You simply cannot let your opponents know that each time that you raise before the flop that you either have Broadway cards or a premium pocket pair. This would just encourage players to call your raises with mediocre hands and wait for you to miss the flop.

So you have to inject some level of uncertainty into the minds of your opponents and uncertainty causes fear and fear causes them to fold.
You need your opponents to be guessing about the strength of your hand and you need them to be unsure whether that innocuous looking flop has hit you or not because you are just as likely to play an 8-7 as you would an A-K.

Brunson’s poker play creates uncertainty in the minds of his opponents. But even this is seriously negated in today’s modern poker game. Brunson’s opponents were not using note taking facilities against him and were not using software like Poker Office to break his game down.

The environment that is online poker in 2008 is a very tough one and your opponents (or at least some of them) may just know a damn site more about your game than you do yourself.

I have always felt that the real art to reading any poker book is not to blindly believe everything that is in it and to try and think for yourself. Unfortunately to get to this stage requires an awful lot of knowledge and experience. It is next to impossible for a novice player to pick up any poker book and find fault with it simply because novice players do not have the knowledge base to be able to do so.

But the problem with all poker books is that they are a constant in what is a forever changing poker environment. It is that constantly changing environment that makes much of the material out of date in many poker strategy books. But the real test is to try and distinguish between what material is still relevant in the book from the stuff that isn’t and that as previously stated can be a very tricky process for many people.

In fact most novice and intermediate players would simply not doubt anything what they read at all and many would just blindly follow what they read. This in my mind is a major factor for why many poker players fail to make money in poker, many are simply using strategies that are either out of date or attempting to use them in the wrong situations.

But Supersystem is still a classic poker book and one that I would recommend to anyone to read. It still has numerous pieces of nuggets of information that are still highly relevant today and even in online poker games. For instance it emphasises the use of aggression to win pots and aggression is vital if you have aspirations of becoming a winning poker player.

Carl “The Dean” Sampson

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