To start, our next book Further Limit Hold ‘em; Exploring the Model Game by Philip Newall is now available. For those interested, it can be ordered directly from our Two Plus Two Store. If you use the code flh2p2, you can get an extra 10 percent off the sales price.

We’re also working on our next book, Applications of No-Limit Hold ‘em; A Guide to Understanding Theoretical Sound Poker by Matthew Janda. While it’s still too early to give a firm publication date, my best estimate is late April or early May. This is a major work with the book coming in at around 500 pages.

We then expect to follow this text with our next Harrington book, Harrington on Modern Tournament Poker by Dan Harrington and Bill Robertie. No other information is available at this time, but as soon as something specific is known, we’ll pass that information on.

On a different subject, when a little bit of time becomes available, I’ve been playing some limit hold ‘em, and for some reason I began to think about nine-handed versus ten-handed games. Years ago, virtually all the games were ten-handed, but today, except for some games at the smaller limits, they’re nine-handed. I think it’s probably safe to say that almost all players prefer the nine-handed game. But for an expert player, which one is better?

The answer to this seems pretty simple. The most common error that many players make is to play too loose. But what’s interesting is that the better your position, the looser you should play. Thus, many players who play too loose may be playing close to correct in the late positions but not so in the early positions since they do not adjust enough for the positional advantage or disadvantage depending on your position.

So this brings us to nine-handed versus ten-handed games. Notice in both forms, the number of late positions will be the same, but when playing ten-handed you’ll have one more early position relative to playing nine-handed. And there, in my opinion, is your answer. The game with more early positions will produce more mistakes from the majority of players who tend to be too loose, and thus the expert should have a higher win rate in the ten-handed game.

Now I also recognize that there are some counter-balancing forces that do occur when playing nine-handed, but they won’t be covered here except to say that it’s my opinion they do not outweigh the significance of having an additional early position for a loose player to play too many hands. Thus again, my conclusion is that ten-handed games are better for the expert than nine-handed games.

However, it’s also my belief that nine-handed games are here to stay. The players like them better and poker room management also seems to like them better. So in the future, it’s unlikely to see a resurgence of ten-handed games, and in fact, I suspect that many of the remaining ten-handed games, mostly at smaller limits, will become nine-handed in the future.