The Professor, The Banker, and the Suicide King by Michael Craig

My Book Review of

The Professor, the Banker, and the Suicide King: Inside the Richest Poker Game of All Time

          This book I read in about three days. Super easy read, and if you like stories about high stakes poker games and what happened in the earliest days of high stakes, this book is definitely for you. I am a huge fan of poker, not only of all the different games but also of the history and stories of the great players in the day.

          The book starts off with describing Ted Forrest, grinding away at the highest games at the time and driving back to the Bellagio poker room. He calls to see if there is a game there and the manager says yes a 10,000 20,000 limit game was going. This was a game 4-5 times bigger than the one he had ever played in, so Ted naturally thought the manager was wrong. Nope. Confirmed. 10k, 20k game going on. I wont tell you what happened, but trust me I couldn't put it down.

           It also describes a person so wealthy that single handed he could bankrupt all the highest stakes poker players in the game at the time. That man was billionaire banker Andy Beal. Imagine that, Andy played a game so big the top card players had to pool their resources ( about 15-20 million max ) to play him! Now how rich is Andy, he is currently worth 7 Billion. If you took that net worth and just earned 4% on the money he would make about $766,000 per day. More than enough to bankrupt "the Corporation" as they were called.

          The Corp was made up of all the usual suspects Todd, Doyle, Jennifer, Ted, and Phil Ivey, lots more that remained anonymous. Without giving too much away of the book, the stories behind the players are well worth reading.

 I absolutely loved the book and if you are a poker story fan this will not disappoint you.

Bennett Onika

           

Book review - The Mental Game of Poker

The Mental Game of Poker

Proven Strategies for improving tilt control, confidence, motivation, coping with variance and more.

Jared Tendler, M.S. with Barry Carter

What can I say? It's an awesome book.

I bought the kindle version about 3 weeks ago and read it pretty quickly on my holidays in Mexico. Like Golf, this is an easy book to read and learn the concepts. In fact the book has already benefitted me on the first reading alone. In order to master them though, it will take you some time and work to truly become a better player through reducing your tilt tendancies and getting to the root of your issues. But really, when has not tilting ever been easy? Although I haven't really sat down to do the tough work yet, my first read through already showed me how valuable this book can be to your overall game. I have bought other books on poker that claim they can alleviate tilt, but they thus far have not worked. I know now why they haven't thanks to this one.

While other books recommend doing meditation and "Zen"ing out, this one tries to get at the root of your issues and understand them so you can be prepared to deal with them by inserting logic. Perhaps that is why it appeals to me as I am for the most part a very logical person - unless I am sitting at a card table. It also teaches a concept that your perfect game cannot be there all the time, but with improvements your worst game and your best games should become better and better over time and with some work.

I am one of those card players which Jared would describe as overconfident. In fact, I think over confident players would look at me and say "wow, he is over confident!". Just by reading the section on how to combat this and how it leads to tilt is quite cool, mainly because I have never looked at myself in this way. I found this part of the book most helpful to me. There are other sections that of course were less helpful, which is ok. Every player is different and anyone that picks up this book should gain insight into the type of player they are, and help improve any weaknesses in their game.

In overconfident players like myself, I feel when I sit down at the table a big part of me truly believes you haven't got a chance in hell of beating me or outplaying me in ANY hand. That's right. Any pot you take down ( which won't be any ) is due to luck, and any one I take down ( which will be all of 'em )  is sheer skill. This inevitably leads me down a path of sure destruction. We all know that there isn't a poker player on Earth that can do that - least of all me. So why do I believe that?

Again I haven't really done the hard work necessary to truly examine my game and where I am prone to tilting. In fact I haven't done it since I started playing over 15 years ago. To be frank , I cannot wait to start to do it. If it can give me the tools to save myself from completely self destructing due to tilt, This book will be worth MANY more times it's retail price.

As a poker player, I am the type that can tilt off my entire roll that I spent weeks methodically building. Jared has stories of other card players that have shared similar stories spread throughout the book, ones I can relate to. This in turn helps me go through what I need to do to make better decisions and ultimately have a healthy respect for my table.

From time to time, I will post how I am doing with my personal journey, in the meantime take some of your bankroll and pick this book up. You will be glad you did. It is a well written book designed to help you learn about yourself as a player and improve. If it saves you one night of tilting off your roll, it will have paid for itself many times over.

Thanks for the insight Jared and Barry.

Bennett Onika

My Next Memorization Challenge, 101 Tournament Moves by Mitchell Cogert

Dear Loyal Followers and Readers,

I had the pleasure of meeting Mitchell Cogert through Twitter and I hope of course to meet him in Vegas next year. I actually bought his book before I knew him, and was really impressed with the "no filler" approach to the book. After all, I don't think anyone likes reading a book where the same thing is said over 200 times for 200 pages or the fact that a book could be condensed down to 50 pages but it is 180 pages long.

I like that he has a short intro, and gets right to the point. He also has boiled away the non essentials and left you with exactly what you need to start to use the moves right away. A great book with "no fillers". Too many books out there regurgitate the same things over and over again, and quite frankly you cannot get through them. One book that comes to mind is Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus. It is a fantastic book for the first chapter. Then it basically says the same thing over and over for the remaining chapters! I couldn't actually finish the book without going insane.

The great part about Mitchell's book is that the moves are excellent, but there are 101 of them. How many of them can you remember to utilize in a tournament? 5? 10? 25? In the past with poker books I would take my favourite parts out and really know those well, and there would be other tools that I could have used for very specific situations, but would not have used them because I simply could not recall all of the information.

I am here to say that this is no longer an impediment. The hardest part will be to organize his information into images that I can cycle through in a live game. Once I do, the actual memorization will probably take about an hour or less, and then I will have the entire contents of the text in my head ready to utilize it for a live game.

Can you imagine memorizing entire volumes of the key information in every text to utilize at a table whenever you choose? How long do you think it would take you to memorize all 101 Tournament moves without training your memory? It would be months, perhaps even the majority of a year to know it cold. I will know them all IN ORDER in less than an hour. I know this seems impossible, but to a trained poker memory artist it is child's play. If you have seen any of the videos I have posted in the last week you know people have memorized far greater amounts of information that just 101 moves.

One day soon I hope to run into Mitchell and he will test me on the spot - "what is move number 65?". I will respond with the appropriate move written in the text.

So starts my goal to commit texts to memory. I would invite you to purchase his book and read it because the information is very valuable. I would also encourage you to train your memory in order to keep it in your head, for that is also very valuable. After all, what good is the information if you can't take it with you?

Until next post, train hard and recall well,

Bennett Onika