Then my delayed education continued with an even more unlikely source: books on tape. It was deep in the Wisconsin winter of 2006, and I looked around the public library for a good book on tape to help during those frigid waits at the bus-stop each morning. I ran across an odd-looking volume, "Positively Fifth Street" by Jim McManus. I vaguely remembered him as the author of the Harper's article, and thought I'd try his book. It's a wonderful read, and I'd recommend it to any appreciator of good writing - McManus ranges over sociobiology, the medieval origins of playing cards, the diversification of poker, and the role of the printed word in changing the game. Moreover, it's the Chris Moneymaker story - win a satellite to the main event and crush the competition - three years before Chris Moneymaker.
McManus succeeds in the World Series (he finished fifth overall, busted out on a bad beat from Hasan Habib at the final table) by following one poker advice book to the letter. "Positively Fifth Street" steered me towards my first (and certainly not last) poker book: T.J. Cloutier's Championship No Limit & Pot Limit Hold 'Em (Amazon link):
In this book, you'll find terse prose suggesting extremely tight play. Here's a favorite passage:
There are situations where you won't call a raise before the flop. Suppose that player C raises on the button and one of the blinds pops it again. Unless you have a pair of aces, you probably shouldn't call; you should throw away your kings. You don't have much invested in this pot and even if he doesn't have aces, it's not a bad play to fold the kings. Where I was schooled in Dallas, the second raise probably would have been aces, and the third raise was like Ivory snow: 99.9 percent pure aces. It's not A-K in this situation - it's aces.(pp. 53-54)(Nice post on PartTimePoker dealing with the "third raise is always aces" rule)
In tournaments, this is excellent advice. I once was in a hand late in a sit-and-go where, after a long dead streak, I picked up AK in the small blind. The button made a standard raise and I came back over the top.
Then the BB re-raised.
I folded my AK. The BB had aces, just like TJ said. The button had kings. I would have been almost drawing dead here.
However, if there's one piece of advice that has caused me trouble in cash games, it's this one:
You have Big Slick. The flop comes three baby cards. Player A bets. What do you do? You throw your hand away. Why? Because you have nothing. In no-limit hold 'em, you never chase. (p. 205)
Reading the twoplustwo forums, I've found that the very best cash game players disagree with this advice. Many of them would say: RAISE!
My introduction to no-limit was playing free live tournaments in the basement of the student union. What I didn't realize at the time was that we played preposterously short-stacked: everyone started with 54 chips and blinds at 1-2. In other words, you started the tournaments with less than 30BB. Continuation betting a flop isn't a very good idea when you only have 54 chips, and I developed an incredibly rock-like style that focused ONLY on value-betting. I was able to make the final table several times, usually just by insanely tight play (e.g. never playing suited connectors for an entire tournament).
When I started playing normal online tournaments - 1,500 starting chips with 10/20 blinds - this style was acceptable but certainly not optimal.
The sage advice of T.J. Cloutier - don't risk your tournament life when you're only a slight favorite - is death in cash games. You need to push the small advantages where your equity is big enough to merit a loose call or raise. T.J. warns that the tournament can't be won on the first day; but in a cash game, there's only one day, and waiting (for higher blinds, for other players to go after each other) has far less value.
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