Book review: Elements of Poker

This morning I finished reading Tommy Angelo's Elements of Poker. I knew in advance that I would like this book, based on others' reviews and excerpts published in Bluff magazine and elsewhere--for example, this gem, one of the fittest descriptions of the game of poker I've seen. (Read all his Bluff contributions here.)

To be sure, there were parts I could have done without: a discussion of tournament equity, a big section on starting-hand selection, pages and pages about breathing. Maybe there's stuff there that I should know, and I don't know what I'm missing, but they didn't seem useful to me.

Way more than making up for those spots, though, are the dozens of places in which he made me think in new ways about old issues and problems. There are few writers that can accomplish that, given the breadth of reading I've done about poker. His way of both thinking and writing is quirky and highly original, traits that I admire. His writing reflects long and deep thought, and exquisite care in the choice of words. (If any poker book has ever contained more clever wordplay, I don't know what it was.)

The whole thing is obviously a product of the author's decades-long struggles with the game--and with himself. The dominant theme is how to tilt less, how to "lop off" chunks of your C-game so that you spend more time playing your A-game. Anybody who claims not to wrestle with this problem is deluding himself.

Another interesting, recurring theme is profit from reciprocality. That is, if every player does everything the same, nobody makes any money in the long run except the house. So in order to be a winning player, you have to do things differently from other players, and differently in a way that makes more money than they would make in the same situation. This is obvious when it comes to purely strategic decisions, such as whether and how to play A-10 from under the gun. But Angelo extends it to essentially everything involved in playing, including how you buy in, how you enter the game, how you speak, how you sit, how you move, how you breathe. Eye-opening stuff.

Rather than cite a few examples here, I'm going to embark on a series of "Poker gems" posts featuring the bits I liked best, maybe one a day or so. It will take a while to get through them, because this book ended up more heavily underlined than anything I've read in a long time.

I should also note that the book is admirably free of grammatical and typographical errors. In fact, I spotted only one (an extraneous apostrophe in "DVDs"--an extremely common mistake). I can't remember the last time I read a book that error-free. It would be an accomplishment for a work from a major press; for one that is apparently self-published, it's extraordinary.

Elements of Poker has its detractors, predictably. See Shamus's discussion of the haters here. Nothing works for everybody, I suppose. But Angelo hits me where I live. His book has already become one of my all-time favorites.