Just finished reading Harrington on Hold'em Volume I and I'm a little bit disapointed about some of his statements in the book. Overall I'm glad that I've finally read it, as I've had it lying around here for a while now. Maybe I was expecting a little bit too much from it as I think it is intentionally designed to be more on the basic side.
I barely picked up any new information for my tournament game, but it was interesting to get inside a tournament players head and see what they're thinking.
Before I go on to the points that I found disapointing I should mention that I don't think Harrington is a bad player, in fact he has a very interesting resumé as he's from a chess and backgammon playing background. He also has some pretty good tournament scores.
Here are some things that I can come up with off the top of my head:

- He will say things like raising 99 UTG (9 handed) early in a tournament is bad. You should limp.
Now Harrington advocates a somewhat balanced open limping strategy and that is not what I question. I question the fact that he claims that good players should be limping there. I think this could be misleading to new players.
- In my opinion Mr. Harrington doesn't differentiate between showdown equity and ex-showdown equity. For those of you who are not familiar with those terms, showdown equity is practically your all-in equity. And ex-showdown equity is basically your ev from playing postflop poker. I say this because in some spots he will just look at his preflop odds and decide whether the hand is callable or not based off of his showdown equity when there is still postflop play to come. Naturally the better a player you are the higher your ex-showdown equity will be and the more hands become playable, in particular speculative hands.
- Raise sizing. Again he goes to an extreme and claims that a 5x raise to an open limper in an online tournament is too small as it will not get any folds, because nobody ever folds online. I should add that the hand he's referring to is QJo to an early limper in MP which is a hand that you probably shouldn't be raising anyway, but he says that raising 5x with it is bad and you should make it either 10x or 20x so you can steal the pot. 20x people! Risk-reward-ratio just commited suicide XD. Now I have a feeling he probably wouldn't make that play, but I don't know why he even brings it up. Just say fold QJo in that spot full stop.
- Postflop play. There was a hand where he said that a good player would never just call the flop with a weak top pair, he would raise for information and then fold to a reraise.
This is obviously pretty terrible advice for cash games, and maybe I'm too novice a tournament player to see that it's obviously a bad play to just call w/qt on q73r when bet into... but I definetly think referring to players that just call the flop bad a bit borderline.
I do think there are some spots in tournaments where you should try to push winning pots quickly a little harder than in cash games, but I'm not sure this is the best example. Spots I could think of would be fast playing and never slowplaying unless you flopped huge or giving up a little ev to take down a pot with lower variance, but I don't think this is a spot I would see this way.

All in all Volume II sounds more interesting to me and I'm gonna see if I can dig it up out of one of my moving boxes. Please let me know what you think about Harrington on Hold'em Volume I if you've read it. If your also interested in expanding your NL Hold'em game to tournaments, i definetly think Tournament Poker for Advanced Players by Sklansky is a reasonable read as he does a good job of explaining adjustments that should be made from cash games to tournaments.

Daniell