Pre-CALI Conference Reading Materials

The CALI conference and the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas at the same time ... coincidence? I think not! The WSOP began on Friday, June 1st, and continues to Tuesday, July 17th at the Rio Hotel & Casino. The CALI website offers maps and directions to the conference. Here's a Google Map for the Rio and some unofficial pre-CALI conference reading materials. [JH]

Required Reading Before Sitting Down at a Poker Table

No Limit Hold 'em: Theory and Practice by David Sklansky, Ed Mille (2006) Hold 'Em Poker by David Sklansky (1996)

Bigger Deal: A Year Inside the Poker Boom
by Anthony Holden

List Price: $26.00 
Hardcover: 304 pages
Publisher: Simon & Schuster (May 8, 2007)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0743294823
ISBN-13: 978-0743294829

Book Description: In the years since Anthony Holden wrote his classic memoir Big Deal (see below), the poker world has changed beyond recognition. When Holden played in the 1988 World Series of Poker there were 167 starters competing for a prize of $270,000. Since then, poker has become the world's largest single-competitor sport -- at the 2006 World Series there were almost 9,000 players and a first prize of $12 million, the richest in any sport.

What happened in the years between Big Deal and Bigger Deal could never have been predicted: the Internet and television sparked a worldwide explosion in the popularity of poker, one that shows no sign of abating. Poker even has a respectable image these days, much to the disgust of die-hard players. Gone are the seedy rooms of the Horseshoe -- you can't even smoke at the table! -- and you're more likely to find yourself head to head with a film star than an ex-con in Las Vegas.

With the future of online poker now legally endangered in the United States, Holden's vision of the poker boom comes at a critical moment in the game's history. In Bigger Deal, Holden is your guide to the world of the "new" poker -- to the players who dominate the modern game and the personalities behind the multibillion-dollar business it has become -- as he tries once again to win the world title. After all, as Telly Savalas once reminded Holden, a million dollars is never irrelevant. Not to mention twelve...

Big Deal: A Year as a Professional Poker Player
by Anthony Holden

List Price: $15.00 
Paperback: 416 pages
Publisher: Simon & Schuster (April 3, 2007)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0743294815
ISBN-13: 978-0743294812

Book Description: In 1988, best-selling biographer Anthony Holden spent one year living the life of a professional poker player. His mesmerizing account of that year went on to become a classic of the genre, an inspiration to innumerable poker players and poker memoirists who followed. Big Deal is his story of days and nights in Las Vegas, Malta, and Morocco, mingling with the greats, sharpening his game, perfecting his repartee, and learning a great deal about himself in the process. Poker, Holden would insist, is a paradigm of life at its most intense, a gladiatorial contest that brings out the best as well as the worst in people. The heroes and eccentrics of the poker world stalk the pages of this remarkable book, along with all the hairraising, nail-biting excitement of the game itself.

Take Me to the River: A Wayward and Perilous Journey to the World Series of Poker
by Peter Alson

List Price: $24.00 
Hardcover: 304 pages
Publisher: Atria (July 11, 2006)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 074328836X
ISBN-13: 978-0743288361 

Book Description: An overeducated underachiever, he's spent his postcollege decades doing his best not to grow up. Now, having just turned the incomprehensible (to him) age of fifty, and staring down his own mortality, this rambling-gambling bachelor decides it's time to settle down. After years of equivocating, he pops the question to his longtime girlfriend. A wedding date is set for just after Labor Day, and to pay for it, a plan is hatched involving poker and a trip to Vegas.

Alson boards a plane bound for the neon desert on his way to the biggest game in town, the 2005 World Series of Poker. Thus begins Take Me to the River, a first-person account of one inveterate gambler and bad boy's quest to grow up while at the same time compete with more than 5,000 players vying for over $56 million in prize money during a scorching Vegas summer.

Take Me to the River is a hilarious, heart-wrenching tale of Las Vegas and an exploration of what it means to be part of one of the fastest-growing and most popular sports in the United States, at the moment of its apogee, and of the lessons that poker has to teach about probability and luck, good and bad fortune, patience, perseverance, and -- most fitting for a man with marriage in his near future -- commitment.