Customer Reviews

Professor, the Banker, and the Suicide King, The: Inside the Richest Poker Game of All Time

5 star:		(40)
4 star:		(20)
3 star:		(9)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Reads like a good novel,a compelling and fascinating look into the biggest limit holdem game ever played. It provides enormous insights into developing a winning approach to limit holdem. A billionaire banker(Andy Beal) actually devised some amazing strategies to play many of the big name seasoned pros at their own game and beat them at times for many millions. If you love poker and story you will really enjoy this book and you will learn and gain insight into your own game. One of the five best books I've read this year.

9/30/05 POST SCRIPT: I didn't read any of the other reviews prior to writing my review and I was so surprised that several reviews state that there is no strategy to be learned from this book. In my opinion there is plenty to work with. One is that Beal minimized any potential collusion by playing heads up-a very important idea if you are afraid of real world or online collusion of any kind. Also, he wrote his own computer program and then additionally hired a computer programmer and spent hundreds of hours analyzing hand values and came up with brilliant ways to play various hands in numerous situations, how various strength hands played versus random hands etc. Much to think about and certainly insightful in improving your game. The fact that he analyzes heads up play is not the point, the point is that an amatuer with the time and energy to think through the game found ways to beat the best players in the world-no small feat.

What an enjoyable book! Michael Craig did a great job in describing sessions of incredible high limit heads-up Hold'em played by the billionaire banker Andy Beal against many great professional poker players in heads-up matches. The pros included Doyle Brunson, Chip Reese, Ted Forrest, Howard Lederer, Jennifer Harmon, Barry Greenstein, Todd Brunson and many more. The book is fun to read and the narrative is free flowing. It's a rare glimpse into the lives, thoughts, fears, and nerves of the high limit pros with a snippet of heads-up strategy. Although this is not a strategy book, it is still definitely worthwhile to read about the players' preparation for the heads-up matches as well as the lifestyles of these high limit pros. In particular, it is interesting to see how Andy Beal (the rich amateur) prepares in order to even the playing field between him and the best players in the world. The pros pool their funds together so they can have the bankroll to play games starting with $10,000 / $20,000 all the way up to $100,000 / $200,000. Each side has their share of wins and losses (I won't spoil who wins at the end). While reading the book, I found myself partially rooting for Beal (the intelligent outsider and underdog), while also partially rooting for the pros (the best at their game should win, right?). I definitely recommend this book to anyone interested in poker.

If you're one of millions who have become intrigued with Texas Hold 'Em, then this book is for you! Michael Craig takes us behind the scenes of a series of cash Texas Hold 'Em games that make the tournaments you see on TV pale by comparison. Imagine betting $100,000 and $200,000 per hand - and it's your money!

The professor, Howard Lederer, gave up a computer science major in 1985 when as a freshman he won $100,000 playing poker. The banker is Andy Beal, a self-made billionaire who earned $50 million plus per year from his various enterprises, including Beal Bank of Dallas. And the suicide king is the king of hearts. Poker players know that the king of hearts holds his own sword at his head, thus the name "suicide king."

A dozen times over four years (from 2001 to 2004), Beal would go to Las Vegas to play heads-up poker at table one at the Bellagio. He'd play against a syndicate of the world's best poker players, including Doyle Brunson, Jennifer Harmon, Chip Reese, and Howard Lederer. (Heads-up poker means that rather than up to nine players at a table, there would be only two - playing each other "heads-up"). Millions would change hands in each game - until over $20 million was on the table during the final game in May of 2004.

The stakes were so high that "flags" (red, white and blue edged chips worth $5,000) were not used. In Las Vegas $5,000 chips are rarely seen, yet the Bellagio has rarer-still $25,000 chips. And even the Bellagio wasn't prepared for a high stakes game of this magnitude. The Bellagio ran out of $25,000 chips to be used in the game!

As Craig describes the action you get a behind the scenes look at the preparation both sides made - and a history of Texas Hold 'Em that few have ever seen. You learn how the top professional poker players, made famous by the televised tournaments, came to the game and gained their poker education, you learn about the legends who kept the game alive until television discovered it. The action is fast, the descriptions vivid, the analysis revealing. This book is a real life pageturner!

