If you don't known it (at least I hadn't), Flop is a slang expression for "low-limit, multi-way Texas Hold' Em". So this is one of the many poker books about low-limit hold'em. Every once in a while an author claims to have found a new and easy system to beat the game. Needless to say these system never work and Burke's system is no exception, he calls it The Rule of Eight. His system goes like this: If you assume you don't have the best hand on the flop, all you have to do is follow the Rule of Eight. "First you count your outs, the cards that could appear on the tableau to make your hand a winner. Then you count the active Enemy, the ones already in the hand, plus the number who will likely enter the fray in turn after you bet. If the sum of outs and Enemy after the Flop is equal to eight (or more), then you will call (or raise). That's it. Add your outs to number of opponents still in the hand and add 'em up. If the total is eight or more, then call or raise, otherwise fold."
No need to bother with laborious things like pot odds, implied odds or reversed implied odds. According to Burke the Rule of Eight is all you need to play after the flop. At least Burke tells you the "Rule of Eight works for two or more outs". Otherwise you could play on if you have eight opponents and zero outs! The author tells you that if the conditions for the rule of eight are fulfilled you can call or raise but he never says when you should call and when you should raise - but this is just a detail. The main problem is that the system itself is flawed.
Let's say that you have called with pocket treys and you have seven opponents. The flop comes A-J-T. The first player bets, the second raises, the third reraises, the fourth calls three bets cold and now it's up to you. If you follow the rule of eight you should call (or raise!) if you assume at least two of the remaining players will play. Obviously this is total nonsense. The rule of eight doesn't take into account the action on the flop. But it gets even worse. The rule of eight is a through ticket to see the river. Burke doesn't realize the pot odds decreases considerably on the turn because the size of the bets doubles.
"Suppose in a Lively or NoFE game, there were five players including you who paid three small bets to see the Flop. There'd be fourteen small bets in the pot. After the Flop, you and four Enemy paid one small bet to see the Turn card. The pot odds would be nineteen for one. You'd proceed with only two outs, because two outs offer card odds of one in twelve." It's easy to see what's wrong with Burke's argumentation. With two outs you have a one to twelve shot to improve your hand with two cards to come! That means you have to pay three bets (one on the flop and two on the turn). Given the scenario Burke describes it is completely impossible that you have the correct pot odds to continue with your draw on the turn. Even the call on the flop is marginal at best.
I guess the rule of eight is better than being totally clueless after the flop but if you are playing in higher limit games or against opponents who have some idea what they are doing the rule of eight is a sure way to go broke.

The book starts with player classifications. For this Burke uses a grid. The horizontal axis characterizes the starting hand selection and the vertical axis the level of aggressiveness. The scale goes from 1 to 9 (don't ask me why he doesn't use a 1 to 10 scale). In this diagram a rock is placed at position (1,9) meaning maximum tightness and maximum aggressiveness. Is this the proper description of a rock? Of course not! Here is how Burke describes a player with maximum aggressiveness: "A Nine will bet and/or raise at every opportunity all the way to the River". Does that sound like a rock? That's the description of a maniac, not a rock. In the text Burke characterizes the rock completely different: "If the Flop doesn't yield him top Pair, top Kicker, then he quietly mucks his Ace-King if he senses any resistance."
Funny is the following statement: "A classic rock will play only Aces, Kings and Ace-King as his starting two-card hand". I have seen many rocks playing hold'em but I never saw a player that was so tight that he wouldn't play pocket queens. Player characterizations are fine but characterizations should be correct and adequate and the author should tell the reader how to play against them.

Often the book is unintentional comical. For instance the author wants to know which hands win and how often. He goes to a local drugstore, buys a little notebook and takes that to the poker table. For three hours he records the winning hands. Then he goes home to analyze the data. He realizes that he needs more data. So he goes back to the card room and records the winning hands for another three-and-a-half hours. Having recorded 208 hands ("In 49 of those hands the winner didn't show his hand") he thinks that's enough. No less than four chapters ("Pair Power", "Salients", "Connected Hands" and "Suited Hands") are based completely on "analyzing" the 159 winning hands he recorded. Of course the sample rate is way to small to draw any conclusions. The printed chart "Winning Unpaired Starting Hands by Kicker" shows that you win less often with a king or queen kicker than with a deuce as a kicker and is obviously absolutely worthless. Burke never realizes that what he is doing is methodologically flawed. Self confidently he says: "Of course, data from several thousand Flop hands might show markedly different results, but I doubt it. I have already seen a few hundred thousand Flop hands at the rate of more than thirty thousand hands a year, and the results shown in all these figures aren't discordant."

Burke doesn't tell the reader which starting hands he should play in which position but he makes it clear what hands he plays. Two things are conspicuous: He plays a lot of hands, about 30 per cent, and he likes to raise. In late position he always raises with any hand he plays if there is no raise upfront. "The first few times you raise in late position with a marginal hand like ♠4-♠3 or ♣Q-♣2, your heart, like mine, might be in your mouth, but after a while, you'll get used to it". I'm sure everybody likes to see Mr. Burke playing at his table. Though the book is titled "Flop" there is not much about post-flop play in it, the reader has to live with the rule of eight.

To illustrate his points Burke has included several hands he played. All these examples have three things in common. It shows that the author is a very weak player, that he never uses his own rule of eight and that he usually is way behind on the flop and hits one or two miracle cards to win the hand. Here is a typical example: "On a busy Friday afternoon in May at my local poker room, I was under the gun with ♦A-♦3. The game was Average, with a few tight players to my left, a loose player on my right, and the rest average. I called the $4 and three others called too. I was a little surprised when Myako, the Big Blind, raised, but I called as did three others. The Small Blind had folded, so after the house rake and dealer toke-to-be, there was $38 in the pot.
The Flop came ♠K-♦J-♥4. Myako led out with a $4 bet. I had a backdoor Straight draw, a backdoor Flush draw, and an overcard. That was the equivalent of five outs, although Myako's before-the-Flop raise and opening bet after the Flop suggested that she had pocket Aces, Kings or Ace-King. There was $42 in the pot and it was $4 to me. I was getting 11 to 1 pot odds, and I reckoned that I had about a 10% chance to win the pot. I called. Sharon called. The others mucked. Three-handed we saw the dealer burn and turn." Of course he catches two running diamonds to win the hand. The call on the flop was horrible. In his analysis Burke makes three mistakes.
First he overestimates his winning chance (it's not 10 per cent, it's only 6.7 per cent which is a big difference). Second he overlooks the fact that he doesn't have to beat one but two players. This reduces his winning chances even further. Third there is no card in the deck that gives him the best hand on the turn (the only exception is when an ace comes and Myako holds pocket kings and the third player doesn't have an ace) which means he has to pay for the turn and the river to make his hand.
Basically what Burke is doing here is what many weak players are doing: They pay for the flop to catch a draw. There are 14 hand examples like that in the book. Burke wins every single hand and closes the examples with statements like this: "It took me several minutes to stack the $356 in white chips". If I would hit that many miracle cards I would probably use the Rule of Eight also.

It's interesting that so many low-limit players who can hardly beat the rake and toke feel the overwhelming desire to publish a book and to share their "secrets". Take chess for an example of the opposite. It's rare to see a chess textbook with totally inaccurate information. Sure you don't have to be a grand master to publish a chess textbook but it takes more than to know how to position the figures on the chessboard. Burke doesn't have a solid understanding about the fundamentals of Texas hold'em. If you are a low-limit player looking for serious advice look somewhere else. 

(Tristan Steiger)