Sloe Times

Killer Poker Online: Crushing the Internet Game / John Vorhaus
Kensington Publishing Corp., July 2003, 278 pages.
Gambling: Poker

This book covers topics related to adapting your poker playing skills for online play. The target audience is the intermediate level player, and possibly the advanced player who is new to online play. It would generally not be a good resource for advanced players with solid experience playing online.

John Vorhaus provides a guide for self examination relating to your poker game as well as information for navigating the online poker world. In the sections related to mind and mood he helps you understand some of the weaknesses that can make your online poker experience an unhappy one. The chapter on data management highlights one of the major strengths of playing on line and how it can be used to evaluate your opponents, evaluate yourself, as well as find and exploit the weaknesses of your opponents.

Little sprinkles of humor throughout the book helped break up some tough subjects. One of the toughest things to do is really look at yourself and your habits but it is absolutely critical if you want to be able to close the holes in your game. John Vorhaus helps guide you through this self evaluation right up front before he gets into actually playing online. I liked this approach because if after going through this effort you may find that as a player, you're not well suited for online play and you can either work to improve those weaknesses, or save yourself some money and frustration and stay away. The chapter and references throughout the later sections of the book regarding data management identified one of the major opportunities for leverage in online play. The method he identified would definitely take a lot of dedication to perform. Fortunately, there have been a number of programs come out since this book was published to help in that regard. Probably the most popular is Poker Tracker which works with most of the major poker sites.

I consider myself at least an intermediate level player with solid online experience. While the book did get me to take a deeper look at my motivations for playing as well as my style of play it primarily reinforced a lot of the thoughts that I already had about playing online as well as many of the strategies that I learned through the experience of trial and error. If I had owned this book when I first started playing online, I think I would have saved myself a lot of money and frustration. I would recommend this book to anyone who is new to playing online as well as anyone who is struggling with their online game.