New Book Out Today!!!!!
Today is the day, my 3rd poker book with Dara O’Kearney, 5th book overall, is now out.
Endgame Poker Strategy: The ICM Book is, as the name suggests, the first book to take a really deep dive into the topic of ICM. We think it is a criminally ignored topic by a lot of players, even some professional tournament players. It’s one of those things some people don’t study until they make a massive costly ICM mistake. Dara regularly finds himself doing early morning coaching with people who made a final table the previous night and had half a day to get an ICM primer before it starts.
The book covers really important ICM considerations that most serious players probably should know, but don’t. Things like bubble factor, final table play, playing different stack sizes, different payout structures, deal making, game selection, postflop and more.
I think it’s the best book we have ever done and think that it will pay for itself ten times or 100 times over if it prevents you making just one big ICM error in your career.
I’ll be releasing a lot of material on PokerStrategy and no doubt doing interviews etc about ICM, but just for posterity I wanted to talk a bit more about the process this time around here on my blog.
We had previously written two books about the extremes of ICM, one on satellites and one on PKOs. We both thought at the same time that there was a natural third book to be written on regular ‘vanilla’ tournaments.
To be honest we both thought it would be a short, quick, easy book to write, but once we got started we realised how dense a topic ICM actually was. This is our biggest book, our most advanced book, our most helpful book and our best book.
Sorry to name drop, but we had Daniel Dvoress, who is an ICM expert, do an advance reading of the book. He liked it, so I can weather a few bad reviews. This is what he said:
“In an era of solvers and preflop charts, game states involving ICM pressure remain one of the few unsolved and untapped areas of poker. Endgame Poker Strategy does an excellent job of clearly explaining the most important ICM ideas and effects. Whether you are a beginning player looking to build an understanding of how ICM works, or a more advanced player looking to better internalise ICM concepts, there is something in this book for you.”
Our previous two books we told people what to do (fold here, call here) then explained why. In this book we go very deep into theory and only get to practical examples at the end. This is a tribute to how important ICM is in tournaments, I think you have to understand it deeply rather than try and look at one hand in a solver and mimic what it tells you to do in all similar spots.
Dara is a professional poker player and I am not. Our process is he essentially coaches me on a topic, I then try and turn that into content, he then critiques the content, and so on. It takes a lot of iterations but we know that when I understand a topic, it means our audience will. I really struggled this time around, particularly on the topic of Bubble Factor, but once it finally sunk in the rest of the book poured out of us.
There is a running joke that I am a terrible player and if I can understand it, anyone can. It’s been five books now, three with Dara, and I am genuinely getting quite good as a (modest, low stakes) player. I have been a winning player for more than two years now, I have had a couple of big wins, I have made a Sunday Major final table, I won a UOS tourney last week and I have a reasonable rating on DTO. There are still massive holes in my game, but the greatest complement I have ever been paid is Dara told me that the transformation of my game and the thinking process I have developed has been his biggest achievement as a coach (that probably also speaks volumes about how bad I was beforehand).
My favourite process of book writing used to be the marketing, but now it’s the early discovery and solver work with Dara I enjoy the most. The next book I’m even more excited about and we have already started work on it. The working title is ‘GTO for Normies’ and it’s essentially Dara trying to teach me GTO.
I am going to promote this book hard, I genuinely think we do some groundbreaking stuff in it and it’s a book ALL poker players should read, rather than the two niche formats we did before which have a specialist audience. This is why I am trying to big myself up a bit more this time around, I don’t want to fall into my usual British wimpy modesty. It’s also why we have gone for quite a cocky subtitle ‘The ICM Book’ as in THE book about ICM.
Feel free to ask me any questions about it or ICM
Endgame Poker Strategy: The ICM Book
