This is not a book for the lazy or the close-minded. His wise decision to shift the focus away from how to play a particular hand and towards building range-based strategies is the best illustration I’ve scene of both how one ought to think about poker and also how, specifically, to do that in a given situation. One of the highlights of the book are the hand examples at the end, where builds ranges for both players across multiple decision points in a single hand. That’s not to say that Janda never goes into any depth. Although Janda doesn’t go into a lot of depth on this, it’s certainly inspired me to investigate these situations for myself. Perhaps the most eye-opening conclusion for me was that there are many situations where the optimal strategy likely involves multiple bet sizes. He emphasizes repeatedly that the goal isn’t to construct perfectly balanced ranges – that’s generally beyond human capabilities and in any event the details matter very little at the margins – but rather to build intuition and to recognize spots where you should be bluffing, value betting, calling, or folding more than you currently are.

His techniques for estimating optimal pre-flop ranges are ingenious, and it only gets better from there. There are no toy games here Janda gets right down to business applying game theory concepts to real no-limit hold ’em situations. If you can get past all that, though, you’ll find the most thorough and practical guide there is to playing unexploitable no-limit hold ’em.

If anything, it serves to make the material seem even more overwhelming, and I can imagine many bookstore browsers getting intimidated. The subject matter is complicated, and the prose doesn’t do as much as it could to elucidate it. There are dozens of typos, some as significant as a missing “not” which of course completely changes the meaning of the sentence. It’s dense, it’s thorough, it’s mathematically rigorous, and the only thing keeping it from a perfect score is that the writing and editing are sloppy at best and downright confusing at worst. On a scale of 1 – 10, I give it a 9.5.Īpplications is a Two Plus Two book par excellence.

I recently finished reading Matthew Janda’s Applications of No-Limit Hold ‘Emand considered it one of the most helpful poker books I’ve read in some time.

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