New book

 

I haven't read this new book by Matt Matros, but with The Mighty Deuce-Four on the cover, it must be good! 

"Poker & Pop Culture"

I recently finished reading Poker & Pop Culture: Telling the Story of America's Favorite Card Game by my friend Martin Harris, aka Shamus of Hard-Boiled Poker. (Amazon link here.) That's it up there on my Kindle, which is how I prefer to read most books these days. It was published six months ago, but I took a while to get through it because of my bad habits of (1) trying to read, like, five books at the same time, and (2) being easily distracted by whichever new one I just bought ("squirrel!") instead of sticking with one until it's finished.

The book has a fair amount of overlap with Cowboys Full: The Story of Poker by James McManus, and that work is cited extensively. If you've read it, you'll probably feel that there are whole chapters of Martin's book that you can skip over lightly. This is especially true near the beginning, where, of necessity, he starts with the origins of the game itself and how it spread.

But then he gets to the core of his subject: how poker appears in and has shaped popular culture--particularly books, magazine, movies, music, television, and radio. Martin has written about many facets of this before, but the essays are scattered around his blog and the various online outlets he has written for; here it's all in one place, plus a ton of details I don't recall seeing before. Martin practically has a corner on the market in this subject matter. Nobody else has written about or researched it as extensively as he has. He has even taught college courses on exactly this stuff.

Let me show you screen shots of some of the things I highlighted because I found them particularly surprising or interesting:

Truth! This is what makes playing poker with tourists in Vegas profitable.

WTF? R U SERIOUS? 66 cards, five suits, and a joker? I can't even imagine how this works. So, where do I sign up?

Also truth. Well, except for the making money part of it.

I don't see how there can be any argument to the contrary.

This sounds amazing. You had me at "Marlene Dietrich and James Stewart." Here's a list of where you can find it on various streaming services.

Back-story to the Kenny Rogers hit. I did not know that Cash had recorded it at roughly the same time. You can hear it on YouTube here. Maybe it's just familiarity, but I think Rogers's version is much better, even though I love Johnny Cash.

When I read this, I said to myself, "No effin' way!" and rushed to YouTube to find this thing. Here, let me save you the trouble, because you have to see this:




Perhaps oddly, my favorite part of the book is the appendix. In it, Martin lists 100 movies either about poker or with a key poker scene, and ranks them, best to worst. (Spoiler alert: "The Cincinnati Kid" nabs the #1 spot, and some piece of dreck called "Zeta One" brings up the rear.) I don't think I could have listed a hundred such movies if my life depended on it.

Between that appendix and the main chapter on poker in the movies, I've highlighted in the text maybe a dozen that sound good enough that I plan to seek them out and watch them. Some I've never heard of before, some are classics that I've inexcusably neglected all these years. My future viewing list includes "Winchester '73," "Rio Bravo," "Silverado," "Dr. Jack," "Poppy," "Tillie and Gus," and "Thursday's Game."

One quibble: The Kindle version has a glitch throughout, in which every ellipsis in the original text is rendered as an ampersand. There are dozens of these scattered throughout the book. But one soon learns to ignore the anomaly.

If the general subject matter interests you--and, since you're reading this blog, why wouldn't it?--then order it from Amazon or directly from the publisher, here. If you're going to read it on Kindle, I suggest buying it from Amazon, because it will be available across all your devices, which the eBook version from the publisher won't do. (Once you have the eBook file, you can install it in any device you want, but you have to do it separately for each one; with Amazon, it's automatic.)

In any format, there is much to learn and enjoy here.

"The Mandibles"

This morning I finished reading a fine new novel by Lionel Shriver, The Mandibles: A Family, 2029-2047. It's set in a frighteningly realistic near-future America after a total economic collapse caused by unsustainable federal spending and debt. Hyperinflation sets in, and US currency becomes nearly worthless. But Nevada secedes from the union and becomes a free, rogue state.

I like how she describes Las Vegas:

The Noble Hustle

I've just started reading The Noble Hustle: Poker, Beef Jerky, and Death, by Colson Whitehead. It's another in the growing genre of poker books chronicling the authors' first experiences at the World Series of Poker. A magazine offered to pay Whitehead's entry fee for the WSOP Main Event in exchange for his writing up the experience, but it turned into a book.

I'm not finding myself a big fan of his style generally, but I admired his opening sentence: "I have a good poker face because I am half dead inside."

I also liked this early paragraph. ("Anhedonia" is a medical term for the inability to feel pleasure.)

I was gonna play in the Big Game and give it my best shot. It was not the National Series of Poker, it was the World Series of Poker, and I would represent my country, the Republic of Anhedonia. We have no borders, but the population teems. No one has deigned to write down our history, but we are an ancient land, founded during the original disappointments, when the first person met another person. I would do it for my countrymen, the shut-ins, the doom-struck, the morbid of temperament, for all those who walk through life with poker faces 24/ 7 because they never learned any other way. For the gamblers of every socioeconomic station, working class, middle class, upper class, broke-ass; for the sundry gamers twelve stories below, tossing chips into the darkness; for the internet wraiths maniacally clicking before their LCDs in ill-lit warrens in Akron, Boise, and Bhopal, who should really get out more; for all the amateurs who need this game as a sacred haven once a month, who seek the sanctuary of Draw and Stud, where there are never any wild cards and you can count on a good hand every once in a while. For Big Mitch and Methy Mike, Robotron and the Lady with the Crimson Hair, the ones who would kill to go to Vegas and will never make it there, my people all of them. Did I sound disdainful of them before? It was recognition you heard. I contain multitudes, most of them flawed. 

"Reading his book is more fun than playing poker"

Ira Glass, of "This American Life," on poker and poker books:

BOOKS: When’s the last time you had time for your own reading? 

GLASS: Christmas. My wife had to work so I went to Vegas for five days. And Vegas for me means I play poker for an hour or two. Then I go to movies, restaurants, and the gym, and I read books. While I was there I finished Katherine Boo’s “Behind the Beautiful Forevers.” That book takes you inside this world of very poor people in India but has none of that National Geographic quality, like someone doing anthropology. You have the same experience you have with great fiction. I also read “Phil Gordon’s Little Blue Book.” That’s my favorite poker book, and I’ve read a lot of poker books. Reading his book is more fun than playing poker. 

BOOKS: How long have you been reading poker books? 

GLASS: I don’t read them very often now, but when I was first learning poker I read all the standards: “Doyle Brunson’s Super System,” “Harrington on Hold ’em” by Dan Harrington and Bill Robertie, and “The Theory of Poker” by David Sklansky. He’s like the Euclid of poker.

Whole thing here.

Things I've been doing

Work, mostly. There has been a steady stream of it, for which I'm grateful.

But I moved here primarily so that I could spend more time with Cardgrrl, and I'm very happy that that has been happening. She comes to my place every Tuesday for dinner (yes, I cook!) and to do laundry (her rental place has no laundry facilities; this will no longer be an issue by July 1, when she moves into her brand-new house, which is almost finished). Then every weekend we get together either once or twice for something fun--like the Chimney Rock hike of the previous post.