What happens when a billionaire decides he wants to play hold 'em poker for millions of dollars against Las Vegas' best pros? That is the subject of this fascinating book. This engrossing account follows the fortunes over four years of billionaire Andy Beal and his quest to beat some of the world's best players at their own game. Driven by who knows what, he challenges himself to better his game against the best while learning some expensive lessons along the way. Millions of dollars change hands back and forth in what was to become the richest poker stakes of all time. But who will prevail overall --- Andy or the professionals??? You'll find yourself rooting for the underdog the whole way. Pick up a copy of this book and you too will be bitten by the poker bug and unable to put it down.

First, I am a marginal poker fan. I didn't jump on the bandwagon like everybody else following the success of the World Poker Tour and the World Series of Poker.

Second, maybe now I will.

The Professor, The Banker, and The Suicide King details the three year period in which a billionaire banker attempted to beat the best professional poker players in the world at their own game. Andy Beal is a self-made billionaire with an obsession to be great at everything he does. In 2001, he took up poker, and rather than attempt to be great at the smaller games, he attempts to be even better at the big games...against the best of the best.

If you're familiar with names like Howard Lederer, Doyle Brunson, Ted Forrest, etc., you'll identify with and enjoy Beal's escapades between 2001 & 2004. Like I said, I am a marginal poker fan (and player) and found this story intriguing and hard to put down. At the same time, I was conflicted on whether to feel sorry for Beal (who gets killed over the three year period, to the tune of about $20 million) or despise him as just another rich guy needlessly throwing his money away instead of doing something for the greater good with it.

Things I enjoyed: The game of poker is certainly not the seedy game confined to the underground like in the past, and Craig does a good job of focusing part of his writing effort on detailing this. He also does a great job profiling each of the professionals Beal attempted to beat during his three year run, as he also does with Beal. He humanizes these professionals rather than allowing them to remain the cold, calculating robots that they may appear to be on television.

Things I didn't enjoy: The epilogue makes Beal a sympathy figure. Following his exploits in Vegas, the professionals (quite possibly misquoted by the media) took it upon themselves to belittle Beal, despite taking a significant chuck of change over the three years. I found it hard to find any sympathy for a man who knew the risks of playing the biggest cash games in the history of the game against people who's job it was to win money from other people.

Michael Craig, The Professor, the Banker, and the Suicide King: Inside the Richest Poker Game of All Time (Warner, 2005)

The interesting thing about The Professor, the Banker, and the Suicide King is that the actual poker game detailed, which went on and off over a period of years, is the least interesting thing about the book. It was limit hold'em, which is much more a game of playing your cards than is no-limit, and lends itself to far less variance. (While the dollar amounts thrown in the book may make that seem like a laughable statement, when it comes right down to it, a unit is a unit. Whether your big blinds are twenty cents or two hundred thousand dollars, a unit is still a unit.) Limit hold'em is normally a game for grinders, those of us who don't mind putting in the time to make one big bet per hour at the table. (That said, the poker books are wrong about that in at least one case; the lower the limits at which you play, the more big blinds you can make per hour, as long as your game is rock-solid. I rarely leave a fifty-cent/one-dollar game before doubling my buy-in, as long as I'm having a winning session. It rarely takes me more than an hour.)Andy Beal was not that guy, not by a longshot, and yet his chosen game was heads-up limit hold'em. Yes, he evened the odds a bit against the world's top hold'em players with his relentlessly aggressive play, but when all was said and done, aggression in a limit game is much less useful than aggression in a no-limit game, especially when each player has $5 million on the table. You push all-in with a stack like that in a cash game and very few players will call you with less than kings. In limit, all you can do is raise another big blind. Still, as I said, the game is far less interesting than the players, and in recognizing that fact, Michael Craig did himself, and those of us who like to read about poker, a great service.

