Grab your hoodies and sunglasses, nerds

So it is customary among my people that January is traditionally a time to hole up in somebody's living room for entire days and play board games and drink adult beverages, and this January is no different, except that I suggested we play poker instead of one of our usual board games. And then, because I am me, I was like "But I have to read a book about it first!" Fortunately, there are like a billion poker books out there; unfortunately, it can be hard to find a starting point among one billion books. After some noodling around on the Internet I settled upon Phil Gordon and Jonathan Grotenstein's Poker: The Real Deal: Insider Tips from the Co-host of Celebrity Poker Showdown. Partly this was because the Internet said it was a readable, overview-y type of book, and partly it was because it was one of the books I could actually check out of the Boston Public Library system (apparently some other poker books are listed as reference works and not available for checkout).

It's a fairly short book, only about two hundred pages, and it covers a lot of ground at a fairly shallow level, walking the reader all the way from "Start with a 52-card deck of playing cards" up through a pleasant fantasy of winning the World Series of Poker Main Event heads-up against Phil Hellmuth Jr. As someone who already knows what a deck of cards is and entertains no ambitions whatsoever about becoming a professional, I found the middle sections of the book the most helpful. I'd picked up bits and pieces of some of the topics he discusses (and a lot of the vocabulary) through work, but it was nice to have it set out in a nice orderly fashion so I could see how it all fits together.

As far as providing strategy goes, I think it hits a good balance for being baby's first poker book: There's enough there to let you learn a few things, which are accompanied by little what-would-you-do questions, followed up by a page or so of text breaking down what the right answer is and why. It's a good way to keep track of how well you're learning. I also thought it was pretty useful that the book contains a number of short reviews of other, more specifically focused poker books, so the reader can decide what looks fun to read next or what they maybe need to read next the most based on which of the chapter-end questions they got the most wrong.

Personally, I was unsurprised by what I discovered, which is that grasping most of the general concepts is easy enough but actually doing math in my head is embarrassingly hard. I have not done any math more complex than balancing my checkbook in nearly ten years, and since I am a publishing minion, my checkbook does not deal in particularly unwieldy numbers. One of the reasons I wanted to learn more about poker was that I figured it would give the math part of my brain some much-needed exercise; now, I think exercise isn't really going to be enough--that part of my brain possibly requires necromancy instead. Holy English majors, Batman.

Still, there's a simplified formula for calculating pot odds and a chart about starting hand strength, and I found those worth going back and reading over more than once before even thinking about trying to seek out more complicated stuff.

The weakest parts of the book were the bits about technology and online poker, which have changed drastically in the past several years. The book was written in 2004, which I didn't realize until I was brought up short by running into a sentence advising that the reader practice poker by downloading "small applets you can play on your Palm Pilot." Now that's a sentence that has aged badly. Less comically, pretty much the entire chapter about online poker is now functionally useless, at least if you live in the U.S.

The goofy celebrity name-dropping anecdotes were less than enormously useful from a "how to suck less" standpoint, but they were pretty funny. Gordon writes in a pretty clear, conversational style, with a bit of humor (including judgmental nicknames; my FAVORITE) and a sprinkling of pop culture references. He's pretty easy to follow if you can keep up with the increases in poker-specific vocabulary employed as the book goes on; if you're having trouble with that, there is a glossary in the back.

Probably the most important question, ultimately, is: Does the book help? I can't entirely say, but I think so. Obviously, just reading it straight through once isn't nearly going to be enough to develop any measure of skill; in addition, I haven't gone to a cardroom in the three days since I finished reading it. I had a home game on Saturday, consisting entirely of people around my own level of cluelessness, and I felt like it helped me recognize what we were all doing wrong and why it was wrong more than it helped me actually do stuff right. Which probably isn't that bad, considering. I think I'm going to review all the what-would-you-do questions before I return it to the library, though, and possibly reread the section about pot odds with a pencil and paper to do all the math out longhand.