We are happy to bring you an excerpt from the latest must-have poker book on the market. Decide to Play Great Poker by Annie Duke and John Vorhaus, was released May 31, and has been receiving rave reviews throughout the industry from poker amateurs and professionals alike.

A revolutionary approach to playing no-limit Texas hold em. If this book doesn't improve your game, you aren't paying attention. --Doyle Brunson, 10-time World Champion of Poker

Annie is the rare player who not only plays well but is also an amazing teacher. She and John Vorhaus have closed an important gap in poker lit by writing about the art of poker, not the mechanics. This is an essential book for anyone who wants to take their game to its peak. --Erik Seidel, All-time tournament-poker money leader

Trust me, this book will open your eyes again and again. It's packed with so many good tactics that you'll read it more than once! --Phil Hellmuth, Jr. 12-time World Champion of Poker

Foreword - by Phil Gordon

In the 10-plus years I’ve been friends with Annie, I’ve never had the opportunity to question her decision-making skills at the poker table. A few things away from the table made me ask, “What the hell was Annie thinking?” (“Celebrity Apprentice” being the prime example), but that’s a whole different story, I’m sure.

Here’s the thing: There is no right or wrong way to play a hand of poker. What’s right for me or Annie may be completely wrong for you. We absolutely hate it when people ask us the inevitable question: “So, how do you play pocket jacks?” or “I had AQ in late position, I raised, and the small blind re-raised. What should I have done?” Those questions are absolutely meaningless and unanswerable without context, without serious decision-making skills.

This book will give you excellent insight into what it takes to make good decisions at the poker table, in both tournaments and cash games. What you must understand is that an almost unlimited number of situations that will occur will be “close”—that is, it isn’t clear-cut if you should raise, fold, or call. Any action could be right, and any action could be wrong. It’s in situations where it’s very close that the real money is made and lost.

If you can somehow manage to get more of the close decisions right, you’ll be a big winner at poker. It isn’t difficult to play AA or KK when someone raises all-in in front of you. It’s really not even close—you just stick the money in the middle. End of story. It’s the hands where you flop second or third pair on a coordinated board and you’re either way ahead or way behind that are the true test.

If there’s one lesson that I think you should take away from this book, it’s this: Have a reason for every action. There are good reasons to raise before the flop or make a continuation bet. There are good reasons to make a speculative bluff or call down an opponent with second pair. There are reasons to get up from the table or decide to re-buy. If you always have a reason for your actions, you’re sure to be making better decisions.

Nothing is “automatic” at the poker table. Even if you’re dealt 72 off-suit under the gun, it might be profitable to raise. You must make a conscious decision to fold. Now, it may be that decision is 100% clear-cut, but some of the time, if you really do the work and dig deeper into the situation, you’ll come up with a different conclusion than the “automatic” play.

You’ve already made one good decision—a conscientious decision to work on your poker game and become a better player. That’s an excellent start. This book, along with some hard work and practice, will help you make good decisions at the table. And, after all, good decision-making is the mark of a champion, a champion like my dear friend Annie Duke.

PART ONE 
Pre-game and Pre-flop 

Chapter 1 

Decide to Decide

The First Rule is There are No Rules

Study the following chart of starting hands very carefully.

Did you notice that there’s no chart? Good. You’ve taken your first step toward understanding a new way of playing no-limit Texas hold ’em, an approach that focuses your attention not on starting hand charts, but on the decisions you make, on how to make better decisions at the poker table than your opponents do. Being the best decision-maker at a table, not following a hand chart in some book you’ve read, will turn you into a big winner in poker.

Of course, a decision-science approach to poker is not the only way to think about the game. Some people take a strictly mathematical approach, where percentages are the only driving factor in their play. Others take an approach that talks about things like “feel.” These people pretty much just go with their gut, without thinking much more deeply than that. But the most common approach I’ve seen in poker books is the method where the book lays down rules. It tells you things like which hands you should play in what position and gives you firm guidelines like, “Always raise three times the big blind.” It has rules for everything from bluffing frequency to how much to tip.

The issue I have with rule-driven teaching is that it’s much too rigid (except the tipping part—always a good idea to tip). Why? Because it turns poker players into rote thinkers, and rote thinking is much too simplistic for the dense, complex, complicated, and infinitely variable game of no-limit Texas hold ’em. I don’t understand how someone can give you a rule about how to play the game of poker when every single game in which you ever participate will be different from the last one. The limitation of rule-driven thinking comes from the fact that every poker game is unique, even if you’ve played the same Wednesday-night game every week with the same eight friends for the past eight years. As with snowflakes, no two Wednesday nights will be the same. Maybe your usually solid opponents are drinking. Maybe last night’s Super Viagra failed to live up to its promise. Maybe someone had a bad day at work and arrives on tilt.

In fact, if you think about it, the game shifts not just from session to session, but from hand to hand and even moment to moment. That’s because your poker game has both a global context (the general attributes and abilities of the players) and a local context (what’s happened recently in the game itself). Has the person you’re playing this hand against been winning or losing for the past half-hour? Did he just take or give a bad beat? Have the Vicodins just kicked in? With highly focused information that requires highly situational decision-making skills, rules won’t help you all that much.

I’ve seen books teach the rule, “If everyone folds around to your button, you should always raise.” But if the small blind is on tilt and clearly looking to shove his whole stack and you’re holding 72 off-suit, would now really be a good time to follow that rule? I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t.

The problem I have is that in a game that’s always changing and evolving, blind obeisance to rigid rules rarely works, especially if you don’t understand the underlying conceptual basis for the rules. Not to put too fine a point on it, but if you’re only following rules, you’re following a road to ruin.