Some other recent examples:

A stroll through the gardens at Biltmore Estate (we both have annual passes).

Seeing Shakespeare's final play, "The Tempest," at an outdoor amphitheater, performed by the Montford Park Players.

An evening of barbershop-style singing by the Land of the Sky Chorus.

Reading. (This part doesn't involve Cardgrrl.) I've been plowing through books much faster than I used to in Vegas. I've been here four months now, and I've read:

Denial: My 25 Years Without a Soul, by Jonathan Rauch.

Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity, by David Foster Wallace.

Control: Exposing the Truth about Guns, by Glenn Beck.

Gospel of Freedom: Martin Luther King, Jr's Letter from Birmingham Jail and the Struggle that Changed a Nation, by Jonathan Rieder.

Redshirts: A Novel with Three Codas, by John Scalzi.

Bacon and Egg Man, by Ken Wheaton.

Elders: A Novel, by Ryan McIlvain.

The World Made Straight: A Novel, by Ron Rash (soon to be a major motion picture, having recently filmed right here in Asheville).

A Universe from Nothing: Why There is Something Rather Than Nothing, by Lawrence Krauss.

God, No! Signs You May Already Be an Atheist and Other Magical Tales, by Penn Jillette.

The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins.

And I'm currently in the process of reading three more:

Maud Martha, by Gwendolyn Brooks.

The Joy of Hate: How to Triumph over Whiners in the Age of Phony Outrage, by Greg Gutfeld.

Nothing Gold Can Stay: Stories, by Ron Rash.

How's that for an eclectic list?


And finally, a cat. If you follow my non-poker Twitter feed you are probably sick of hearing about the cat. But I can't help it. I'm in love. Cardgrrl recognized this when I had had the kitty home for only about 24 hours, and the adoption was still on a trial basis (to see if she triggered my allergies in some uncontrollable way), and she didn't even have a name settled on yet: http://www.somebeaut.com/2013/02/26/petting-kitty/

I have only become more smitten since then. Lucy is the best thing to happen to my life since Cardgrrl came along four years ago. She brings me delight and laughter every day. She sits on my lap for a couple of hours a day, sleeping and purring while I work. When not there, she is usually on her window perch about three feet away, often making the most squee-worthy series of cute, snorgling vocalizations.

I am mightily tempted to here produce a photo dump of every exposure that has her beautiful little face in it. But I shall restrain myself and post only a few of the best ones. The first two were taken by Cardgrrl, the rest by me.

Isn't she just the most gorgeous, adorable thing you've ever seen? ("Yes." The correct answer is "Yes.")

So that's what I've been doing since settling in here. To my shame, I still have not reassembled my bicycle and started tackling the hilly streets of Asheville. But that will come when I get the time and sufficient mental motivation.

I do miss all my Vegas friends*, and I miss poker. But in case you couldn't tell, I am very, very happy here.



*Not nearly as many people come visiting in Asheville as in Vegas. So far only one friend of mine has come to town: Shamus came through on his way home from a tournament reporting gig at Harrah's Cherokee in April. He, Cardgrrl, and I had lunch at Juicy Lucy's, which is very near where Cardgrrl's house is going up. This gives me an excuse to re-post my favorite photo of Shamus, International Man of Mystery:

Pocket guide

A bunch of copies of this book were in the magazine rack in the poker room at Mandalay Bay when I was there yesterday. Last week I saw somebody in my Twitter feed mention having picked one up at Treasure Island, I think.

It's a guide to the poker rooms of Las Vegas. Each room has either one or two pages, with details about location, contact information, games spread, tournament schedule, and promotions.

Nothing in the book indicates who compiled or published it, or why. At first glance you'd think that it's paid for by advertising. But the only ad anywhere is the back cover, which is a splash for the Venetian poker room.

A printed book is a strange medium for this kind of information these days. The details change so fast that the book was guaranteed to be out of date the day it hit the stands. And it was. Two of the poker rooms it lists have already closed (Jokers Wild and Aliante Station). One promotion listed expires December 15, another expires at the end of November, and several more at the end of the regular NFL season, further assuring that the book will very quickly be hopelessly outdated. The entry for the Suncoast poker room mentions a promotion that was good only during August!

Even All Vegas Poker, a web site dedicated to tracking what's going on in the city's poker rooms, has difficulty keeping up with the ever-changing promotions and tournament schedules. My understanding is that they call every poker room manager every week to see what's new. My guess is that it's rare that a single day passes without at least one piece of information found in this book changing. When most people are carrying around a web-enabled smart phone, a book like this just doesn't make much sense.

And, by the way, you'd have to be Captain Kangaroo to have a pocket big enough for this "Pocket Guide," which is 5 1/2" by 8 1/2".

Whoever published it also could have used a good proofreader. The table of contents lists "The Strip" a second time instead of "Off Strip" for a section header. It calls the Eastside Cannery the "Eastside Canner." There are odd errors inside, such as a reference to free meal as a "compliment buffet." Fremont Street is misspelled as "Freemont" all three times it appears. The plural of "ace" is written as "ace's." "Please" is spelled "Pleas."

This book is just an all-around mystery. Who produced it? Why? And if you're going to bother with putting such volatile information out in a book format, why such a bad job of it?

Once again, the world baffles me.

"The Superuser"

Last week I saw a flurry of Tweets about the release of a new poker novel, The Superuser, by Collin Moshman and Katie Dozier. It cost only $2.99, and I was kind of curious how the Kindle application would work on my PC and on my Android phone, so I bought the book, downloaded the software to both devices, and dug in. It's a fast read, and I finished it the night before last.

Basic story: Some high-stakes online players suddenly start losing a ton of money to a few unknown accounts. They start investigating and quickly come to understand that there must be one or more superusers, players who have access to their opponents' hole cards. As they probe deeper, they find themselves entangled in a web of deception, scapegoats, conflicting motives, political power plays, and murder.

Most of what I'm going to write here is going to be negative, but I don't want the volume of words that I use for my critiques to obscure or overwhelm this central fact: It's a fun read. If having a few hours of distraction from your cares, immersed in a fast-paced story of crime and intrigue in the poker world, is worth three bucks to you, you will no doubt enjoy yourself with this novel. It's hard to beat it for value on a dollars-per-hour-of-entertainment basis. Most blessedly for the sake of my steam gauge, all of the poker details are correct, without the kinds of howlers that authors unfamiliar with the game tend to include through their ignorance. (The co-authors--husband and wife--are both successful online pros.)

There are some amusing nuggets tossed in for those in the know. For example, one rich online player is said to have a condo with a slide installed for getting from upstairs to downstairs. Hi, Phil Galfond! Another character's name appears to be a slight variation on that of Jimmy Fricke. Assuming that was deliberate, the authors must have gotten a laugh out of making him a sniveling, weasely cop. One online player is said to play under the screen name of "hotjenny314," which is Dozier's Twitter handle. At one point in the investigation they produce a graph of money won against hands played, and it looks just like the famous one that in the actual UB/AP superuser scandal first convinced everyone that there was no explanation except cheating. (In fact, it might be the actual graph from that history--I didn't try to compare them to find out.) And so on. I appreciate little bones like that thrown quietly to those paying attention.

