“When we get better at poker, we get better at life.”
These are the words of Tommy Angelo, a writer and poker coach who we’ll cover today.
If you want to learn poker strategy, you’ll quickly notice an abundance of information. Today, the online world is full of books, videos, and training courses, so it is important to choose a truly useful source of knowledge. That’s why it's more important than ever to know about people like Tommy Angelo and work like Elements of Poker and Painless Poker.
Who is Tommy Angelo?
Tommy's lifelong passion for poker began at the tender age of 14, after years of admiration from afar. Despite knowing that poker was financially driven, the author dove headfirst into the game.
Throughout high school, the two were inseparable. However, at 18, the author fell in love with bridge, leading to a five-year affair that consumed his every waking moment. A sudden career change to professional music put a halt to the bridge obsession, but poker remained a constant presence.
Over the years, Tommy Angelo’s attention was divided among various games, including scrabble, chess, backgammon, and gin. As the other games faded away, the author found himself once again alone with his first love, poker, just as it had been from the very beginning.
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Summary of the Book
Tommy Angelo is not only the Mafia computer game’s main character but also a poker pro and coach of some famous players, including Phil Galfond. Tommy truly became famous in the poker community after writing the book Elements of Poker. It received a lot of positive feedback and is considered a classic poker book.
Elements of Poker describes the very basics of the game and demonstrates concepts with simple words. If you don't know where to start, Tommy Angelo's work is a great option.
The book is divided into several sections:
- Tommy’s Terms: At the beginning, the author introduces the reader to the terms.
- Universal Elements: The largest section of the book covers different aspects of poker that apply to all forms of the game.
- Table Poker: Live poker instructions for everything from your poker face to the difference between ignoring and not reacting.
- Internet Poker: Tommy covers online poker tilt, multi-tabling best practices, and even the chatbox.
- Cash Games: This short section covers variance, blind dynamics, and game selection.
- Tournaments: This section has useful information on the bubble, ICM, and comparing MTTs to cash games.
- Holdem: Explores some general concepts about the most popular poker format.
- Limit Holdem: Even though this format has lost popularity, the information here will still be useful to Limit Holdem players.
- No-Limit Holdem: Covers stack sizes, buy-ins, pot control, and a small amount of other useful concepts.
- Elements of Performance: The final section explains concepts like wellness, focus, meditation, and other over-arching things that benefit poker players.
While some of the concepts in the book might have become outdated (such as bet sizings and raise strategies), there are a lot of timeless concepts.
Elements of Poker is also a very accessible book in terms of pricing. There’s a copy available on Amazon for around $20, plus several less expensive options.
Along with Elements of Poker, Tommy Angelo also wrote:
- Painless Poker
- Waiting for Straighters: A Preflop Experiment for No-Limit Holdem and Pot-Limit Omaha
- Dailyness: How to Sustain a Meditation Practice
- A Rubber Band Story and Other Poker Tales
Additional Ways to Learn Poker
Books and videos are theory that needs to be put into practice. Play a lot, but don’t forget to analyze complex hands in special software. Flopzilla is great for this. The program will teach you to think in ranges; you can buy it at no extra charge in our Shop.
Some players mistakenly think that practice alone will propel them up through the stakes. However, this is not the case. Playing the game and studying brings familiarity and improvement, and very few players can improve significantly without both.
Luckily, players at all levels can use software and training tools. Programs used to be laborious and complex, but that’s no longer the case. With some personalized guidance from support, you’ll be able to start studying right away.
You can familiarize yourself with the entire assortment of our Shop. In it, you will also find other useful auxiliary programs that will make your game more comfortable, for example, Hand2Note or StarsCaption.
Free Tournaments from GipsyTeam
Freerolls from the GipsyTeam free tournament schedule are also a great way to practice.
Across almost every major poker site, we collect the start times and prize pools for free tournaments. Any day of the week, you can be sure that there are thousands of dollars of prizes up for grabs. You’ll face some high variance at the start, but the freeroll will eventually fall into a more normal style of MTT poker.
Aside from freerolls, you can also use new player rewards to generate real money from zero investment. You can try 888poker’s No Deposit Bonus, working your way from the micro-stakes to low and beyond. When you sign up, you’ll also get tickets for First Depositor Freerolls, which can have $1,000 prize pools and limited registration numbers.
