100 Essential Tips to Master No-Limit Hold’em by Jonathan Little: A Detailed Review

Overall Advice Is The Best Part of the Book

100 Essential Tips to Master No-Limit Hold’em starts off strong with a clear and convenient list of topics you can find in the book. Titles are primarily short and easy to remember, such as ‘Don’t Get Fancy’, ‘Call All-ins Intelligently’ or ‘Trap Maniacs on the Flop’.

All tips are divided into seven sections depending on what you are interested in: Basic Principles, Preflop Strategy, Flop Strategy, Turn Strategy, River Strategy, Format Adjustments and Other Topics.

The last section isn’t focused specifically on how to play Hold’em but contains a lot of general advice for players, including explanations on why you should be attentive to your health, how to distinguish between different forms of rakeback, what you need to know about bankroll management, etc.

This book isn’t as easy to read and approachable as Little’s guide was. A lot of sections are long and overloaded with different information to cover a specific topic as much as possible. It reads more like a collection of detailed lectures than a set of tips.

It is also worth noting that some sections are formulated quite easily to digest and remember — my personal favorite is Chapter 16: Play Wider Ranges with an Ante and No Rake.

Finally, diagrams and tables in this book are very useful and easy to understand, memorize and use when they’re needed. You just need to get used to some of the design decisions to appreciate it fully.

Inconsistency Can Mess With Your Head

From the get-go, the book isn’t really sure who its target audience is.

It talks with cash players, tournament players, live regulars and online grinders simultaneously , often not specifying exactly who should be following these tups.

It gives you the most basic foundational advice for non-experienced players along with examples of GTO play and also insists that you need to have at least a basic understanding of GTO strategy, otherwise you simply won’t be able to notice when your opponents deviate from it.

Some explanations are clearly made for newbies but these are also inconsistent. For example, Little describes what rake, limp/3bet, and lojack are — but not hijack.

Diagrams, while clear and easy to understand, are all over the place. They are mentioned right after a section as often as on the following page after a few long paragraphs. Such a design isn’t convenient, especially for an e-book.

The most consistent part of the book is the repetitive advertising of PokerCoaching, which is so overwhelming that at some point your brain just stops seeing it.

Finally, some parts of this book simply aren’t correct. One of the most disturbing ones for me is:

The contemporary online grinder knows that a lot of poker rooms have nothing against players using static charts. They are allowed in the most popular rooms, moreover — some of them, like CoinPoker, even give them to players right inside the lobby.

The Book Is Useful but Messy

Despite all its short-comings, 100 Essential Tips to Master No-Limit Hold’em is quite good. You might not master NLH by reading it but you can find a lot of useful and applicable advice here, meaning this book is worth a read.

However, if you aren’t a fan of long and detailed lectures, this book may not be as good a pick for you as The Complete Poker Workout.