Now for my gripes. There's one potential spoiler, but I'll let you know when it's coming.

First, the high-stakes players hire as an investigator the book's protagonist, Grisham Stark. This makes no sense at all. Stark has three possible qualifications for the job: He's a former cop, he has had some success in poker (he has a WSOP bracelet), and he has been caught cheating at poker, in a live tournament. We are supposed to believe that these multimillionaire, sophisticated online pros pick this guy to investigate the superuser on the theory that it takes a cheat to catch a cheat. But Stark knows absolutely nothing about the subject. He plays so little online that he isn't even aware of the existence of hand-tracking software and heads-up displays. (It is, frankly, implausible that somebody who has won a bracelet and has an online poker account--as Stark does--could be this clueless about the modern state of the game, but that's what we are asked to accept.) He doesn't know how to trace IP addresses or online money transfers. He is a loser at life and at poker. He is utterly unsuited to such a technical investigation. It strains credulity to the breaking point that he, of all people, would be the one hired to crack the case. It seems obvious that the only reason he is chosen is so that he can have a character arc of redemption from his cheating past, but within the universe of the book, his selection is completely ludicrous. Stark's investigation keeps running up against the limitations of his own incompetence, which causes the reader (at least this reader) to keep wondering, "Why did you pick this moron to track down your criminal???"

Next is the typos. There were only a couple of glaring ones, but there are many, many spots where commas are used incorrectly--or, to be more specific, where commas are needed but not to be found. This happens especially around words such as "however" and when a person is being addressed and his or her name is not set off with commas, as would be standard usage. These things bug me a lot, as an inveterate proofreader. They probably won't annoy others as much as they do me, but I'm a stickler for grammar and punctuation, so such errors leap off the page and grab me by the throat, yanking me out of the world of the book for a few seconds every time.

But my biggest complaint is structural--how the novel is put together. In this category I have three specific irritants.

First, these authors are way, way, way too fond of the cliffhanger. The chapters are short--often the equivalent of what would be just one or two pages in a paperback novel--and nearly every one of them ends with some sort of drama bomb. Just now I picked a spot at random, went to the end of the chapter, and there was a typical example. A character is reading an email, and the chapter ends with this: "Then he looked again, and realized that the attachment was far from standard." You can almost hear the Dramatic Chipmunk music playing as the scene ends. The next chapter then picks up with some other character's action somewhere else, and we are forced to wait for the completion of the story from which we were whisked away. I picked another random spot and tried again. This time the chapter ended with, "As he looked inside, he clasped his hands to his face." Of course they don't tell us what he saw that was so horrific. Instead they jump to another character's story.

This kind of thing is completely artificial. It breaks how we expect things to be presented. As a general rule, a movie scene or a novel chapter should be one logical whole. If a character sees something important, well, tell us what it is. The cliffhanger has a place in novel writing, but, like most devices, needs to be applied sparingly. These authors seem to know no other way to end a chapter. The extreme overuse of this technique made me feel like I was watching a badly written TV show, with the writers desperate that I not change the channel during the commercial break. I found it seriously annoying.

The second structural gripe I had was that the authors don't play fair with crucial information. Without revealing too much here, there are important relationships between some of the characters, which these characters are perfectly well aware of, yet Moshman and Dozier withhold these details much longer than is logically necessary simply in order to heighten the "Aha" sensation when they are finally announced. This is, in my opinion, authorial cheating. It's one thing if, say, two characters are brothers separated at birth and they discover that fact in the course of interacting with each other, and we as readers learn it along with them. But the relationships I'm talking about here are known to the characters, and it feels completely artificial that we're deeply into the book before we are allowed to know what the characters know, when we otherwise are given full access to their thoughts and actions.

A related "cheating" problem is that the authors seem to love starting a chapter by describing the action, but not telling us who is involved. They just use pronouns without identifiers, then finally let us in on who we're watching after a few paragraphs have gone by. For example, Chapter 42 begins, "The distinctive beeping surprised him. He opened the text on his work phone. Look at Poker Times news forum top. With a sick feeling in his stomach, he logged on to the poker site and navigated his way to the specified section...." All we can do is guess at who this is we're supposedly watching, until the authors deign to give us a name. This is pure amateur hour--the sort of thing I'd expect to see turned in for a high school creative writing assignment. It does nothing to further either the story line or the reader's emotional experience, in my opinion. It's just irritating.

My final structural critique contains a semi-spoiler. That is, I'm not going to tell you what specific details we learn at the end of the book, but I'm going to tell you the way in which those details are revealed. If you think that will ruin part of the fun of reading, then skip the next paragraph.

POSSIBLE SPOILER PARAGRAPH NEXT

There was a great sketch on Saturday Night Live in its early years, in which (as I recall--it's been a very long time, so forgive me if my memory is faulty in some details) a villain is admonishing other villains about what to do when they capture James Bond. "Just kill him. Don't tie him up while you tell him your master plan. Just shoot him and be done with it." It went on at some length about all the times that other baddies had made this same mistake, spilling their beans to Bond because he was about to die anyway, so what harm could it do? This cinematic device was ripe for parody by SNL, because it's both cliched and dumb. Surely mastermind criminals aren't actually that stupid, are they? Sadly, though, Moshman and Dozier resort to this tired old mechanism for finally explaining who did what and why. One or more of the bad guys literally have one or more of the good guys at gunpoint, about to kill them, when a good guy pulls this old ploy: "You're going to kill me anyway, so it can't do you any harm now to tell me now how it happened," and the bad guys go along with it, telling how the whole plot fit together. Seriously, all you aspiring novel writers, do NOT do this. It is maybe the single most lame, hackneyed way ever devised for revealing to your readers the back story that finally makes everything fall into place.

END OF POSSIBLE SPOILER

OK, that's it for my list of nits to pick. Even though it took a lot of words to lay them out, I want to reiterate that their net impact is not enough to cause me to feel cheated, or hate the book, or wish I hadn't read it, or withhold a recommendation. Things like I've listed may well bother me more than they would most readers, and even with my heightened sensitivity for errors and irritants, I still enjoyed the ride the authors took me on. There's a good chance you will, too.

Ira Glass on poker books

Wil Wheaton mentioned in passing on his blog today something about Ira Glass and storytelling. I'm a hard-core Ira Glass fan, so I clicked on the link, which took me to a series of four YouTube segments, totaling about 17 minutes, in which Glass expounds on the building blocks of good storytelling. If you're interested in doing anything creative--whether or not it involves storytelling per se--I think you should watch them. After discussing what makes a good story, he shares keen insights into how long it takes to get good, and how much crap you have to produce in order to make something really worthwhile.

