Mary

A basic guide, NOT for would-be sharks

Revisado: 05-26-24

This book is an extremely basic introduction to hold ‘em. Despite its subtitle, it’s not an ultimate guide. Despite the publisher’s blurb, it won’t help you take your game to the next level. No book could do that in 68 minutes. Instead, it’s aimed at someone who has little or no familiarity with the game. It starts out by giving the rules. Subsequent chapters touch on important topics, such as bluffing and taking account of position, but necessarily in only cursory fashion. If you’re a complete beginner, it will give you an idea of what topics you need to explore in more depth.

If I were rating it by comparison to the hype, it would get one star. It deserves four stars for what it actually tries to accomplish.

I was a little leery when I saw that the “narrator” was Virtual Voice. The quality was a pleasant surprise. It had a somewhat robotic flavor, and was inferior to a good human narrator, but it was okay.

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Not a book for beginners

Revisado: 04-17-24

This is not a book for beginners. Most of the author’s analysis focuses, quite properly, on “range” – meaning that you have an idea of what hands, from weak to strong, your opponent might have, based on the action so far. Comparing that range with your own hand gives you an idea of your mathematical chances. If you don’t already have some knowledge and experience in assessing an opponent’s range, you should start with some other book.

If you’re comfortable thinking about ranges, this book is valuable. It gives good advice for a succession of specific situations. Although the discussion is in the context of tournaments, most of it is applicable to ring games as well. The main exception is the section on adjusting to payout implications, i.e., how a tournament’s prize structure should affect your strategy, especially in the late stages. The author points out adjustments that are sometimes counterintuitive (wait, fold pocket kings preflop?).

You can listen to this as a standalone audiobook. In addition, however, the author makes frequent reference to charts that are available (no extra charge) on his website. For some passages that I listened to while grocery shopping or brushing my teeth or the like, I listened again later when I could look at the cited chart.

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Not up to "Andrea Vernon" level

Revisado: 03-31-24

I had high hopes for another book from Alexander C. Kane, but this one was a cut below the Andrea Vernon series. It had those books' imagination and creativity. The story and the overall setting, however, just didn't come together the same way.

The narrator was saddled with voicing a whole bunch of characters with Southern accents (the story is, after all, set in Alabama). She did an excellent job of distinguishing each one.

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Human interest but little technical advice

Revisado: 09-04-23

Each chapter is an elite poker player’s account of his or her rise to the top. They vary on such points as their use of online solvers and the importance they attach to talking with (and sometimes rooming with) other good players, but there is one common thread: dedication. You won’t make it into their company unless, for a protracted period (i.e., years), you spend huge amounts of time on poker. I gave four stars because their stories have a lot of human interest. OTOH, there’s virtually no technical advice about specific at-table situations, although Daniel Negreanu succinctly explains exploiting a self-pitying opponent who bemoans his bad luck. There’s also not much that’s useful to a casual player who wants to improve but who won’t be putting in the hours to reach the stratosphere. You'll get only passing mentions of some of the tools that are available these days.

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A nontechnical math history

Revisado: 03-27-23

The author of a book like this has to decide how technical to get. McGrayne has opted for extremely nontechnical. Unfortunately, this turns much of the book into a soap opera. There are Designated Villains (establishment types who want to keep doing things the old way), then along come Valiant Heroes (rebels who use Bayes), the Valiant Heroes solve a problem that no one else had solved – then on to the next chapter and the next problem, same story. The book is weak on explaining the math of why, on this or that particular problem, one method worked better. It’s much more informative about the individuals on both sides and about the circumstances of their conflicts.

Unless you’re already completely familiar with the math, I recommend beginning at the end – with the case study in Appendix B (Chapter 24 in the audiobook). According to the author’s numbers, if a woman in her 40s has breast cancer, the chance that she will get a positive mammogram result is about 80%. Nevertheless, if a woman in her 40s gets a positive mammogram result, the chance that she actually has breast cancer is only 3%. Why are the numbers so different? Bayes’s theorem explains how to solve problems like this. In Appendix B, the author works through the application of the theorem to this specific situation, in a way that greatly illuminates the theorem. It makes the rest of the book somewhat more comprehensible.

