the first quarter of the book laying out a basic mathematical and logical foundation for understanding NLHE as a game. The middle of the book maps strategy street-by-street strategy, spending a fairly balanced amount of time on pre and post-flop play. The final chapters handle a few miscellaneous topics and offer readers additional resources, along with some meta-advice regarding poker as a pursuit.

Pros
This is one of the best poker books I’ve read in a long time. The writing is precise, concise but still fluid and (relative to your typical poker book) entertaining. There’s almost no fat to the text, which is impressive when you consider that it clocks in at over 150 pages.

The analysis, logic and supporting material are by and large fantastic. Readers get a deluge of real-world examples that clearly illustrate the principal at hand without feeling forced or contrived. The breakdowns are deep and articulate, but not so dense and jargony as to cause the reader’s eyes to glaze over.

There’s also an excellent intangible quality to this book that only a few other books I’ve read posses (Harrington on Hold’em comes to mind) – namely, that reading the book made me excited about playing poker again.

Finally, it’s affordably priced at $37, especially when compared to competing titles for this market.

Cons
I really don’t have much here. The one suggestion I’d make is to break up the flow of the book a bit and insert some of the psychological / miscellaneous content as interstitial material. While the flurry of analysis and examples is instructive and useful, it starts to all bleed together a bit after dozens of consecutive pages.

Conclusion
If you play small stakes NL online, you are losing money by not reading this book.

Focus: 10/10
No filler.

Quality of advice: 9/10
Would be a 10 except so much of the advice is core and a bit familiar to many players.

Examples: 10/10
Fantastic here.

Readability: 8/10
Wears you down a bit, but overall a serious improvement over your typical poker book.

Overall (not an average): 10/10
For SS NLHE players, this book is required reading.

VERDICT: Dollar-for-dollar, this is the best poker e-book available, and can safely be called an instant classic for small stakes NLHE players.

Exclusive – read a chapter excerpt from The Poker Blueprint here.

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