Tournament Killer Poker By The Numbers: The Keys to No-Limit Hold 'em Success
by Tony Guerrera
Lyle Stuart (2008), 276 pp ISBN 978-0818407239, $14.95

Tony Guerrera's latest work, Tournament Killer Poker By The Numbers: The Keys to No-Limit Hold 'em Success puts forth a text that aims at the use of numbers for those who need that extra something to make their hold 'em game work. His approach is keyed to reading and adapting to opponents with specific information on why it's vital to understand the blind and payout structure. He discusses hand distribution and probability, including permutations, factorials, combinations, the binomial distribution, approximations, independence and clumping.

Mixed throughout the book you'll find tables, charts, and mathematical formulas as part of the background information. They compliment discussions on why too tight is better than too loose, understanding expected value, independent chip modeling, and using target return-on-investment to determine risk threshold. That's just for starters. Later chapters focus on exploitative play versus equilibrium play, and pre-flop all-in matchups.

Overall the book looks to capture both the online and land-based tournament players who know how to get deep into the tournament action but don't quite understand how they got there or how they might get further.

Indexed with 14 pages of glossary, the book is a super resource for the experienced tournament player whose goal is to move to the highest level of play-consistent winners. Like Guerrera's other titles, Killer Poker by the Numbers and Killer Poker Shorthanded, this one is oriented toward the person with math skills who can put those abilities to work at the tables. But this book will also be useful to people with limited math skills since Guerrera provides enough tools to understand the concepts. He begins each topic with an introduction that explains where it's headed, follows with the meat of the concepts and ends with a summary that puts everything into a final perspective.

Overall this is a book that tournament players who read it will relish, while those who don't read it might be wondering what hit them.