After I had watched those clips, I started clicking around the related videos, and found this one, in which Glass takes us around a Borders bookstore, highlighting some of his favorite items. In the first two minutes or so, he discusses the poker books he has read that have helped his game the most:

New book from Tommy Angelo

I loved Tommy Angelo's first book, Elements of Poker (EOP), as you might have guessed from the number of snippets from it that I posted here. It's wise, pithy, insightful, memorable, unique, with the most inventive and clever use of language ever put into a poker book.

I was therefore excited recently when Angelo contacted me and asked if he could send me, gratis, a copy of his newest work, A Rubber Band Story and Other Poker Tales. Why, yes, as a matter of fact, you may. I finished reading it last week.

As advertised, it's a collection of 55 stories, all but six of them nonfictional, most or all of which have been published in various print or online venues over the last ten years. I had read maybe three of them before, but the rest were new to me. A couple are quite well known, such as his adventure in folding aces before the flop for no reason other than to prove to himself that he could do it, and his celebration of the beauty of the buy-the-button rule.

The tone ranges from grumpy (rant about the stupid "I want to see that hand" rule) to whimsical (stories of animals playing poker) to affectionate (those about his wife, Kay, and his best friend, Alex). Several made me laugh out loud--especially the punchline to a story in which he managed to make Alex positively apoplectic over how Angelo played a tournament hand. Some of them celebrate his best ideas and plays, while in others he pokes fun at his own foibles, such as acting out of turn because he was busy revising an article on the importance of paying attention.

The tales make for light reading--but if you're not careful, he'll slip in a lesson that might help your game, one about strategy or mindset or bankroll management.

I'll list here the handful of flaws I noticed, even though it's nitpicky of me to do so. Once a copy editor, always a copy editor. Besides, I know that Angelo values getting these things right.

• There is a missing quotation mark on page 22, and another on page 90.
• "BBPH," which can stand for several different things depending on context, is an abbreviation or an initialism, not an acronym (page 44), though, to be fair, there is some disagreement on these labels (see here, e.g.).
• On page 104, a question mark should be after the quotation mark, rather than before it.
• Pages 105 and 106 are reversed in order.

That's a pretty small list of pretty minor quibbles, compared to most of the badly edited stuff I read.

A Rubber Band Story is a fun, interesting read, full of amusing stories and unforgettable characters, told in Angelo's distinctive style. If you expect it to be EOP 2 you'll be disappointed. It's not. But accept it for what it is, and I think you'll have a rollicking good time reading it. (Available from Amazon.com here.)

To give you a sample of the tone, I'm going to close this post with some excerpts from my favorite chapter, titled, simply, "Folding," written in 2006:

I played poker for ten years before I discovered folding in 1984. That's when I met Bobby. He had a big belly, a big beard, and a big laugh. Bobby was like Santa Claus, minus the giving. He just kept throwing his hand away, and he didn't seem to mind. Then he would carry the money away, and the players didn't seem to mind.

So I started folding more often, to see what would happen.... It was so new, so exciting. I was high from it, like an explorer.... But it didn't stop there. Oh no. Before long I got hooked on the hard stuff, like folding on the river when I had a good hand.

Soon I went to Vegas. After a week in the desert, I felt like Charles Darwin must have felt on the Galapagos Islands, having traveled to an isolated land, where he found strange new ecosystems populated by bizarre species. What I discovered on Las Vegas Island was that in the poker ecosystem, at the top of the food chain, sat the folders....

I couldn't get over how comfortable the folders were, with all of it, with the folding, with the comments [about their tight play], and they'd just sit there, behind their tall stacks and long smiles, and muck, one more time.

I was like, okay, I see how this works now. It's like a club. The folders club. Well, whatever it was, I wanted in.

After my first taste of big-time folding, I felt that if I could get really good at it, I could quit my job....

By 1990 I was folding enough to support my food and rent habit. This freed up lots of time for more folding....

My path became a gentle incline that coaxed me up to a sunny ledge where I stopped, and sat, and I looked around in wonder, for I could see the top of the mountain far away and high above, and I could see the bottom, waiting for me, should I neglect my folding.

Adapt or die

This week I started reading a book my sister gave me for Christmas: The Gun by C. J. Chivers. I first learned about this book just before its publication date in October, when the author appeared for a long, fascinating interview on NPR's "Fresh Air," which you can listen to here.

The book is a history of the AK-47, and how dramatically this one weapon changed the way that wars are fought. As an owner of two of the myriad derivatives of the original form (I have a Romanian-made semi-automatic rifle chambered for .223, and a Russian-made semi-automatic 12-gauge shotgun variant, the Saiga-12), I was eager to learn more about this story. However, the book's first 140 pages are spent laying out the 80 or so years of history of automatic weapons prior to Kalashnikov. This was completely unfamiliar ground to me.

What I found most interesting was how astonishingly slow even the most sophisticated armies of the day were to adopt their tactics to the new weaponry. Chivers asserts (page 113):

Military bureaucracies, as they considered incorporating machine guns into their armies, dawdled indecisively in every Western country but Germany. The thinking was fully blinkered. Senior officers recognized the effects of withering bursts of fire upon massed combatants, having heard reports of the felling of heaps of Arabs and Africans who advanced in formation toward machine guns. They were somehow unable to accept what might happen when such fire was directed against their own ranks.

Lest the reader disbelieve Chivers's claim that the world's most sophisticated military commanders were incredibly slow to figure this stuff out, he spends the next 25 pages providing the proof. His mention of "Arabs and Africans" is in reference to stories he has already told about how European colonizers in the 1880s and 1890s effectively annihilated more primitive armies of vastly larger numbers by simply mowing them down as they charged forward with their spears. It was slaughter of an efficiency and ferocity these opponents could not have even imagined when heading into the battle, with those at the rear having to clamber over piles of the bodies of the dead in order to take their turns at being gunned down.

So military commanders certainly understood the power of automatic weapons. But, as Chivers said, it somehow just could not sink into their skulls that their own men were just as vulnerable. In 1904, the Japanese skirmished with the Russians in Manchuria. Even after seeing wave after wave of men cut down, never getting anywhere near the Russian machine guns, the Japanese commanders kept ordering more troops to follow them until there were none left.

OK, so the Japanese are rather notorious for cherishing suidical acts of "courage" in warfare. They're an exception to how modern armies dealt with opponents' automatic weapons, right?

Nope. In World War I, despite having literally decades of experience with machine guns, the mighty British army was still training each recruit that the bayonet affixed to the end of his single-shot rifle was his most important weapon; practice with it constituted the majority of pre-deployment training.

Two years into the first major machine-gun war, the British had still not changed the basic tactic that they had used to attack an entrenched enemy for as long as anybody could remember: sending masses of men charging at the defended positions. This was done knowing that those in front would suffer high casualty rates. But given how long it took to reload older rifles, a sufficiently large number of soldiers would eventually be able to overrun the enemy. In retrospect, it is blindingly obvious that this same approach was sheer folly when the enemy had guns that spat out hundreds of rounds per minute. Somehow, though, this self-evident truth just could not penetrate the concrete, old-fashioned thinking of senior military types, and they kept trying the same thing over and over again, despite repeated heavy losses and little gain.

