Poker Books and Reviews

This book contends that the game of poker is in reality a game of psychology. james McKenna is a poker columnist and a pychotherapist. This book will teach you to play your opponents as well as you play your cards. Learn how to read and give bluffs. Predict what the players around you are thinking.
Read Full Review of 'Beyond Bluffs'

In poker, it's not enough to play your own cards well. Knowing how to read other players, gauge their hands, spot their weaknesses—these are the skills that enable you to chart a winning course of action, no matter what cards you're dealt. Noted psychotherapist and poker columnist James A. McKenna shows you how to anticipate players' behavior by analyzing their physical and mental approaches to the game.
Read Full Review of 'Beyond Tells: Power Poker Psychology'

McKenna goes into the psychology of poker, revealing howto use the psychological patterns that govern opponents to trap them into making mistakes. He explains how consistent winners use different bait for different prey and how they trap and avoid traps by noticing the difference between players at the table. He expands on his two previous works, Beyond Bluffs and Beyond Tells, by demonstrating the different approaches needed for different personalities and outlining the traps for each: pigeon traps, fish traps, speed traps, net traps, and mixed traps and showing readers how to take their game to a higher level by playing their opponents as expertly as they play their cards
Read Full Review of 'Beyond Traps'

The best-selling account of a year spent in the tough world of the professional poker player. Poker is not gambling but is like chess, a paradigm of life at its most intense, a gladiatorial contest that brings out the best as well as the worst in people. Its heroes and eccentrics stalk the pages of this remarkable book, along with all the hair-raising, nail-biting excitement of the games themselves.
Read Full Review of 'Big Deal: One Year as a Professional Poker Player'

Holden's original book, Big Deal, presented a great read about his quest to play and win his way to the top of the heap, the World Series of Poker Championship. Since that year, poker has turned out to be the hottest product in the world and that's the focus of this title. Holden' presents his vision of the book and of the future of poker. He becomes a guide to the world of the "new" poker -- to the players who dominate the modern game and the personalities behind the multibillion-dollar business it has become -- as he tries once again to win the world title. Holden is friends with most of the important people in the world of poker, from players to to managers to promoters, but his roots (an ongoing home poker game) haven't shifted as he brings both worlds together here for a totally captivating work.
Read Full Review of 'Bigger Deal: A Year Inside the Poker Boom'

This is a fascinating account of former world poker champion Bobby Baldwin's meteoric rise to the championship. The book covers everything from his early days playing poker in dangerous roadhouses to his high-stakes poker games against other poker legends.

Contains 11 solid chapters, packed with illustrations, sample hands, and interviews with players who pulled off some of the biggest bluffs in modern poker history. Where most books have a basic chapter, section or discussion on bluffs, Lessinger takes it many notches better -- almost honing it to a fine art where we'd all like to be -- way ahead ands brave enough to keep plowing over the opposition even when don't have a great hand.
Read Full Review of 'Book of Bluffs'

This is a poker novel that looks at three types of players -- any of whom could be based on real-life characters -- and follows them through their high-stakes quest for rame and fortune.
Read Full Review of 'Broke: A Poker Novel'

Mike Caro is one of casino poker's pioneers and he has been teaching people his brand of winning since the 1970s. He was a major contributor to Doyle Brunson's Super System and is the creator of the first videos on poker tells. In this title he continues with his lessons on hold'em by revealing some previously unpublished--and secret--strategies including rankings and anatomies of all 169 categories of starting hands. He covers every detail with chapters devoted to the concepts of bluffing, image, psychology, manipulation, pre-flop and post-flop conditions and follows these with treating poker as a business (doing it the profitable way), tournament concepts, tells and advanced hold'em concepts.
Read Full Review of 'Caro's Most Profitable Hold'em Advice'

A. D. Livingston's indispensable and fully illustrated guide on to how to detect and protect yourself against cardsharps when playing poker, blackjack, gin rummy, and bridge at the table or online. Beginning with the eyeing of marked cards, false shuffles, and shifty cuts, Catching Poker Cheats helps to inform the uninformed who would otherwise be susceptible to hustlers and con artists.
Read Full Review of 'Catching Poker Cheats'

A fine, useful, timely resource, this book has 17 sections including a five-page index, ever so valuable as a time-saver when the inevitable incident or controversy occurs at the tables. As the authors explain, 'This rulebook considers fixed limit, spread limit, pot-limit and no-limit games.' To be as clear as possible, they cover Texas hold'em, seven stud and seven stud high-low split, razz, five stud, Omaha high and high low split, draw and lowball.
Read Full Review of 'Cooke's Rules of Real Poker'