[Blarg]

He's a good friend of Alvarez's, and they played a weekly game together for years.

I thought the book was huge fun. I got quite a kick out of it. He had a fun story to tell and he could actually write, unlike many people who write about poker. The best people at things are often pretty mediocre writers about it.

Only thing that annoyed me was that he spoke about playing for a living as if it were quite serious, and took it quite seriously, yet he blew money at a preposterous rate. Not only did he constantly have to go jetting back and forth everywhere at the drop of a hat, but holy mother of...he often did it on the Concorde! You don't have to spend, uh, what was it, 6k or whatever for a one-way trip across the pond. That's ridiculous. And when he found a great game, often as not he would leave the table, the state, or the whole country immediately!

That can make for plenty of different exotic locales that make for a more fun, action-filled book, but then his goal becomes writing the book, not playing a year of poker. That kind of extravagance should have been left to when he had an employer paying for pretty much all of it.

Finally at the end he more or less wistfully says he guesses he just can't play well enough to be a professional. But in my mind, he handled his money so irresponsibly that he never really gave it much more than a very half-assed chance.