The insanty reached its zenith on July 1, 1916, in the Battle of the Somme:

Watching from behind their machine guns, German soldiers were amazed. They had weathered fear and frustration through the shelling, waiting for the immense attack they knew was coming. As they peered over their parapets in the sudden quiet, the sights astonished them: thousands upon thousands of men, strolling exposed in neat lines.... "The English came walking, as though they were going to the theatre or as though they were on a parade ground," one German soldier said. "We felt they were mad." Another saw waves in which the men were so densely packed they "were like trees in a wood." Some of the Germans whooped. They were professional soldiers, the product of a German military system in which conscription was nearly universal.... They had never seen such targets before. The time for killing was at hand. One German machine-gun team alone would fire at least twenty-five thousand rounds.

In this withering fire, a Yorkshire battalion, Company A of the Seventh Green Howards, lost 108 of 140 men in minutes. An even more galling destruction fell upon the Tyneside Irish, a brigade of three thousand men, which had to cross almost a mile of open ground behind its own front-line trenches just to reach the British edge of No-Man's-Land. It took twenty minutes under fire to complete this march. Bullets slammed into the soldiers the entire way. The surviving Irish were ordered on, to press the attack across five hundred yards of open space.... Of the three thousand men who had stepped off, fifty fighting men remained. The New Army, Lord Kitchener's grand two-year project to replace the battered British Expeditionary Force with volunteers from all walks of British life--the mines, the factories, the clerks, the schoolhouses--was being cut down in an hour. The Dervishes had fought this foolishly. So had Japanese soldiers, who saw duty in death. Now the British army was doing it, too.

A darker hour for England would be hard to measure. By one estimate, 30,000 British soldiers were killed or wounded in the first sixty minutes. The midday tally reached 50,000. By the end of the day, 21,000 British soldiers were dead, 35,000 wounded, and 600 more had been taken prisoner. The survivors were emotionally devastated. One lance corporal, a signaler who had not been assigned to advance, watched his friends try to cross, only, he said, to be "mown down like meadow grass." He stayed back, weeping.

(Chivers, pp 133-134.)

This colossal failure finally, finally caught the attention of the Allied commanders. It slowly dawned on them that maybe charging massed men across open fields into the teeth of machine gun batteries wasn't the best idea.



Why this historical reflection? Well, even those who have disdain for overly casual or frequent analogies between poker and life in general must admit that poker and war have much in common, and much to learn from each other. One particular truth that they share is this: If you do not adapt your tactics to those of your opponents, you will be defeated.

I see this as having both micro and macro applications. In the micro setting, you have to adapt to the players currently at the table. As an extreme example, I remember a guy who used to come in to the Hilton poker room occasionally. His approach was extreme: He would buy in for $100, then repeatedly move all-in blind--without looking at his cards--until he had either built up $400-$500, or had lost about the same amount. If the former, he would move to an aggressive but at least fairly rational style of play. If the latter, he'd laugh it off, decide it wasn't his day, and go home.

This immensely frustrated some of the other players--particularly the older, nittier crowd. It both offended them as the "wrong" way to play poker, and intimidated them. Their desire for a slow, conservative, low-variance approach was utterly frustrated by this tactic. In the presence of such a wild player, it is clearly a mistake to respond by tightening up even further, but that is exactly what they would do. They would welcome the chance to call his blind all-in, but only if they had aces or kings in the hole. But by doing so, they left lots of money on the table. In order to profit from that extreme degree of looseness, you have to loosen up yourself. A hand like K-J offsuit is a substantial favorite over a random hand, and one you should be willing to take against him (at least one on one; having other players also calling complicates things, however).

As more familiar examples, if you repeatedly try to bluff a calling station, you are just giving away money. If you back down to an aggressive, bluff-happy bully every time, you might as well just hand him your wallet and go spend your time doing something more enjoyable than watch your stack of chips erode.

Maybe the poker situation that most resembles the history related by Chivers is the unwillingness to let go of pocket aces or kings in the face of unmistakable evidence that they are no longer good. When the table rock calls you on the flop and check-raises you on the river when a third diamond falls, aces dwindle in stature to nearly nothing. But time after time you can see people react to such a counterattack by stubbornly moving all-in, throwing good money after bad, refusing to accept the reality of the situation. They might as well be a British recruit trying to charge an entrenched German machine gun with a bayonet.

Then there is the macro sense of adaptation, too. Poker is a game that evolves over time, and one must change with it. The first poker strategy book I ever read (because of its prominence in James McManus's Positively Fifth Street, which was the first poker book of any kind that I read) was Cloutier and McEvoy's Championship No-Limit and Pot-Limit Hold'Em, published in 1997. Consider some of the advice that the authors give on pages 152-156 about how to play ace-king. (The "I" here is clearly Cloutier, with McEvoy acting sort of as his amanuensis.)

Say that you have raised with Ace-King from a front spot and one or two people have called. The board comes with 9-7-3, three suits. What do you do with your A-K? I don't care whether or not I've raised before the flop, I never bet A-K when the flop comes three rags....

By betting you have shut off your opportunity to get a free turn card and
possibly make your hand. If you check-check, you have found out information without it costing you anything. An aggressive player like Phil Hellmuth [Grump notes: It is a separately amazing thing that Hellmuth--now taunted for being overly passive--was once considered to be an unusually aggressive player.] may have a tendency to fire on the flop head-up; that's his style of play. But you can burn up a lot of chips that way. I don't continue with A-K unless I flop a hand that relates to it in some way, a hand with some strength in it....

Now, let's change the scenario: The action is two-handed, but you're sitting behind the other player.... The flop comes three rags and your opponent checks to you. You don't bet: You check right back at him. That way, you're not shutting yourself out. For example, what will you do if he checks, you bet, and then he raises you? What are you going to do with your hand then? So, you may as well take this opportunity that his check has given you and get a free card by checking along....

A lot of players will fire at the pot one time in these types of situations. When they see a baby flop, here they come! But I think they're making a mistake when they do that: You have to give an opponent credit for having something to have been able to call your raise to start with....

If a guy bets in front of me against that nine-high flop when I'm holding A-K, he wins the pot. It's that simple. I don't care what he has, he wins it right there.

Perhaps that advice constituted "championship" play in 1997; I don't pretend to know. But I do know that trying to play either a cash game or a tournament today by following that recipe will get you run over by nearly every player at the table. They will quickly figure out your transparent strategy, bluff you out of your shorts, and not pay you off when you actually do make a hand. You will not win the tournament. You will not make the final table. You will probably not even cash. You will have circles run around you. This is not just bringing the proverbial knife to a gunfight; it's bringing a knife to a machine-gun fight, and you'll be shot to pieces. There is a reason that you don't hear about Cloutier winning any tournaments lately.



