Posts Tagged ‘book review’

My One Minute Recommendation- The Poker Blueprint gets an 8.5/10 for content but a 5/10 for presentation. It contains plenty of great material for players who need help beating smaller stakes online short-handed games, but I fear the often terse, jargon-laden explanations will be too confusing or overwhelming for many players who would otherwise benefit greatly from reading it.

Had Tri Nguyen and Aaron Davis published their e-book The Poker Blueprint several years ago, I would have recommended it in the strongest possible terms. It’s reminiscent of the Cardrunners videos of that era: an opportunity to peer into the mind of a great player but with no real effort at teaching rather than simply reciting information. The information is valuable, no doubt, but processing and making use of it will require a lot of work on the part of the reader. In this day and age, the same material is available in more user-friendly books and videos, so while the content of The Poker Blueprint is easily good enough to warrant the $47 price tag, I can’t offer a whole-hearted endorsement.  Read the complete post...

When I first heard that James McManus was working on a book about the history of poker, I was surprised that such a book had not yet been written and glad that McManus was the one writing it. His first poker book, Positively Fifth Street, is a personal favorite of mine, in no small part because he so compellingly presents the culture and lore of the World Series of Poker alongside the excitement of actually playing in the event. I expected that he would bring the game’s history to life in the same way while making insightful observations about its continued influence on American culture and politics.  Read the complete post...

I can’t say that I expected great things from the memoirs of a man who divided his life between the ranch, the pool table, and the poker table, and while it can’t be called great, Amarillo Slim in a World Full of Fat People is a surprisingly enjoyable diversion.

From his early days as a pool hustler and USO performer to his days on the road with Doyle Brunson and Sailor Roberts and his eventual victory in the World Series of Poker, Amarillo Slim surely led a memoir-worthy life. With the help of co-author Greg Dinkin, he shares his tales of daring hustles, outrageous proposition bets, and near-death experiences with both humor and humility.  Read the complete post...

Michael Craig’s The Professor, the Banker, and the Suicide King takes readers on a behind-the-scenes tour of (at the time) the highest stakes poker game ever played. In search of a new challenge, banking prodigy Andy Beal challenges the best poker players in the world to play for stakes so high that millions of dollars change hands in a session and even these seasoned veterans can barely handle the swings.

As a poker player, I found PBSK fascinating for a number of reasons. For one thing, there were a lot of little details about Bobby’s Room (the high-stakes section of the Bellagio poker room, named for Bobby Baldwin) and the people who play there that I didn’t know. Craig writes for a broad audience, but even as someone who is relatively in-the-know about the poker world, I came away with a much better sense of the culture and traditions of that game. There were even a few regulars I hadn’t heard of, which I suppose is in itself a statement about the nature of the game.  Read the complete post...

Ever since reading Tommy Angelo’s excellent Elements of Poker, I’ve been working on keeping calm and focused while playing live poker. This is no mean feat: the pace is glacial and the company grating. There are a million reasons to zone out, wander around, or get annoyed with someone. My mother, a yoga instructor, recently gave me a Thich Nhat Hanh book, and that, combined with Angelo’s advice, which itself draws largely on the famous Buddhist scholar, gave me some things to work on at the table. Specifically, both advise focusing on your breathing as a way to stay calm and conscious in the present moment.

As I say, I’ve been working on this for a while, and on Day 1 of the PCA, I felt like I was doing it about as well as I ever have. I was a statue, sitting placidly at the table, back straight, hands in my lap, slowly and deliberately breathing in and out.  Read the complete post...

I like old poker books. It’s fun to see how people played, and talked about, the game decades ago. In “The Old School”, I share the best and worst from these antiquated tomes. Sometimes the strategy is laughable, sometimes it is surprisingly astute, but it always provides a unique insight into the history of poker.

Oswald Jacoby was a world-renowned bridge author and player who published 17 books and over 10,000 articles on that and other card games. In Oswald Jacoby on Poker, he turned his considerable card skill to “The Great American Game”.

Originally published in 1940, the book discusses primarily Draw and 5-Card Stud, with some attention paid to 7-Card Stud and to variations of these games. There is no mention of Texas Hold ‘Em, and only the briefest mention of any sort of community card game: Cincinnati, in which players have five cards of their own and five community cards from which to make a five-card hand.  Read the complete post...