Poker Book Review: "Super System 2" By Doyle Brunson

When Doyle’s original work ‘Super Systems’ hit the book stores in the late ’70s, it caused quite a stir as poker enthusiasts gained invaluable insight and learnt in depth secrets from one of the games greatest professionals.
In this update to his original book, Doyle Brunson has done a great job of adding to the volume of his earlier work, by gleaming top advice and experience from a range of modern poker pros including Jennifer Harmen, Todd Brunson, Daniel Negreanu, Bobby Baldwin, Johnny Chan and Mike Caro, to produce a fascinating and comprehensive 624 page compendium of poker.
In Super System 2, Brunson modernises his earlier work by introducing chapters from these contemporary poker pros, and discussing a wide range of poker variants including limit and no limit hold’em, Stud/8 or better, Omaha, and Triple Draw. He has also dropped games, such as ‘lowball’ which have fallen out of fashion since the time of the book’s first publication in 1979.
As mentioned, each chapter is written by an authority on a particular poker game, with Doyle, of course, writing the chapter on his own speciality of no limit texas hold’em. Most fascinating of all, was the power poker style of play Doyle promotes, which is a very aggressive style that should not be confused with loose play. The whole emphasis of the style advocates raising or folding instead of calling, and value betting over the top, in order to force your opponent to make difficult decisions.
Doyle also introduces the important strategy of using aggression to pick up the small pots and using those chips as a freeroll to buy into the bigger pots.
The greatest strength of ‘Super Systems 2’ is that it is a modern work, which expands on the concepts introduced in the original book. It is also a must for those players interested in playing mixed games, especially in the medium-to-high stakes range. Players just starting out in the game will certainly derive much invaluable advice from the book, but might, however, want to adopt a less aggressive approach whilst starting to find their feet in the game.