Phil Gordon's Little Green Book

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"It is horribly written. It seems like every fifth or sixth word is "I," and probably 20 percent of the words could be eliminated. I find it amazing that these major publishers don't do basic editing, and Phil Gordon, who I believe is a good guy, should be very upset about this."

--Not to pile on, but this observation is quite absurd. As others have mentioned, this is Phil's attempt to have a conversation with the reader about how he plays. His book is subtitled _Lessons and Teachings in No Limit Texas Hold'em_, meaning the style will be informal and conversational, an attempt to simulate a personal lesson.

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I've hesitated to jump in on this issue so far, but I really can't resist any more. You can count me among those who like the book (a little more than Mason's first impressions, a little less than Mason's second impressions :-), but in my review I also indicated that I found some of the wording to be below my standards.

Note, I have no objection to Phil's almost gratuitous use of the word "I". I think that's just fine. I have other objections. So, I'm deleting the part of the post to which I'm responding that deals with the "I" issues.

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As for the absence of professional editing, in his acknowledgements Phil thanks Howard's father Richard Lederer for spending so much time reviewing the manuscript. I doubt he was working on the strategy sections. By my count, Richard Lederer has published 17 books on English usage and grammar, and is as close a thing America has to a Dean of modern American Usage. I am certain he approved of the manuscript. We should all be so lucky as to have his help with our writing.

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I don't know to what extent Richard Lederer was involved in the editing of this book. I agree that his qualifications on English usage are top notch. However, no copy editor that I've ever worked with would have approved this manuscript. I didn't mark them, and it would take more time than it is worth for me to go back through the book, but I recall at least a half dozen occasions when I was reading through the book thinking "the wording here is just wrong."

Let me relate just one example that I'll have to paraphraise 'cuz I don't remember exactly where it was in the text. There was a sentence of the form, "If I bet into an opponent and they raise me... ." In this fragment "opponent" is singular and "they" is plural. They don't match. I'm sensative to this, because I used to do this. (I'm guessing Phil was doing it for the same reason I used to, it's an easy technique that keeps writing gender neutral. The problem is it's improper.) In fact, I wouldn't be a bit surprised to find that older reviews I wrote contain this flaw, so I'm really not trying to throw stones. However, a mistake of this sort should not appear in a professionally copy edited manuscript. To reiterate, this isn't a quote from the book, but I distinctly recall a mismatch of this form.

The bottom line is that parts of the text use wrong or poor English. This is something I don't expect most readers to notice, but I did, and it annoyed me a little. However, none of these errors detract from the meaning of the text, and I found the content of the book to be quite good. The language problems are a minor distraction from an otherwise fine book. Still, though, I found the quality of language in this book to be below par.