In this book, you won’t learn a bunch of rules that can never be broken. I might give you some strategies or thought-forms that generally work, but I won’t give you any rules like, “Always raise three times the big blind.” Instead, what you’ll learn is a conceptual framework, one that teaches you how to set goals, execute strategies based on those goals and, fundamentally, think about the purpose of every action you take at the table. This framework will give you an understanding of what your purpose is on every bet during every hand of every session of poker you ever play again. That’s an ambitious goal, I know, but I assume you wouldn’t involve yourself with this book if your goals weren’t ambitious and if you weren’t already ready to move beyond rules into a much more fluid and deeply felt grasp of the game.

To be fair, rules aren’t a bad place to begin in poker. If you’re a rank beginner and I only had one hour to get you up to speed on the game of no-limit Texas hold ’em, yes, I’d teach you a bunch of rules. But if you want to be a world-class player, or even a winning intermediate, that’d never be enough.

Tools, Not Rules

So instead of rules, I want you to think for a moment about tools. Think about what’s in your poker toolbox. You have tools in that box like raising, calling, folding, check-raising, check-raise bluffing, and so on. When you consider something like a raise, you’re really asking, “Is this the right tool for the job?” Just as you’d ask if your screwdriver, hammer, or keyhole saw is the right tool for your carpentry job, you should be asking if raising or folding or checking is the right tool in a poker hand. All of your tools represent choices you can make in poker, and here’s a secret: No tool is any better or worse than any other tool. You just have to use your tools appropriately, for the right job.

This notion flies in the face of current conventional wisdom about poker. Some people, for example, insist that limping (flat-calling) when you’re first into a pot is wrong. (They have a rule against it!) Well, guess what? It’s not de facto a bad thing, it’s just that conceptually it’s not the most broadly useful tool at your disposal. Thus, it’s often the second- or third-best choice to make. At times, though, it’s the perfect tool for the job and the problem is that if you have a rule against limping, well, you’ll never limp, will you? But “never” includes that small percentage of the time when limping is perfectly, outstandingly, correct.

So let’s forget about rules. Instead, let’s focus on understanding your goals as a poker player, because once you understand your goals, you can figure out your purpose and what you’re trying to accomplish in each hand you play. Only then can you live a purposeful life in the game of poker.

Why?

To that end, let me ask you a question: Do you always know why you’re doing what you’re doing at the table? You should. It should be the case that if I, or anyone, tapped you on the shoulder and asked you the purpose of that action you just took, you could state it, clearly and succinctly. And I mean a very detailed explanation. If you just bet $70 into a $130 pot, you should be able to tell me not only why you chose to bet instead of check, but also why you chose to bet $70 instead of $50 or $100 or any of the other choices you had.

Most people can’t do this; they can’t really verbalize why they do what they do during a hand. Even some top pros can’t do it. Take a moment to honestly assess if you really know the reason for your actions during a hand and I think you’ll find that a lot of the time your explanation will be something like, “It seemed like the right thing to do.” Or “I felt like he’d fold if I bet.” Or “I raised three times the big blind because that’s what I see pros doing on TV.” Those answers are the equivalent of memorizing your multiplication tables so you can answer that three times three is nine, but not understanding why nine is the answer, not understanding how the underlying mathematical operator, multiplication, actually works. The problem with that is that if you only memorize your threes tables up to, say, three times nine, but now want the answer to three times eleven, you’re kind of stuck.

Think about all the possible decisions you could make during a hand of poker: whether to raise now or raise on a later street; whether to check in an attempt to check-raise or check with the intention to fold; if you raise, how big? You can see that the situation is complex. Rules alone won’t get this difficult job done.

Here’s why:

POKER IS A GAME OF DECISION-MAKING

UNDER CONDITIONS OF UNCERTAINTY

Underline that. Highlight it in yellow. Understanding this concept will change the way you think about the game and allow you to become a great player. Once you understand that poker is a game of decision-making under conditions of uncertainty, you really understand the fundamental problem the game presents, and you can now set about to determine your ultimate goal for any hand of poker you play.

Like what you see so far? You can purchase this great book at the great price of only $19.99 until June 20th through ShopLVA.com Also available on Kindle.

Many thanks to John Vorhaus and the Huntington Press for providing this excerpt.

About The Author(s)

Annie Duke Annie Duke has established herself as one of the best poker players in the world. In 2004, Duke beat out an assembly of 234 players in the WSOP $2,000 buy-in Omaha Hi/Lo Split and won her first WSOP bracelet. In August of the same year, Duke knocked out eight of the worlds’ greatest poker legends and won $2 million in the No-Limit Texas Hold ’em winner-take-all, invitation-only WSOP Tournament of Champions. Duke now not only serves as a consultant for the online poker site UB.com, but she also acts as the Executive Vice President and League Commissioner for the new professional poker league, Federated, Inc. She currently resides in Los Angeles with her four children, Maud, Leo, Lucy and Nelly.

John Vorhaus John Vorhaus is best known as the author of The Comic Toolbox: How to be Funny Even if You’re Not. An international consultant in television and film script development, Vorhaus has worked for television networks, film schools, and production companies in 30 countries on four continents, including half-year stints in Romania and, God help him, Russia in winter. In another corner of his ADD multiverse, he is the author of the six-volume Killer Poker series, plus miscellaneous other books on the subject, including the novel Under the Gun, a “how-to whodunit” set in the world of high stakes tournament poker. His other novels include The California Roll and The Albuquerque Turkey. Vorhaus is a graduate of Carnegie-Mellon University and a member of the Writers Guild of America. He lives in Southern California in the company of his wife and an endless rota of dogs.