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Dave Fromm
Expert Hold’em – Shorthanded Hold’em

$59

(8.0)
The probably best DVD’s to date in the “Expert Hold’em” series – a series that focuses on giving serious, and high-quality advice. Some things that came to mind when watching Fromm’s shorthanded limit hold’em advice:

Disc 1- rating: 7.5

· Good concept “Isolation with Position”.
· Also OK: the concept “Illusion of action”. Unfortunately, not a lot of discussion of exact percentages, and of the range of hands that the opposition might hold.
· Not good: When you raise and get reraised by a late-position bettor, Fromm almost always recommends to just call. But why always let the late-position reraiser keep the initiative – why not just reraise him once more, both with your good, great and also simply steal hands, to negate for your bad position, and to put him to the test there and then?
· A starting hand strategy based on position, say like Sklansky created for full-ring limit games, would have seemed appropriate here as well.
· No discussion of how you can / should play on the button when someone else, say the cutoff, makes the “Isolate with position play.” How much should you tighten up, and can you still occasionally play (i.e., four-bet) hands like T♠9♠?
· Good analysis why an ace-rag on the button is a worse hand to three-bet with than hands like 9♥8♥.
· Not a lot of discussion of play from the blinds – this despite the fact that 1 time out of 3, you will be the blind in shorthanded play.
· As to the graphics: Just like with my own Expert Hold’em DVD’s, card pictures have been added later to clarify situations, say to serve as an example to the text. But in Dave’s DVD’s, the specific card values don’t always seem to match 100% with his story.

Disc 2 – rating: 8.5

· Excellent material!
· Good: Fromm uses a “percentage of the time” to analyze the preferred options of betting and checking for instance, rather than just state which play is the best.
· Good focus on relative position in three-way pots. Analysis of squeeze plays, and how to change your strategy in order to put someone in the middle.
· Good analysis of betting scare cards / representing hands because of the texture of the board.
· Good play of checking behind on the flop in an “automatic bet” situation to then raise on the turn with nothing (as some sort of delayed bluff that, when performed sparingly, can give some extra credence, makes your game les predictable and also gains an extra bet because it can induce a turn bet by your opponent who may then fold to your raise – possibly even with the best hand).
· Good: Balancing your play by betting out instead of always going for the automatic check-raise, especially in relatively small pots when your opponent(s) may not yet be committed, whereas a check-raise would / might tie him on.
· Bad: When someone reraises you from late position, Fromm almost always assumes big cards – when they could very well be following his own advice of “Isolating with position” with hands like T♦9♦. After all, if he would make these plays, why wouldn’t others? And just calling the reraise with hands like pocket nines, to then check-fold on the flop if it’s just remotely dangerous, well that may be giving up too much IMO. Why not just four-bet preflop and then keep the initiative postflop so that you will have your opponent guessing – instead of the other way around, where you would let your opponent get away with possibly just a simple positional play.
· Again: Not a lot of hand selection & which hands to defend from the blinds.

Disc 3 – rating: 8

· Another good disc, but sometimes Fromm talks very fast – meaning there may be some kind of information overload especially for those players who are not that familiar with all the terms. He does seem to enjoy both the poker and presenting the shows – meaning that he comes across as a nice and laid-back guy.
· After about 15 minutes, Dave recommends checking back JJ on a T98A board with two spades in a heads up situation. This seems like a bit too risky to me, especially because the pot is rather big and this giving a free outdraw would be a disaster.
· A tiny mistake: Someone with a 7 versus your TT on a QQ7 board is said to have three outs, instead of two outs (the two last remaining sevens).
· Good: Betting scare cards / keeping pots small in order to go for the steal later.
Dangerous: Because Fromm recommends to sometimes check with top pair JT on a T5732 board, or check back with AK on the turn K5T3, both in order to induce bluffs, this means that (because of his rather loose but especially very aggressive tendencies) an even higher percentage of his bets and raises will be bluffs or close to it. If opponents will catch up to this, they will start check-raising or reraising him with a wide range of hands, simply because they know that a very high percentage of his bets are done on relatively light values. And this would be bad, as a large part of Fromm’s successful shorthanded strategy depends on the notion that people will respect his raises.





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