Customer Reviews

Amarillo Slim's Play Poker to Win: Million Dollar Strategies from the Legendary World Series of Poker Winner

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Play Poker to Win is filled with many of Amarillo Slim's famous anecdotes, as well as some advice about the game itself. You can go into this book not understanding much about the game, and after 1 or 2 reads, play a decent hand.

Not great if you are looking for a book on playing poker really, but good if you want poker humour, and action.

_Play Poker to Win_ isn't the usual kind of poker strategy book. It's about 60% anecdotes (the anecdotes are the usual mix of hilarious Slimmagisms; two or three are repeated from _Amarillo Slim in a World of Fat People_, because they are worth repeating) and 40% poker advice. The poker advice is often over-specific. The reader has to pick through to find the useful advice, and then thoroughly analyze what Slim is saying, working out how to generalize it enough to actually use it. You definitely would not want to use this as your first or only poker reference.

This is offset by the occasional gem of insider thinking, and the exposure to the way Slim thinks about hands and games. If you just read this book with a lively and open mind, you may very well get infected with a winner's attitude, which is worth far more than the price of the book.

Besides, any book that casually calls Former World Champion Phil Hellmuth, Jr. "soft as butter at the poker table. ... only half kidding[ly] ..." (p. 154) has got to be worth a look.