Rules? No. Not exactly rules. More like good advices.

1. Play on Party and its affiliates.

2. Use PokerTracker

3. Get the PokerTracker Guide

I thought about writing a little something about each of these three things, but really, why bother? I’m pretty certain all of you already have an account at Party and at least two or three of its affiliates. I’m also pretty sure you have PokerTracker and that you’ll agree with me that it’s the best $55 you ever spent. Odds are also pretty high that you already know about Hank and Iggy’s Excellent PokerTracker Guide. No, wait, it’s just called PokerTracker Guide. My bad.

However, you may not necessarily have read it. So I’m here to say that if you follow good advices 1 and 2, and you play limit hold’em, you should send the good folks at PokerTracker Guide $20 for their book. Here are the first two things that come to mind when I think of reasons to buy the Guide:

1. Finding leaks. They give you easy-to-follow advice on finding the leaks in your game. Even at .50/1, these leaks can cost you $5 on a single hand. Stop doing this four times and you’ve saved yourself the price of the book.

2. Evaluating your opponents. They also give you guidelines on how to analyze your opponents. In addition to the usual Loose-Tight and Passive-Aggressive axes, they add a third axis of player evaluation, which I don’t think I’ve seen anywhere before (but I don’t go surfing for this stuff anyway–I need to be spoon fed). This can be very helpful in calculating implied odds and knowing when making your hand will result in the kind of returns necessary to make those loose calls. Backing up this advice is hours of research and analysis on what makes a winning player in limit hold’em. Again, if this works for you just four times, you’ve paid for the book.

Think of it this way: you were smart enough to pay $55 for a great tool (PokerTracker), but now you’re not going to be smart to pay $20 to learn how to use it? Not only are you going to make less money than you could, but you’ve wasted part of the $55 you paid for PokerTracker in the first place.

No, think of it this way: Hank and Iggy command high prices as consultants to big companies. Get their advice for cheap. Buy the book.

No, really, think of it this way: Hank’s a great guy, and they say Iggy’s okay, too. They’ve put out a lot of good advice and information out there for people in the past and they’ll keep on putting in the hours to help out their readers. The way I see it, you already owe them $150 (not me, I signed up for EmpirePoker using BONUS CODE IGGY1). This little book probably took as much time as a year of weekly blogging. Now, through the miracle of Internet technology, you can buy the book and sleep better than you have in years now that you’ve settled your debts and atoned for your sins.