I looked over the book review list on the http://www.cardschat.com/poker-strategy.php and decided that I should perhaps make it a bit more complete by reviewing the 10-or-so books that I have that aren’t on that list. I’ve started working on writing them and I discovered something:

1. Cash games have changed. A lot.

2. Tournaments haven’t.

What I mean to say here is that books on cash games - such as Hold ‘em Poker for Advanced Players - start to feel kinda dated. They no longer accurately reflect how poker is being played, especially on the internet. I came to this realization when I read Stoxtrader’s limit book (the title is too long for me to even begin to bother writing it out - seriously, it’s almost as long as this parenthesis, if not longer) and noticed how “fresh” it felt. It actually described games I play in, instead of opponents and game types that I haven’t seen since I started playing online two years ago.

So that’s when I started thinking about how cash games have changed and how that makes older cash games books become slightly out-of-touch. Many concepts will still hold true, but their relative value will be less since the opportunities to apply them start to fade towards zero.

So, it was with this realization in recent memory that I started working on some book reviews and I picked up Tournament Poker for Advanced Players to go through it. It’s been well over a year since I last read it, and I’m not going to make a review just out of memory. My memory isn’t that good. So I opened the book, fully expecting to find a lot of outdated advice and strategies that weren’t very applicable anymore because times have changed. But this turned out to not be so much the case. Browsing through it and checking some of the chapters more carefully, it seems to me that most tournament advice still holds true and is still very applicable.

Interesting, isn’t it? Cash games have evolved - especially in the shorthanded mid and high limits - to hyper aggressive cockfights (or so it feels at times) but proper tournament strategy from five years ago still seems to be proper tournament strategy today.

(Or, and this is a perfectly reasonable case, I’m just a crappy tournament player who wouldn’t know anything about how tournaments have evolved.)