moar poker bookses

I picked up Ed Miller's Getting Started in Hold'em at a gorgeous secondhand bookstore in Harrisburg. Pros: It was dirt cheap. Cons: It was published in 2005, very shortly after the poker boom really kicked off, when everyone was throwing money around and few people had figured out what they were doing yet, so it's possibly kind of dated, and if I knew enough about poker strategy to really be able to evaluate what's still applicable and what's not, I wouldn't be reading books with "getting started" in the title.

But I bought it anyway, for a few reasons. One is that I seem to be doing an entire literature review of poker writing this year, so I figured it'd be interesting to compare/contrast to Phil Gordon's books and to the articles that cross my feeds and to whatever else I'm reading. Also I know Miller has written many more recent books, so I figured if I liked the approach/style in this books that should give me a better idea of if it would be worth my time to seek out and read the more recent ones.

The book starts off with an assurance that "Don't worry! Most of the people you play against will be bad!" which is basically the opposite of what you hear now, which is lamentations that even people who have never sat down in a cardroom before will have read all the books already (can confirm: Have never sat down in a cardroom; plan on reading all the books first. Why wouldn't I?). It also assures the reader that anyone who is "reasonably intelligent" can become a breakeven player pretty quickly, a statement I believe is designed to be soothing but which his basically going to just make me judge myself when I don't pick up stuff as fast as I'd like to, a thing that is already happening (probably at least partly because I am reading 10-year-old books instead of noodling around with Flopzilla like you're apparently supposed to in 2016). I'm also not an enormous fan of the setup (apparently pretty common in more general, beginner-level poker books) of teaching limit strategy and then teaching how to adjust it for no-limit; I've only ever played no-limit so information on limit is probably just going to confuse me and take up precious brainspace that I need for learning to play the games I'm actually in.

On the upside, the book is quite short, clocking in just shy of 200 pages; is written in a clear, concise, and very easy-to-follow manner; suggests concrete, actionable strategies complete with refreshingly simple charts and text callout boxes; and does contain a lot of less stressfully optimistic expectation-setting advice about dealing with variance, developing hand-reading ability (short version: you'll be bad at this for quite a while), and common psychological traps players fall into. There are some places where it diverged pretty sharply from the advice I've been reading elsewhere -- mainly in its suggestion that beginner no-limit players deliberately play short-stacked -- but overall I think it makes sense considering the focus of the book, which is not to teach about what the pros are doing to win the World Series, but instead to get a beginner onto a more-or-less functional TAG strategy as soon as possible so that they don't go broke while learning the game in more complexity.

The big question in any instructional reading is: Did it work? Was it helpful? Poker being poker, by the time I review something I feel like it's always too soon to tell. Getting multiple perspectives and strategy advice from different authors I feel can only help me, since it forces me to think about the material in different ways, and sometimes having concepts explained differently can make them easier for me to grasp. I did reread the no-limit cash game section in the park on Friday shortly before my women's game, and I did make money that night, but this is probably more due to my running decently well and not starting the evening off massively on tilt like I have for some of the past few weeks than it is to remembering anything much of what I'd read that afternoon. But I liked the style, and I'll probably try to scrounge up copies of the more recent and/or advanced books by this author sometime this year.

Zelda Fair and Frankie Key play poker with the devil

Catherynne M. Valente was the Guest of Honor at this year's Readercon, so, although I was trying to be frugal, I just had to get one of her books -- signed, preferably. I've only read two of her other novels and a few short stories, but that's enough to know that she's an absolutely genius storyteller. Her work varies pretty widely in tone and theme, but it's always dense with allusions and myth and the prose is so gorgeous and vivid it makes you want to read it out loud to somebody.

