Caro’s Most Profitable Hold ’em Advice by Mike Caro
Many poker strategy books are fairly derivative, but that is not the case with Caro’s Advice. It is packed with unique ideas and profitable strategies that can be employed immediately to make you money.
What is Caro’s Most Profitable Hold ’em Advice about?
The book is jam-packed from cover to cover with great Advice on how to make the right decision time and again when playing either limit or no-limit Texas Hold ’em.
Caro’s Most Profitable Hold ’em Advice runs the gamut of subjects relating to winning poker, including:
- technical play,
- poker psychology,
- mental game advice,
- winning strategies,
- mathematical and computational analysis,
- and much more.
His section on preflop play is comprehensive.
Caro goes into the complexities of positional play. Breaking down exactly what starting hands can be played in precisely what conditions.
Mike recommends a mixed strategy of calling and raising to keep your opponents off guard and make them guess the quality of your hand.
He introduces a brand new statistical analysis of great importance, the “table of misery” (how often your pocket pair will be an overpair), and thoroughly analyzes every single Hold ’em starting hand.
A Hold ’em book like no other.
The amount of detail that Caro puts into his analysis is unparalleled among other poker authors, and the profound insights he shares demonstrate his deep understanding of the game of hold’em.
After explaining preflop play thoroughly, he goes on to the much more complicated subject of post-flop play.
He covers when and why you might bet with an unpaired hand (a crucial decision-making node, as every hold’em player, instinctively understands).
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How to play the second pair, how to play draws, and how to utilize essential river concepts to profit.
Caro makes the extremely complicated subject of post-flop play simple, with easy-to-employ concepts and helpful hand history illustrious.
The importance of bluffing
Because so frequently you end up with a weak hand in NLHE, bluffing is of vital importance, and Caro goes into the subject of bluffing with his usual depth.
He breaks down the importance of bluffing while keeping an eye on the danger of fancy play syndrome and helps the reader understand when and why to bluff and when to give up on a hand.
Bluffing is a fine art
You don’t want a reputation as a player who never bluffs or people won’t pay you off when you have a good hand. If you bluff too much, you run into the danger of bluffing all your money away.
Caro helps the reader understand when and why to bluff to gain maximum advantage.
Psychology
Another crucial section of this work is his chapter on image and psychology. Caro was one of the first poker authors to stress the importance of poker psychology and how to create the right table image to maximize your profits.
The key, says Caro, is understanding how your opponents think. Their natural mistake is to want to call too much.
They came to play, so the right thing to do is create a table image exploiting that weakness. You want your opponents to think of you as crazy, stupid, but dangerous.
You want them to be eager to call you but scared to raise you so that they are the ones who are put to the test and not you.
In ‘Most Profitable Hold ’em Advice’ Caro argues that:
Working on your image is far more likely to generate long-term profits than working on technical proficiency and studying whether calling is better than raising in some obscure part of the game tree.
Developing a good image that will get you paid off can make you immediate profits today.
And make no mistake, the psychological manipulations suggested by Caro in his book can bear real fruit.
Caro’s Most Profitable Hold ’em Advice also has essential suggestions on how to go about the business of poker itself.
- What limits you should play in.
- How players go broke (overspending is a big problem with prospective poker pros who underestimate the variance inherent in the game),
- Advice on when to quit a poker game vs. when you should stay.
- It is not just how you play your cards but also how you manage your bankroll and make the right financial decisions that determine one’s success as a poker player.
A section on tells
If you have read “Caro’s Book of Tells,” you know that he is the master of tells. He wrote the book on them.
Understanding how tells work and how to recognize them is an important part of poker, especially if you play in games with more recreational players.
Tells can enable you to make incredible decisions that no other player can make. They can help you:
- get paid off,
- help you avoid paying people off,
- and help you make stunning folds and equally incredible calls.
- they can save you bets and win you pots.
Caro’s knowledge of tells is first-rate, and applying what he teaches can make you a lot of money.
A section on tournament play
While there are a lot of similarities between the strategies employed in a cash game and the strategies employed in a tournament, understanding the differences between the two can be very important.
Like in the rest of the book, Caro’s descriptions of tournament strategy and proper adaptions are authoritative.
Our recommendation
All in all, Caro’s Most Profitable Hold ’em Advice is a must-read for any aspiring poker player. It is simply the product of genius, a masterful work that can transform a break-even reg into a poker expert.
If you only read one book on Hold ’em, let it be this one. From start to finish, this is a monumental, game-changing work.
- Tons of starting hands and probability charts
- Clearly written
- Easy and enjoyable to read
- Light on the math (a negative for some players)
- Useful opinions on a number of subjects
- Not for beginners
- Some parts are outdated
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