Now if you'll excuse me, it's Saturday night of Super Bowl weekend, the Guest Gauge is "very busy," due to the confluence of that game, a UFC match at Mandalay Bay, and the Chinese New Year. I go off in search of poker players foolishly charging across open fields with their pocket aces.

"Most"? Seriously?

Roy Cooke begins his latest column for Card Player magazine (January 26, 2011, vol. 24 #2) with this assertion:

"Most poker books encourage a rigid strategy. Few discuss constantly adapting your play to your opponents' tendencies."

Huh? I've read a good number of poker books, and I can't remember even one of them encouraging use of a rigid strategy. If I had, I think it would have stood out in my mind as so obviously, ridiculously wrong-headed that I would have (1) stopped reading it, and (2) blogged derisively about it right away.

The only possible exception that comes to mind is Kill Phil, but that is explicitly a book for beginners, outlining a strategy (actually, several strategies of varying complexity) by which an amateur can minimize the skill advantage that more experienced players have over him in a no-limit hold'em tournament. Its authors acknowledge that it is not a long-term winning approach to the game, and that readers will need to learn more finesse as they progress.

Even Phil Hellmuth's dated and basic Play Poker Like the Pros describes a few different broad categories of opponents' styles one is likely to encounter, and how one might adjust to play against each.

As a test, I just now pulled out my old (copyright 2000) copy of Poker for Dummies by Richard Harroch and Lou Krieger. In Chapter 2, "Essential Strategic Considerations," I find this on page 34, after description of a semi-bluff that went bad:

"What went wrong?" you ask yourself. "I had the perfect opportunity to
semi-bluff." Perfect, that is, only from the perspective of the cards on the
table and those in your hand. But it was far from perfect if you stopped to
consider your opponents. Your mistake involved considering only the cards while
choosing a strategy. Semi-bluffing doesn't work with players who always call.
You have to show them the best hand to take the money. While there was nothing
you could have done to win that pot, you certainly could have saved a bet on the
river.

Nothing was wrong with the strategy itself. It might have worked if the
cards were the same but your opponents were different. Knowing your opponents is
as important to winning at poker as understanding strategic concepts.

So the most simplified poker strategy book I own or know about, a mere 34 pages in, in the second chapter, is already emphasizing the point that Cooke says "most" poker books do not discuss.

Let's try another sample. This is the 2004 answer to the above publication, The Complete Idiot's Guide to Poker, by the late, great Andy Glazer. He actually gets to it even earlier than Harroch and Krieger did. In Chapter 1, page 7, under the heading, "Poker Is a Card Game and a People Game," Glazer writes:

It is difficult to imagine a game in which context is more important than
it is in poker--where the right decision against Jeff may be the wrong decision
against Phil, or where the right decision against a player who has been winning
for the last 20 minutes would be the wrong decision against someone who has been
losing heavily during that time.

Although many decisions are clear-cut--for example, you would not want to
fold the strongest possible hand in poker, a royal flush--just how you should
bet with your royal flush to maximize the amount you will win isn't at all
clear-cut.

Some players will be intimidatd by an early bet and may drop out; if you're
up against such a player, you're much better off checking and hoping that he
catches some good cards and becomes the aggressor himself. The amount you will
win with this hand can vary dramatically depending on how well you understand
your opponents' tendencies and personalities.

So, again, a book aimed at completely green beginners addresses this point at the earliest opportunity.

I'm completely unable to understand how Cooke could hold this opinion. How many poker books has he read, and how many of them recommended an inflexible strategy, rather than adapting one's play to the table?

Readers, I'm calling on you. If you can recall any poker strategy book that conforms to the description that Cooke says is true of "most" of them, please leave a comment here with the book's title and author, with a page number (and exact quotation, if you feel up to it) where such a recommendation is to be found. My guess is that even with the number of books we have collectively read, we won't come up with any.

A challenge to Mr. Cooke: Can you quote me even one poker strategy book that fits the description you gave for "most" of them? It should be easy, if what you say is true.

I suppose I should add that I happen to enjoy reading Cooke's columns and thinking through the situations he describes. I also adore his rulebook, Rules of Real Poker--it's the best one in print. He is no fool, and it is not my purpose to denounce him as one. This strange assertion is, I think, a rare glitch, but it sure is a whopper.

"Donkey Greedy, Donkey Gets Punched"

I just read a short story by that title, by Steve Almond. It's in Best American Short Stories of 2010, which you should be able to find at any library.

It's an interesting tale about a difficult relationship between a poker-playing psychiatrist and his patient, a professional poker player. The patient might be based on somebody real; he's egotistical, trash-talking, lives in the San Francisco area, a past WSOP winner, who has his own line of poker-themed clothes, and who is married to a psychiatrist. Sound like anybody you can think of?

The tension in the therapeutic relationship spills over onto the green felt, predictably. I'll leave it at that.

Unlike many poker-themed short stories, this one does not betray an author's underlying ignorance of the game by misuse of terminology or unrealistic situations or reactions. I do have to ding it, though, for messing up the cards in the dramatic showdown hand: a king of diamonds on the flop suddenly has become the king of hearts by the turn (though that doesn't affect how the hand plays out). The title, by the way, is the pro player's motto, his reminder to himself not to try to play too fancy.

The story is less than 20 pages long, a fast read, and worth the effort next time you're in a library.

"Poker" in books

You can now search Google's database of books for the relative frequency with which words or terms show up, by year (or decade) of publication. I was curious about whether "poker" would show an increasing trend over time; after all, there were very few poker books written prior to World War II.

I was therefore surprised at the curve generated, showing a peak in the mid-1940s, and a substantial decline since. (There is a little rise just in the last few years before 2000, which might be attributable to the boom in poker and poker publishing, or might just be statistical noise. Too early to tell.)

For comparison, I also checked "blackjack," "roulette," and "gambling." None of them showed the same kind of trend line.

I'm puzzled by this. Maybe a lot of the references are noncontextual, i.e., referring to fireplace pokers rather than to the game. If so, that would help explain why the other words do not follow similar patterns. Or maybe it's a sampling error problem--i.e., a higher fraction of 1940s books that mention poker found their way into Google's database than was the case in the 1980s.

But I really have no solid idea. Theories, readers?

Lost Vegas

I finished reading Dr. Pauly's Lost Vegas a month ago, and promised I'd post my thoughts about it, then never did. The reason is simple, though hard to explain. It's because I haven't been able to figure out what to say about it.

Lemme back up and start with the basics. Lost Vegas is Pauly's intensely personal look at the city, framed around the visits he made here between 2005 and 2008. Though there are a few trips for lesser poker events or just for recreation, most of them were to cover the World Series of Poker, at first for hire, then later for his own blog, as it became popular enough to sustain him via the advertising revenue it drew (or at least this is what one surmises).

As a poker guy, I was surprised to find that the parts of the book that were least interesting were the parts about the poker tournaments. That's likely in part because I had followed the WSOP closely enough during the years in question, including at least intermittently on Pauly's blog, that I knew the stories, so there wasn't much new.

