Book excerpt: In the early 1900s, Charles Goren developed a simple point-count system for the game of bridge. It quickly became the most widely used process for evaluating a player’s hand. It remains to this day the most commonly used process. Its popularity rests with its simplicity since it is so easy to remember. In this book, a similar point-count system is described for the game of Texas Hold’em. It allows players to quickly evaluate the strength of their cards and thereby eliminates the need to utilize, or remember, the many tables of probabilities that are typically included in most of the other books on Texas Hold’em. It takes into consideration more than just the initial two cards a player receives, such as position at the table, size of other bets, stage of a tournament, stack size, and special combinations of cards, such as connected and/or suited cards. After the initial development of this process, it was tested while playing over ten thousand actual hands with solid results. During this time, it was clear that many players enter hands by overrating their cards, which then often leads to unnecessary loss of chips. By using this point-count system, only those cards with a relatively high probability of success are played. Admittedly, there is the unique aspect of Hold’em in which bluffing is important, so topics such as that are also included. This book was written specifically to allow an amateur player to quickly learn a process in which steady winnings are achieved in playing in no-limit Hold’em tournaments. Such tournaments can be a single-table tournament or one with many tables. Such tournaments are available in all the casinos, in cruise ships, or in local friendly games. They are also available online, so there are plenty of opportunities to enjoy this game.