The NL Workbook

The No-Limit Hold’em Workbook: Exploiting Regulars

Price: $97 for the eBook.  Buy Now

Who is this for?  The No-Limit Holdem Workbook is primarily designed for semi-professional  online poker players wanting to move from $0.50/$1 up to the $3/$6 mid-stakes games.  Built on ideas from Nguyen and South, the NLH workbook follows up Let There Be Range and and teaches you how to optimise your aggression by 3bet/4betting, value/check betting the river, check-raising the flop and reading opponent’s tendencies more (in fact, a lot of the ebook is based on playing against your opponent and narrowing down his range).

The No-Limit Hold’em Workbook Review

If you’ve found yourself stuck in the NL50 or NL100 games and not been able to successful move up the stakes with the same bb/100 win-rate, then the NL Holdem Workook is for you.  It teaches you how to beat regulars in mid-stakes games by playing more aggressively and bluffing against solid opponents.  This ebook  is different to most books which only teach you how to win against fish or TAGs. 

The difficulty with moving past the Nl100 ($0.50/$1) games is that you’re no longer playing against typical 40/10 fish or weak players.  You need to be able to deal with the better players around you.  This is precisely what the Nl Workbook is for.  The NL Workbook is filled with specific $3/$6 short-handed scenarios, analysing opponents on different boards and how to maximise value on the river.  In certain spots for instance, Nguyen shows how it’s better to be value betting your bluffcatchers/merged hands as opposed to checking for thin value.  The book also teaches you how to out-level opponents on various boards based on your perceived hand range and tendencies.

Nguyen and Tom “kingsofcards” Marchese implement a profitable strategy against a typical TAG 22/17 regular.  This works well because it is the typical prototypical opponent to at this level.  One of the major aspects is that the book re-defines how to get paid off on the river.  Being in position on the river often means there is far more +EV then simply pot-controlling or showdown/bluffcatching a hand, and it is a position most low stakes players fail to take advantage of.  The book takes you through a series of examples at NL600 to illustrate opportunities to make more money here.  In terms of planning hands, the NL Holdem Workbook helps you think ahead e.g. how the board will develop and what this means for your opponent’s hand range. Integrating forward thinking lets you plan across multiple streets.

Many of the case examples in $3/$6 deal with heads up 3bet and 4bet pots with 100-150 stacks against a fairly aggressive opponent.  This is where you’d expect to make the majority of your money in high stakes game so it’s very useful to start thinking about. This book skips over the basic generalisations and philosophical aspect of poker, and gets right down to the nitty gritty stuff allowing you to directly learn and implement the same level of thinking from hundreds of $3/$6 case study examples.

The end of the book contains around 100 pages of 35 exam questions which force you to question your own game and the bulk of the book’s advice.  Each question has an entire page dedicated to answering and explaining each problem. 

In conclusion, this is a brilliant and very conceptually-minded book for mid stakes grinders who want to become a fully-rounded mid-stakes player.  If you’re someone who only understands basic tenets of advanced concepts like check-raising, 4bet bluffing, floating and squeezing, then this poker ebook shows you how to properly implement them into your strategy against solid mid-stakes opponents.  It skips past the basics, making it unsuitable for beginners, but if you’re stuck in the NL100 games and are aware of situations where you perhaps don’t extract enough value on the river then walking through this guide is definitely worth reading.

Go to DailyVariance.com to buy the NL Workbook