If youve read Harrington, Sklansky, and Gordon and are still struggling with your tournament game, then this book may be exactly what you need.

Arnold Snyder has been a professional gambler, blackjack strategist, and poker player for years in the Vegas area. As a successful gambler that makes his living from many types of casino games, Snyder is uniquely qualified in this arena. Whats even better is that he constantly refers in his book to actual tournaments he was in, while exploring his strategies. Further, they are the kind of tournaments that you and I are much more likely to play in, with entry fees ranging from 50 to 500, with moderate sized fields, and vastly quicker structures than the big money tournaments in the WPT and WSOP.

Snyders new poker book, The Poker Tournament Formula snaps squarely in the face of the great poker writers already mentioned here, at times even pointing out generally accepted strategies among them, while making a sound, mathematical argument throughout the book for entirely different reasoning.

For example, the popular axiom taught by Sklansky in Tournament Poker for Advanced Players and reiterated time and again by others, you need a better hand to call a raise, than you need to make a raise, is vigorously shot down in this book as completely nonsensical when playing time-sensitive, accelerated blind tourneys that have limited opportunities for quality hand play.

Snyders strategy is predominantly position play, but unlike Sklansky and Harrington, Arnold Snyder plays position virtually blind and pushes his advantage to take pots and chips pre-flop, or at least pre-turn. Its a pressure, luck, survival, rock, paper, scissors, conundrum that he swirls his opponents in and strives to come out on top. In this regard, it is anti-Sklansky play that Snyder claims makes his strategies that much more effective.

Arnold Snyder analyzes, and categorizes the skill level of such tournaments and gives recommendations for playing them. You can read a lot of the strategy basics from Arnolds disciples on his website, but lacking there, and in the book, are specific strategies for low buy-in tournaments online. Although some on Arnold Snyders website claim success using Snyders book, very few step up and admit it. Now, this could be a result of keeping success secrets to themselves, but as for my own trials online, it is simply not what I found.

If I could ask anything more of a very well written, compelling poker book, I would ask Arnold to publish a guide strictly for online poker tournaments with low buy-ins. Then, truly this book would appeal to the poker masses.

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