Speak Easy jumped out at me because of its gorgeous cover, which I know you shouldn't judge a book by, but sometimes I do a bit anyway, because that's how book marketing is supposed to work. The Roaring Twenties party vibe is pretty evident right from the get-go, with the font and the art style depicting a short-haired lady smoking a cigarette in front of a pelican what looks like a busy scene of other partying folk, all framed inside a fancy keyhole like the reader is spying on them. It's a pretty perfect representation of the story inside, which is a lushly written novella about the folks living in the magical Hotel Artemesia, loosely adapted from the fairy tale about the twelve dancing princesses (and also referencing it several times), providing a fictional backstory to the tragic marriage of Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Our main character is the mysterious Zelda Fair, who came to New York to find out what she is good at, and while everyone else thinks she's perfectly excellent at being Zelda, she's not contented with that. Nearly everyone else at the Hotel Artemesia has a role, sometimes many of them, and Zelda's so far seems to be to turn heads and show up at parties and try a different job every week until she finds the right one. She lives in an apartment in the hotel with three other girls: a dancer, a theater critic, and a costume seamstress. Several of the men in the hotel fancy they're going to marry her, and they're all wrong, at least right up until the end.

Much of this book is an ode to partying -- to dancing and drinking and dressing up and doing outrageous things and meeting outrageous people, and generally to the power of letting loose and having a good time. But it's not shallow at all, and it's not so much that beneath all the dancing on tables and wearing shiny dresses there runs a desire to be seen and to be loved and to create and to be good at things, but that it's all intimately bound up with it. Zelda has some pretty important things to say about the joys of talking when she's sitting around in a silver dress in a bathtub full of gin, eavesdropping on the other partygoers. And Frankie Key ruins the last party in "Canada" (spoiler: it's not Canada) the same way he ruins Zelda's life: by being grasping and entitled and ruining what he loves by holding onto it so hard it breaks, because he's controlling like that even though he seemed so nice at the beginning, just wanting to be good at something just like everyone else did, but he couldn't leave well enough alone when he finally descended into the wintery underground forever-party that belonged to the master of the Hotel Artemesia, a cheerfully awful godlike type of being called, among other things, Al.

The plot seems to get off to a slow and vague start, with a fairly large cast of characters for such a tiny book, but by the time the whole web of drives and desires and attempts at escapism all come together at the end of the story in a deadly, supernatural poker game, it turns out it was all being set up right at the beginning.

I did not know when I picked up this book that the climactic event of the story was going to be a poker game, since I actually read this to take a break from just reading poker books all year, but I was pretty delighted. The game is called Cretaceous Hold'em, which is pretty hilarious to me, and from what I can tell of the gameplay it does seem to be probably a version of five-card draw rather than a hold'em-style game, but that's Al for you. They don't play with chips, instead betting trinkets and personal items that represent bits of their lives. Frankie essentially wins Zelda in the poker game when he wins all her stuff, including her creativity, because in real life F. Scott Fitzgerald basically stole a bunch of Zelda's writing to use in his own novels and then locked her up in a sanatorium.

I do think the absolute best thing about this book is the language, by turns sumptuous and hilarious, and often both. My favorite line in the whole thing is when Frankie is described as not having "the smooth God gave a porcupine," which is something that I will probably find myself using to insult actual people sooner or later. Basically the whole book is like that. If you don't like paying a lot of attention to the actual words on the page you'll probably despise the book, but if you like to roll around in ridiculous '20s slang and steal new ways to insult people from writers smarter and more creative than yourself, like I do, then it's just about the best thing you could read.

The book cost me $40 because it's a signed special edition, number 890 of a run of 1250, with a special flyleaf framing Valente's signature in a purple keyhole so that it doesn't have to go on the title page like when a regular book is signed. It was well worth the $40, as short as it is, because the physical book is a work of art just as much as the words inside.

My only criticism is that it feels vaguely wrong to read it without an adult beverage in hand, and I really just couldn't stand to do that for several days after Readercon, because in real life partying all night leads to hangovers that make you cranky and tired and not want to touch booze again for days, or at least they're starting to with how old I'm getting. But one of these days I'll probably read it again and I'll make sure I have champagne this time, and maybe somebody to read it aloud to.