1) They are the best books about how to play NL Hold’em tournaments on the market, in terms both of strategies to be a successful player, and the easy-to-digest manner in which the material is presented.
2) You can’t buy just one or the other…they are designed as a set. It’s easier to carry around, and sell, two 350-page books than one 700-page book.
After doing their best to teach the world how to play tournaments, Dan Harrington and Bill Robertie are back with a two-volume set, “Harrington on Cash Games”. Whereas the HoH books dove deeply into “M”, “Q”, danger zones, and other concepts and techniques to play the medium- and short-stacked decisions key to tournament success, HoCG takes on the challenge of defining a comprehensive approach to deep-stacked play.
For those of you who have read the Harrington on Hold’em books, especially those (like me) who base their tournament strategy on this foundation, the Cash Game books are like a phone call from an old friend. The straightforward writing style, real-world examples (High Stakes Poker hands are used instead of WPT/WSOP final table moments) and dozens of problems to analyze…it’s all the same as before….
The strength of the two books is their consistent focus on addressing the most common mistakes tournament players make in cash games, like overvaluing good-but-not-great hands like top pair/top kicker or bottom two pair. The phrase “small hand, small pot; big hand, big pot” is consistently use throughout a variety of applicable situations. I also got a lot of his ideas on changing starting hand requirements and betting patterns based on the relative stack sizes of the opponents in the hand. Harrington, as always, is as good as it gets at taking a topic which seems obvious after he presents it, but in retrospect, you recognize it as a leak in your game.
And yet, I’m not sure I recommend the HoCG books as strongly as I do HoH, for two major reasons:
1) Harrington & Robertie attempt to take on every aspect of deep-stack poker fundamentals. In doing so, they decided to start at the very beginning, with explanations of pot odds, counting outs, bluffs and semi-bluffs, and bet sizing to price draws in or out of a hand. To borrow a phrase from my disc jockey days, there’s “more filler, less killer.” There is a lot more prose in these two books than in the tournament books, limiting their effectiveness for much of the potential audience.
2) At the time the original “Harrington on Hold’em” books were released, the vast majority of tournament players, from micro-stakes to the highest of live buy-ins, were uncomfortable making many of the decisions emphasized in the books. Everyone could learn from them, and the strategies worked all the way to the top, as shown by Harrington’s win at the 2007 Legends, runner-up at the 2005 Festa al Lago, and quarterfinal appearance in the 2006 Mirage Heads-Up…on a limited playing schedule, after he told the world what he was doing. The Cash Game books preach a tight-aggressive style of play, which will be easily exploited if attempted at a higher level. Harrington’s examples are mostly set in a 5/10 NL cash game, a game I have no personal experience in…but as I read through them, I kept thinking a player of this style would get run over in most 5/10 NL online games, not to mention moving up into truly rarified air. If Harrington has a theory on what to do when durrr or sbrugby 3-bet shoves the flop in a pot worth more than my car, with a range of Any Two Cards…this book ain’t sharing it.
That said, please don’t take these comments as any sort of negative endorsement. Being “pretty close but not quite” as good as the most valuable poker books ever written is no sin.
There is an enormous audience of players who have been successful in SNGs or MTTs, who have yet to solve the mystery of deep-stacked cash game play. Admittedly, I’m one of them. I’ve avoiding taking a serious cash game plunge for the last couple of years, partially because the subtleties were lost on me (frankly, I’d get bored), but mostly because I stink at them. I look forward to improving my play with continued study and application of the lessons in “Harrington on Cash Games”, moving from donator to dominator. And I hope nobody else gets as much out of these books as I will.
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