[benfranklin]

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The reviews I read on amazon were all very positive.

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I smell a BIG RAT. All of those reviews were short, concise, and very well-written. None of the 5 reviewers had ever written a book review on Amazon before. Typical Amazon reviewers are worse than typical 2+2 posters. They have dozens if not hundreds of reviews, and they ramble on and on. That whole thing is "rediculous". Those reviews are an obvious con job from her PR folks or the publisher.


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I haven't seen anything about the book here and was wondering if anyone has read it and what they thought. Is it worth getting? For just stories? For strategy? For both? How does it compare to the other books out there?

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I read an advance copy of the book which had numerous factual errors about poker. Some of this stuff many be attributable to her co-author, but this is pretty sloppy writing for a pro. I will give the authors the benefit of the doubt, and not comment on those, as they may have been cleaned up in the final editing.

The main body of the book is a combination of her biography and a recounting of her winning an Omaha/8 event at the 2004 WSOP. The chapters alternate back and forth between these two topics. There are a couple of preliminary chapters explaining the basics of poker and poker jargon, along with brief descriptions of the major players in that tournament. There is also a brief final chapter summarizing her winning the Tournament of Champions against Hellmuth, Lederer, et al.

The biography was fairly straight forward, and, to me, largely uninteresting. This is admittedly a personal thing. The only part of her life that I would find interesting are the details of the highly competitive nature of her family. There is nothing new here that Howard has not covered elsewhere. There is a lot of detail on her marriage and her children, both in general and in relation to a poker career, as well as her life-long problems with anxiety/panic attacks. Again, these are things I find boring, not because of the writing, but because of the topic. At the risk of being politically incorrect, the biographical content of the book would generally be of much more interest to women than to men.

She does spend a few pages discussing the Negreanu flame war, without mentioning him by name. She says that this caused her to reevaluate her motives for playing poker, and that she came out of it feeling better about herself than she did before it happened.

Unfortunately, I found the description of the tournament to be generally uninteresting also. There are a few brief glances into the life of high stakes poker, such as:

“Tournaments are much more of a high-variance situation. …Because of the high variance, I have a backer—my good friend Erik Seidel—who puts up 100 percent of the buy-in and gets a percent of the return. In cash games, I play my own money.”

She also mentions that she and Chris Ferguson have a standing 5% mutual sharing arrangement on their tournament play, and thus she had 5% of Chris when he won the Main Event. (She doesn’t mention if that applied to the $2 million she won in the Tournament of Champions.) She also talks about a big cash game against “…the famous Texas billionaire (who’s a fish, so I don’t want to name him).” Oh, really?

But for the most part, the description of the tournament seems very routine and matter of fact, with few good insights into the strategy. The last chapter about the Tournament of Champions, is very good in this aspect. However, this description appeared in much the same detail on her web site some time back, and looks like something tacked onto the book at the last minute. In fact, everything about strategy on her web site is much better than anything in this book.

There are “strategy tips” sprinkled throughout the narrative, but these are of the most elementary level, and of no interest to anyone who has ever read any decent poker book.