Andy Beal was (still is, probably) a banker with a taste for poker. He also had a taste for buying things no one else would buy just before they got really, really big, which made Andy Beal a very, very rich man. (Still does, probably.) When his business interests took him to Las Vegas, his taste for poker developed into something of an obsession, and having the game's best players at his beck and call prompted him to make a little side bet with himself: could he get good enough to play these folks at their own game? And how far would he have to raise the stakes before the pros were out of their comfort zone? By the time the game had concluded, most every major high-stakes player in Vegas, and a number from California, had gone up against Beal, including both Doyle and Todd Brunson, the late Chip Reese, Johnny Chan, Jennifer Harman, Ted Forrest, Howard Lederer (the Professor of the title), John Hennigan, and a host of others you've heard of if you watch any televised poker whatsoever. Beal would do reasonably well, losing far less than anyone expected him to, then limp back to Texas, do some more research, play a lot more hands, and go back to Vegas armed even better than he was the time before.

But, again, that's not what the book is about. It's about the backgrounds of the people who played in the game. It's about the economics of poker (taking shares, staking people, and all the stuff that no one ever talks about because, let's face it, that math you need for that ends up being more advanced than the math you use in calculating pot odds). It's about a rank amateur and his underdog dream. Good thing Andy Beal did not have an obsession with football. I'm sure the Denver Broncos, for example, would have wiped him out fast. But poker is a game where anyone with a good grasp of the rules, a decent amount of experience, and a dash or two of luck can sit down across a table from Barry Greenstein and end up with all his chips. It's not likely, but it can happen. That's a big part of what attracts us, the amateur contingent, to the game, and Michael Craig--being an amateur poker player himself--understands this and lets it shine through. To me, it's obvious that this is a book written by a poker player for other poker players. The fact that the public glommed onto it is icing on the cake.

Fascinating, highly readable, and for a nonfiction book, incredibly well-paced. Even if you're not a fan of the sport, this one's worth a read. ****

I was looking forward to this book a lot; in the end it's a good piece of journalism about gambling, but it misses the mark as far as poker content is concerned. On the one hand, it has no clear perspective - you'd expect to learn a lot more about the thought processes of Andy Beal (the banker) than you do. Let's face it - he did something spectacular in sorting out some strategies to handle, or at least ward off, some of the biggest name players alive. But we never find out, except at the most superficial level, what those strategies are. Maybe the author doesn't feel qualified to write on that. Most of the stuff on the pros is pretty standard fare, related to lifestyles, not poker styles - Lederer's weight loss, Harman's health issues, Greenstein's philanthropy, etc, and unfortunately there is quite a lot of repetition of these. How many times do you need to know that Todd Brunson doesn't like to wake up early? And again, very few insights into the game. Buy this if you want a good story; don't buy this if you want to learn how any of them wins at high stakes limit hold 'em.

If you're not a poker fan, this book will probably not appeal to you, since its the knowing of the main characters is one of the strong draws to getting you caught up in this book. This book can teach you plenty about head's up poker while you don't even realize it's doing it. This shows what one slightly above average intelligent man can do if he puts his mind to it. This is a guy that went from being a non player to a pro level player in about 2 years. He used his bank's computers to help simulate play and run hand percentages in heads up. He closely watched the pro's and figured out that pro's do not always make the correct plays mathematically. He figured that if he did, he'd win. So, he charted out all the hand's that were most profitable, he figured out hands that would win over 50% of the time regardless of what the other people had, (listed in the book) on his bank's computers, and he became very adept at eliminating all tells, even to go as far as put a little timed pressure switch on his body just so he could always act at the same speed. It's really quite an amazing book and what made it even more intriguing, is it's all true. A great read and 5 solid stars!

Craig's knowledge of the players and the Vegas/LA subculture surrounding them is in-depth and highly researched. I found previous portraits of the scene insipid and boring - full of who had what hands at what big tournaments, etc. I would put this up there with Positively Fifth Street as one of the most interesting poker books in years. Also, really made me love Howard Lederer even more than I already did.

Although this book won't teach you to play poker, you'll be entertained by one man's obsession with winning one of the highest stakes games ever played.