Thursday-Night Poker: How to Understand, Enjoy--and Win

by Peter Otto Steiner

Intended for the serious biweekly or monthly player, this gaming guide devotes chapters to calculating probabilities, estimating odds, bluffing and being bluffed, reading your opponents' down cards, and more. Virtually everyone will learn from this clearly written, fully illustrated instructional book.

Genres: Nonfiction, Games

480 pages, Paperback

First published January 30, 1996

Reviews

[Richard Seddon · Rating 5 out of 5]

The key is in the name, this book is for casual but serious players, who play the game largely for enjoyment in house games, and not for professionals, people looking to make money, or complete newcomers.

While this book has all of the standard poker advice on probabilities and starting hands, it also has a lot of good tips I’ve never heard before on how betting rules and betting culture of a given table affect the game, and how you should rethink your play style based around them. It does a very good job of teaching you how to decide how to play based on the several key factors, instead of just giving basic “if X then Y” advice.

Its one detriment is that it’s now 30 years old. While the games haven’t changed much and the probabilities certainly haven’t, the culture around the game has. Hold’em is by and large the most popular game now, and anyone who only thinks of Hold’em as poker might be confused about the several chapters and examples about 5 and 7 card stud.

[Sid Groeneman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thursday Night Poker is appropriate and useful for moderately experienced players but not for raw novices. Author Peter O. Steiner takes the reader through the basics of calculating probabilities, poker skills (bluffing, pot management, reading others' cards), and goes through the specific rules and strategies of the most popular games--5-card stud and draw poker, 7-card stud, Holdem, and Omaha and their common variations. The strategy suggestions are readable and make good sense. My only quibble is that some of the diagrams/graphics in my 2005 paperback edition are unclear. The black and white ink with shades of gray make the small characters hard to distinguish--maybe not so much a problem for readers with younger eyes (I'm 73).

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read about 6 books about poker that the library has,
this is easily the best of the lot.
It covers quite a few areas of the game.

Was good enough that I bought a copy at ebay so I could refer to it any time I like.

[Gary S. Feuerstein]

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