The Poker Book of the Future

The second is that books for poker players are more than just instructional manuals for the game; they are entertainments, sources of gossip, and occasionally real works of Art in themselves. In the last year I feel I’ve seen enough signs of of innovation to make me hopeful that poker books might be on the verge of a renaissance. Even as the primacy of instructional books wanes, other formats are ready to wax.

Mistaking Change for Innovation

Almost all books seem to fall into one of three categories, each with a pretty standard structure and format by now: There is the the outsider’s look-see: journalists like Anthony Holden (Big Deal), Al Alvarez (The Biggest Game in Town), and Vicky Coren (For Richer, For Poorer) play some poker and use that as a structure around which to build a more general narrative of what poker is like today.

This formula is being reused early next year by Maria Konnikova, who has spent a year under Erik Seidel’s tutelage and is writing about her time on the tournament circuit applying what she learnt. We’ll see if she adds much to the genre.

Then there is the how to guide, which vary massively in usefulness and consistency, and is perhaps the genre that seems to be struggling the most to remain relevant.

While certain books will remain forever useful as introductory texts – like Sklansky’s The Theory of Poker or the non-hold’em sections of Super/System 2 – there is a definite tendency for the game to move on from one set of strategies to the next. Most books are going to struggle in a market like that, when they are competing against the constantly updating wisdom of forums like 2+2, or the new poker vlogging craze, or indeed Twitch.

Individual coaching is often only an option for the already well-heeled, and it a book can be a nice way to get a distillation of an admired pro’s position on things. But even there one is often beset by a sense of deja vu when you crack open some new text that is meant to revolutionise your holdem play. In the end most of us browse forums like 2+2, for this sort of advice.

The final category is the story, while poker fiction seems to have faded out almost completely (we will come to an interesting exception shortly) there was a time when Damon Runyon’s short stories, and novels like The Cincinnati Kid and The Hustler were big deals worth reading and adapting into Oscar awarding winning classics.

Nowadays poker narrative tends to be (auto)biographical, a perfectly acceptable form and in the case of Molly Bloom’s pithily titled Molly’s Game: From Hollywood’s Elite to Wall Street’s Billionaire Boys Club, My High-Stakes Adventure in the World of Underground Poker plenty journalistic and salaciously sensational.

Unfortunately, a lot of them end up feeling like regular celebrity biographies, full of anecdote and phrased in that rather bland ghost-writerese that they all seem to share.

The main problem with all of these is that the poker book is generally speaking not considered art, and so has languished – like self-help and romance novels – in the reed bed it initially washed up against back in the 70s.

Painless Poker

It is a shame when one looks at what Geoff Dyer and Martin Amis do in their non-fiction that no one seems to be stepping up to make poker books readable. But there seems to be a whiff of change in the air, not just with Molly Bloom’s self-incriminating tone but in a couple of books that came out in the last year and seem to have remembered that reading is not just educational but also edifying.

The first and perhaps most pertinent response to Negreanu’s complaint would be to point at Painless Poker by Tommy Angelo. While on the face of it, it is a book about meditation and mindfulness for poker players, it’s also a kind of novel in which a group of characters are beamed into a symposium like situation to deal with a moment of tilt. It’s also threaded through with Angelo’s memoirs.

Each of the characters at the symposium have their own story and arc, their own plots and shenanigans, all of which unfold along with Angelo’s semi-Socratic dialogue, in which he teaches them meditation. The characters and the reader all learn a bit about life along the way and go off to practice his teachings.

He describes the process on his blog as being different from his other books, “For Painless, I wanted a different model. I wanted it to flow from the front to the back, like a reading book, rather than a teaching book. I had the idea – more like a fantasy – of writing a first draft from beginning to end, plowing into nowhere the whole time.”

The result is an odd book, that is both entertainment and manual but doesn’t seem to sacrifice much of either in the process.

It’s also an attempt to do something genuinely interesting and creative with the form of a poker manual. One we can only hope is in someway replicated by Phil Hellmuth’s upcoming self-help book Positivity.

From Meditation to Medals

Qui Nguyen’s ‘biography’ From Vietnam to Vegas is equally mercurial when it comes to nailing down a genre for it. Although it does tell Nguyen’s story from his youth in Vietnam to his victory in Vegas, the vast bulk of the book is a blow-by-blow of about two-thirds of the hand’s from the final table of his WSOP Main Event win.

The book owes a great deal to Gus Hansen’s Every Hand Revealed but where Hansen’s book is a rather cold account, from his point of view, and frankly not much to look at – From Vietnam to Vegas builds like a novel and is presented beautifully in full colour. There is a central back and forth between Qui and his co-author Steve Blay in which they tease out a central theme of logic versus and in concert with intuition. Qui provides the main thrust of the narrative and Steve chips in additional commentary.

From Vietnam to Vegas is also just a joy to look at, the graphics, charts and table diagrams are all fantastically designed, crystal clear and in rainbow colour. Cardoza and 2+2 would struggle to print something like this on their budgets, but here Nguyen’s victory allowed them to get some real production value behind the book.

It also demonstrated how much room for good design there is in creating a poker account. The visual and textual elements add up to more than the sum of their parts in this case. The hope has to be that other publishers will take books like this as a jumping off point to develop new visual styles.

The Queen of Spades

The third book that gives me hope for the gambling presses was Michael Shou-Yung Shum’s The Queen of Spades in which Pushkin’s classic novella is updated from 19th Century Russia to modern Seattle.

It’s a semi-supernatural tale of the group of casino regulars and employees whose lives are changed for better or worse by the vicissitudes of luck and the occasional child psychic.

The central narrative involves a dealer at the casino who is frantic to discover the rationale behind one player’s – known simply as ‘the Countess’ – strategy. From this seed a weird meditation on luck, fate and irony is born heavily filtered through the lens of Hong Kong gambling movies.

The story is surreal, but the setting is wholly believable, and again great effort was made to push the formal strictures of the Novel. In particular, whenever a card is significant to the action is appears printed as an image embedded in the text. There is also a scene involving a poker game which is interrupted by a table diagram, allowing the following narrative to flow smoothly without constant references to order of play or position.

The visual language of poker non-fiction is used to add to the experience of a poker fiction. It is a work of literature primarily, but it is so steeped in the arrangements of how-to books that it can’t help but let some of that spill onto its own pages.

So Where Can We Go From Here?

The answer is anywhere.

When the status quo runs into trouble there is motivation to experiment, and that means a whole lot of failure and crap, but also a much better chance of something properly great being produced.

I for one am looking forward to sifting through the former for the latter.