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Needs maps

Revisado: 11-25-22

The book covers a period when the war was one of maneuver more than major battles. Following the narrative requires the listener to visualize the area. The author thanks his wife for the “outstanding maps” that accompany the book, but they’re not available in the audiobook. This is a major gap. The maps available from other sources are a poor substitute.

The TL;DR version of the book is that, in the first few weeks after Gettysburg, Meade guessed wrong about what Lee would do. As a result, there was no decisive defeat of the Army of Northern Virginia. The book is a very detailed account of that short period. It acquaints us with the experiences of lower-level officers and common soldiers. If you haven’t read a fair number of other books about the Civil War, however, the detail here may be more than you want.

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Believe the title

Revisado: 11-06-21

This book is not a comprehensive introduction to Stoic philosophy. It's a succession of short biographies of leading figures in the history of Stoicism, stretching over several centuries. The reader will inevitably pick up some information about their ideas, including valuable excursions into areas where they differed among themselves, but that's not the focus. This book would NOT be a good starting point for someone who wants to learn about the Stoics' thinking. As opposed to just reading the Stoics' own words, however, this biographical book is informative about how their lives may have shaped their philosophy and about how, believing as they did, they engaged in the political struggles of their day.

I concur with the many other reviewers who've panned the narration. Ryan Holiday is a much better author than he is a narrator. He should get someone else to read any future audiobooks.

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Too formulaic for my taste

Revisado: 02-26-21

As Gillian's review said, this is standard rom-com with HEA required. I gave it a try because I thought that it might illuminate the setting in the desi community (Indian-Americans with the younger generation moving away from traditional norms). There's only a little of that. If you're into the genre, though, it's probably a good choice.

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Not a comprehensive history; not introductory

Revisado: 02-22-21

The "Boston Globe" reviewer recommends the book for the Civil War neophyte. I disagree. It's not a comprehensive history. Instead, as the subtitle states, it's a collection of perspectives on several particular aspects of the war. There's a chapter about Jesse James, but only passing mentions of George Meade and Stonewall Jackson. A reader who doesn't already know the basic outlines of the runup to the war and the war itself will lack the context for much of this material.

For the non-neophyte, however, there's a great deal of value. I was particularly impressed by the treatment of the consequences of the Battle of Antietam. It tends to be overshadowed by Gettysburg, but McPherson makes the case that Antietam was more important, notably because it forestalled the British and French involvement on behalf of the Confederacy that might otherwise have occurred. I was less interested in all the meta-analysis. McPherson, as a professional historian, discusses sources and several other modern scholarly works about the war. These passages amount to an annotated bibliography rather than a history.

Narration: Some reviews here criticize the narrator's monotone. That's too harsh, but he does tend to not vary his tone much. I was astounded to see that he also narrated "A Confederacy of Dunces" because that narration was one of the best I've ever heard. It was notable for the narrator's ability to convey the distinctive voices of a multitude of characters. He should have deployed some of that talent here. There were also a couple of minor points. It's one thing to pronounce "Taney" to rhyme with "rainy" (it's actually a homophone of "tawny"). But even people unfamiliar with American legal history should know that longitude and latitude are expressed in degrees and minutes. The Missouri Compromise line was 36 degrees 30 minutes, not, as this narrator repeatedly says, 36 degrees 30 miles.

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Not worth the time

Revisado: 12-21-20

I think I would've enjoyed this book when I was about 10. Heroes, villains, implausible fights, a few mildly amusing wisecracks, but overall not holding my interest. I didn't even last as far as the parts that some reviewers have criticized as misogynistic. The narrator's rendition of different characters' voices was over the top, and would have been inappropriate for a work of any substance, but was a good match for a book whose only virtue was as a distraction.

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