But the real, deeper explanation, I believe, for why the book seems to drag a bit when describing the poker action is that it's no longer so much about Pauly and what he is observing and experiencing as it is about the subject, and there are stretches that become more journalism or history than personal story-telling. The chapter that seemed most out of place was the one about Archie Karas (chapter 32). All of a sudden, Pauly basically disappears as narrator, and we're reading third-hand stories that could have been compiled by anybody. I kept thinking, "C'mon, get back to your own narrative!"

That reaction, I think, is key to understanding what makes most of the book work, and what makes it unlike anything else you have read or ever will read about Vegas: It's Pauly's own story. Nobody else could write it because it didn't happen to anybody else. If you have read his stuff over the years, you know that he has a unique point of view as well as an enviable creative talent for relating it--sometimes deeply insightful, sometimes wickedly funny, sometimes painfully confessional, usually sacrilegious and iconoclastic, always with a keen eye for detail. Most people writing about their lives--even their vacation lives in a place as intrinsically interesting and potentially volatile as Vegas--are, well, boring. Not Pauly. His descriptions of his successes and failures, his adventures, his fears, his devils, his pleasures, his degeneracy, his friendships--these are the book's raison d'etre, and they are a blast to read.

Now let me try to explain why I had trouble figuring out what to write about the book.

First, I've never before read a book in which I know so many of the people described. I am not a deep insider in the poker media circles; I kind of hover around the perimeter, and that's about it. But maybe half of the characters a reader meets in Lost Vegas, including the author, are people whose writing I read regularly, and/or people I've met, worked with, worked for, shared meals with, have as contacts in Outlook or Skype or on my cell phone, played poker with, and a few that I would even call friends. I know most of the real names behind the pseudonyms. I had hoped to somehow parlay this bit of acquaintance into some unique perspective on the book, but nothing ever coalesced in my brain. After a month of letting it simmer, I've given up. The little thrills of "Hey, I know him!" recognition I got from reading about folks in the poker world whose lives have intersected with mine will just have to remain as my own personal pleasures, because I haven't figured out anything to say about them that would be meaningful to anybody else.

But my biggest failing as a writer is this: I wanted to pen a brilliant commentary on why my reaction to Vegas is so profoundly different than Pauly's is. Lost Vegas is all about his love/hate relationship with the city, how he loves the people with whom he interacts here and loves all of the things he can indulge in here that aren't part of his everyday life--but, simultaneously, how those temptations are toxic to him, and how he can't stop the indulgences until they are pulling him down into financial, physical, and emotional ruin. "All I did know was that in less than a year, Las Vegas had brought out the worst in me, magnifying my existing problems, inflaming my addictions, and intensifying my deviancy" (page 91). And, "I frolic. I conquer. I stumble. I crash hard. The missteps rip me apart like shrapnel. The nonstop gambling action soothes me like a lick of ice cream on a hot summer day" (page 182).

I sort of get that on an intellectual level. After all, I see it all around me, day after day. I'm vaguely aware that that's what many, perhaps most, people are experiencing to one degree or another as they visit here--in fact, that that's what they come for.

But I don't get it in any sort of sympatico sense. I'm not interested in gambling, except for poker, and don't get any thrill out of it. I don't drink or smoke or use drugs. I don't care for casual sexual hook-ups. I might be the only single, straight male who has lived here for four years without setting foot in a strip club or a night club, not because I'm a prude, but just because they hold little allure for me. In short, I am basically immune to and unaffected by the very set of temptations that this city was designed to feature. That reaction, as you can tell, is about as far removed from Pauly's as it could possibly be.

I had hoped to ponder this for a while and come up with a dazzlingly genius explanation for why Pauly can come here and experience such amazing highs and lows from the sins of Sin City, while I sit in the middle of it all, year after year, and say, "Meh" to it. But, again, after a month of trying to get that particular pot to boil, I've decided it's not going to. He and I are very, very different personalities, and I don't think any amout of verbiage I could throw at the question will be able to probe any deeper than that.

And maybe that's why I enjoyed the book so much--because his way of being in the world, and specifically of being in Las Vegas, is so thoroughly a contrast to my own. Pauly sees the same things that I see every day, but experiences them with emotions that they just don't generate in me, and it was delightful and thrilling to get inside the mind of a wholly different, articulate observer--sort of a Being John Malkovich kind of sensation.

I was about to list here the handful of typos I spotted. I can't help noticing them--I started doing copy editing in high school, and once a copy editor always a copy editor. But now it just seems petty to do so, and probably too boring to read, so skip it. I'll just say that for a self-published, self-edited book, it is blessedly light on such errors.

I hope I won't be abusing copyright fair-use doctrine to insert here a few of my favorite bits, to give you a flavor of the writing:

[Page 20] The Wild Wild West was a low budget casino, a side of Las Vegas
missing from guidebooks and travel magazines. Now I understood why. It was like
walking into a time machine and zapping yourself back to 1981. The clientele at
the Wild Wild West were older than Bob Hope and sat at the bar in silence while
drinking $1.49 draft beer specials and chasing keno jackpots. Geriatric ladies
shoved pennies into slot machines in between huffs on bulky oxygen tanks
attached to the backs of their wheelchairs. It was a hospice with slots, and the
owners were more than happy to accept the remnants of Social Security checks.

[Page 24] I gazed at the skyline of the faux New York City in the distance.
The collective fakeness of The Strip's carbon copy of NYC made me even more
homesick. I finally trudged back inside to log onto Party Poker. If you ever
want to feel like a degenerate loser, play online poker in Las Vegas on a
dial-up connection. Sylvia Plath level depression began sinking in as I missed
another flush draw and realized I was smoking my last bit of ganja. I considered
turning on the oven and sealing my windows to escape my misery.

[Page 62] In less-sanitized terms, Binion's turned into a piece of shit
after Becky ran her deceased father's casino into the ground. What Binion's
lacked in class, it made up in character. The lighting was intentionally poor in
order to shield your eyes from the dismal plight of its inhabitants. Depending
on where you stood the schizophrenic air-conditioning would either freeze your
tits solid or leave you sweating your ass off. If you dropped money on the
floor, you were better off letting it rot than risk contracting some form of
flesh-eating bacteria trying to pick it up. The waitresses were hot pieces of
ass--during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Binion's perpetually smelled of Ben-Gay,
stale cigars, and a truck stop urinal. Downtown's dinginess made it a perfect
backdrop for the Main Event. When you have to step over people lying in puddles
of their own urine on Fremont Street in order to walk into the Horseshoe, it's a
harsh reminder that you're only one bad beat away from lying face down in the
gutter yourself.

[Page 73] I thought about philosophers like Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and
Sartre and how the face of 20th Century philosophy might have changed if they
had frequented Las Vegas. How could you maintain a meaningless and bleak existence when your face was buried in the chest of a tweaking former homecoming queen who used your nose as her personal ass-battering ram?

