United Kingdom of Boomer

A while back I was asked to do a review of Tri “Slowhabit” Ngyuen’s PLO book available from his website Daily Variance , which I found extremely enlightening and wrote so in my review.

Now Slowhabit has moved back to NLHE, where he’s well known for his colaborative effort with Cole South called Let there be Range.

The Workbook is a 70-page e-book which deals mainly with problems many may face when playing 50-400NL and trying to move up past those levels and it’s fairly priced for those levels as well with pre-orders availabile for less than $100 with the full price moving up to just under $200.

Fortunately I was allowed to see an advanced copy and as with the PLO book I was extremely impressed with Tri’s writing style. He seems to have a knack for being able to get his point over in a way that’s understandable to someone like me who has virtually no knowledge of advanced no-limit holdem except what I’ve seen on DC when I can tear myself away from a Deathdonkey or Oink vid for more than an hour.

Now in this review I am coming at the book from this angle. I am not a NL player so I have no right to question any of the strategy in the book so I am not going to. What I am going to focus on is premise, execution, presentation and how I believe it would appeal to a player at the lower stakes.

The overall premise of the book is that No-Limit Holdem in the Small Stakes to Mid Stakes has a great deal of Regs playing in those games and certainly games such as 200NL-600NL can be games where even those who try to work on their game hard can find themselves getting stuck and not progressing.

The first half of the book is contained within 11 chapters detailing moves which bad tight regulars use, their ranges and what can profitably be used to exploit those tendenices.

Just some of the items which crossed the pages and, in some places had me stunned at what was being considered were things like:

1) Turing showdown value into a bluff on the river when the top of your opponent’s range is pretty much exclusively 1-pair hands especailly by c/r bluffing
2) Overbetting the turn and river both for bluffs and for value
3) Range Balancing pre and post flop
4) Knowing when exploitable play is ok
5) increased controlled aggression vs regs, when, where and how.

All these concepts and more are covered in clear hand examples and Tri does a great job of walking the reader through the mathematics and ranges behind each decision he makes in the examples. This can be a dry subject at best at times and Tri does a good job of making sure the reader isn’t hit in the face by a wall of text or numbers.

Then we get into the meat and potatoes of the book, so to speak.

Chapters 12 and 13 are an “exam” in what has been learned so far to see how you’ve absorbed the concepts already shown in the book and now can you apply them.

Speaking personally I love stuff like this in poker books. Stoxtraders Winning in Tought Limit Holdem Games was actually readable to me because of the hand examples (The Wall of Numbers theory however did apply to that book in parts….including where I think one of the players folded AA in the SB or something similar…I wonder if that was in there to see if anyone noticed)

I personally find that i learn a lot more by doing that by being told and in this format Tri takes the elements of both worlds and makes them work.

In chapter 12 the reader is presented witht eh questions and 13 answers them one-by-one.

It’s an extremely effective way of dealing with situations and actually made me REALLY think about how some situations could be played so well by experts which 90%+ of the NLHE population of the internet will just miss and that is what this book is designed for.

Tri signs off by saying that now you have the aggressive moves necessary to take down the regs but it will be a long process to learn when and where. As good as this book is it is not an answer all and you are going to have to put A LOT of work into your game before you can employ all of these moves and thought processes into your game and begin to crush.

Don’t get the book becasue you want to instantly know everything, get it becasue you’re willing to put time and effort into your game to understand what you can do to exploit those in your game and by doing that you’ll get the most from your investment and if you are willing to put the work in and want to be made to THINK about the game, which you’d hope if you’re forking out $100+ on an e-book, then you can’t go wrong and the NLHE workbook is recommended heartily.