[Page 137] On the first day, I wagered more money than my old man used to
make in a month humping a shitty desk job for an insurance company in Midtown
Manhattan. I only won two of my four games in a gut-wrenching session, but won
my monster bet on UCLA. Seriously, nothing in this life is sweeter than cashing
a monster ticket at the sports book and counting along inside my head with the
cashier as she counts out my winnings in front of me. I have to wipe the drool
from my mouth and hide my erection as the cashier slides the stack of money
toward me.

[Page 138] The UNLV loss wiped out all of my profit from the first day. I
stewed in a pot of gambler's rage. I tore up a couple of my losing tickets and
watched the small pieces of paper flutter to the carpet. If I had been alone at
home when I suffered those losses, I would have punched a hole in the wall or
tossed an entire litter of kittens into the microwave. Consumed with ire, all I
wanted to do was head-butt the lone Oregon Ducks fan in the sports book.

[Page 237] The guilt-ridden sinners hide from the sneers of God and become
the wayward refugees that pious little Mormon children pray for every night.
Thousands of citizens with good reputations, solid marriages, and impeccable
criminal records become shattered casualties in hazy weekends of Dionysian
decadence while holed up in a room at the Stratosphere shooting pharmaceutical
cocaine into the veins of their feet with a 21-year-old from Boise who moved to
Vegas to become a blackjack dealer but ended up on the pole. After she orders
$500 in room service and clogs up the toilet with a nasty case of diarrhea,
another sucker realizes that he should have waited to sober up before slurring
marital vows in front of a fat and sweaty Elvis at the Graceland Wedding Chapel.

[Page 175] The demons mercilessly poke pin-sized holes in your soul and all
of your warmth, creativity, and morality oozes out to become part of a stream of
hopelessness that flows all the way back to Lost Vegas.

OK, enough of the free previews. If you want more of that, go order your own copy here. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

I can be really, really stupid

Yesterday while I was playing at Binion's, there was a guy across the table from me reading a book when he wasn't in a hand. The book was Check-Raising the Devil, nominally by Mike Matusow, but with more than a little help from Amy Calistri and Tim Lavalli.

I have not read this book and do not own a copy. But I have, naturally, seen plenty of reviews of it in my poker reading, in blogs and in magazines. The reviews almost always include a picture of the front cover, so I was familiar with what it looks like:




I was, therefore, surprised when I saw the book yesterday, because it was plain black, with the title in simple lettering across the front. No photo of Matusow with a satanic 6-6-6 flop in front of him.

At first I thought maybe this was a translation into another language and, hence, with a different cover for some foreign market, because the guy reading it was clearly not a native speaker of English. But no, when he tipped it down to watch a hand, I determined that it was in English. Could it be some sort of special book-club edition? I've had book club memberships, and sometimes the covers differ from the publisher's usual output of a title. I doubted it, though, because I recognized the logo of Cardoza, the publisher, on the spine.

I finally decided that what I was looking at was most likely some sort of pirated, black-market copy, probably produced dirt-cheap in a sleazy third-world country back alley and sold at a price to undercut the legitimate publisher. Even as I settled on that as the most likely explanation, however, I was aware that it did seem a little weird. After all, the book sells to a niche market of poker enthusiasts--not exactly the kind of runaway bestseller that you'd tend to think would attract rogue printers itching to cash in on the frenzy of some girly fictional romance that Oprah had gushed about. I dismissed it as a minor mystery that I would probably never get the answer to, turned my attention back to the poker game, and had forgotten about it by the time I got home.

Today I was reading Lavalli's most recent blog post, and the question of the strangely undecorated book came to mind again, because there's a little ad for it in the margin of the page. It occurred to me that I could pretty easily contact Lavalli and ask him if he knew of any pirating of his work, since I know that he at least periodically stops by here for a read, and has left at least one comment that I remember.

I started composing a note to him. Then, fortunately, I was saved from the embarrassment that would have resulted. I don't know how it happened, but in some sort of weird deus ex machina moment, the answer to the riddle just dawned on me from out of nowhere. In retrospect, it is so blindingly obvious that I am now seriously questioning my sanity:

The man was simply reading a copy of the book with the dust jacket removed.

Calacanis

Have you ever noticed that when you learn a new word, or first become aware of some person or fact, you will frequently run across the same thing again in some totally unrelated, random context very soon thereafter? I have, and I know I'm not alone.

The first time that the name "Jason Calacanis" entered my consciousness was around June 22, when I watched (a day late) the first installment of the second week of the PokerStars Big Game. He was on for that whole week.

But in the last 24 hours, I've been hit wth a Calacanis triple whammy.

First he showed up on a podcast with the Entities of Wicked Chops Poker.

Second, last night I started reading Paul McGuire's hot-off-the-press book Lost Vegas. (Order your copy here.) On page 11 Pauly is describing his first day on Media Row at the 2005 World Series of Poker. He writes of Jen Leo, "She had secured a blogging gig covering the WSOP for a new gambling site created by start-up entrepreneur Jason Calacanis." This surprised me, because I had no idea that he had been involved in the poker scene that early; his conversations on the TV show had made it sound like poker was something he had just recently taken up, but perhaps I misunderstood that. Pauly doesn't mention the site, but with a little probing around the web just now, I think that it must have been Card Squad, which is still online but announced its own demise in early 2007.

Third, I was just now reading Pauly's semi-live blog updates from yesterday, when I spotted the Calacanis name yet again--his bustout hand from the Main Event, seventh item down.

Now, to be fair, a couple of caveats are in order. First, I must have actually heard of Calacanis at least in passing prior to last month, because while digging around for this post I noticed that he was featured in Bluff magazine in the October, 2009, issue. I virtually never miss that publication, so I probably at least glanced over the article, though I'm sure I didn't read it closely. Furthermore, I see now that Wicked Chops has mentioned him at least three times before--here, here, and here; I read their stuff pretty faithfully, so my eyeballs had likely run over the name, even though it didn't stick with me. Second, these recent mentions are clearly not entirely independent of each other.

Still, it's a little freaky to have recently become aware of somebody who is not exactly a prominent player in the poker world, then see his name pop up in three different places in a 24-hour stretch. If he has a publicist, he or she is doing the job well, apparently.

New books

I haven't purchased any books in months, which is a little out of character for me. So today I remedied that with the above order--with free shipping, even! The first item is brand new, just made available yesterday. The second has been out for months, and I'm slightly embarrassed not to have bought my copy well before now--but better late than never. The authors, in case you don't know, are my friends and proprietors of the fine poker blogs here and here, respectively.

Frankly, I think Pauly has a little splainin' to do on why he charges 8.8 cents per page, while Martin's fee is a more modest 6.1 cents per page. Truth may or may not be stranger than fiction, but it apparently costs more. :-)

Weird books

No poker content here. I'm stuck at home sick. Web surfing. Came across this, and it's too good not to share: list of 101 weird books. Go see. I won't even tell you my personal favorites so that you can discover your own.