Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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31 of 32 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Success is not easy, and this book will show you why, April 13, 2005
For the price, this book is definitely worth a read. Matt takes us from his kitchen table home games to the televised event that netted $700k. Here is my short review of the book.
Matt chooses not share all his secrets with us (and he says so). With that exception, you will find his honesty and openess refreshing while enjoying the vicarious thrill of trial by fire at several major tournaments. Most of all, you can learn about the hard work and study it takes to succeed by reading Matt's detailed accounting of how he restructured his game. This is a good book for all aspiring players.
There are some real disappointments such as the sparse chapters on game and heads-up theory, but overall we have sufficient detailed hand analysis to compensate.
Until the publisher or Amazon gets around to it, here are the chapter titles. Keep in mind that the chapters titles are indexes into the authors stages of development more than instructional topics (some exceptions).
01. Learning to Play
02. Texas Hold'em
03. Introduction to Tournaments and Connecticut Poker
04. Intorduction to No Limit Hold'em
05. Hosting a Home Game with Regular Opponents,
and Spotting Tells
06. Tournaments, the Next Level
07. Limit Hold'em, the Next Level
08. Pot Limit, Live
09. Playing as a Manaic
10. Picking Your Game, in Vegas
11. Game Theory
12. Learning Omaha and Stud (at FARGO)
13. Talking Your Opponents to Death
14. The Tournament of Champions
15. Heads-up Theory
16. Analaysis
17. Online Poker
18. Running Bad
19. Televised Poker and Me
20. Cashing Out
21. Postscript
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18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Worth Your Time and Money. , August 25, 2005
If you're a fan of The WPT, you may remember Matt Matros from the championship final table in April of 2004. The hand he went out on to Martin de Knijff was later analyzed unflatteringly by Daniel Negreanu and Phil Hellmuth on "Poker Corner." The author gives an accounting of this play and discusses the situation here in the book's postscript. For his efforts in the championship, he won over 700 grand.
I would have to say that "The Making..." is kind of a hybrid. It is a personal story and also one which attempts to explain poker strategy to the reader. The biggest indication that it succeeds at both goals is that I found it very hard to put down. All of the chapters are readable, which may be due to Matros veering from his mathematics background to obtain a Masters of Fine Arts degree in creative writing at Sarah Lawrence. He seems to make few mistakes and does not dwell on jargon in these pages (and he has a glossary in back for novices). The mathematics background comes across, however, in his personality, and he appears far more Yale than common man. Sometimes a narrator can produce feelings of empathy in a reader, but, in this case, he could not.
As far as the poker is concerned though, this book is surprisingly insightful. Matros is a scholar of the game and appears to be completely devoted to self-improvement. Here, he documents the tremendous growth he achieved over a few short years. The tale is inspirational to pikers like myself who hope for a small percentage of his lifetime cash-outs. I think his observations about the differences between tournament poker and "real" poker are excellent. I had not fully comprehended the disparities until opening this one up. His examination of the effectiveness of the maniac playing style was very valuable. How many times do we sit and watch our calls and raises get steamrolled by lunatics? Yes, they go broke, but so often they redistribute our chips to others before doing so. It's frustrating, and Matros reveals how some personal problems led him to accidentally assume the maniac role at a tournament and achieve astonishing results. We see, through his actions, just how stunningly effective maniac play can be. Even though many of us long for a civilized game, aggression is perpetually rewarded in No Limit Hold'em. Lastly, the chapter on game theory was perfect for beginners. The author gets across many important tenets of the mathematical discipline without alienating the non-mathematically inclined. If you're looking for a poker book that manages to teach as much as entertain, this one is a short-list choice.
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12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Short on Depth, Strong on Story, February 23, 2006
Mike Matros has a bachelors in mathematics from Yale and a MFA in creative writing from Sarah Lawrence, which is itself an interesting combination. One does not normally think of the two sides of the brain converging in a single person, but apparently, it has in the personality of Mike Matros. Matros is a rising tournament player who after writing this book placed 3rd in a WPT event, netting him over $700,000. That story, and others, is related in the book (as a postscript).
Poker books have been around for decades, but due to the sport's recent, explosive popularity, the market has seen a signficant increase in both the numbers published, as well as the creation of new sub-genres. Anyone who is in the market for a book on poker deserves to know where Matros's new poker book fits within this marketplace. Here's my shorthand for the sub-genres of poker books:
1. Technical and Strategic. These books seek to explain, not merely the rules of poker, but strategies and the technical mathemetics needed to become a winning player.
2. Poker Memoir. These books are more about the poker player than they are about poker. They recount stories of bad beats or significant events in the life of the player.
Works that fit #1 are absolutely essential reading for anyone interested in improving their game. Books by writers like Dan Harrington, David Sklansky and Mike Caro fit this category well. Works that fit #2 are not, in a sense, technically necessary but are enjoyable reads nonetheless if one loves the sport. A great example of an excellent memoir book is Michael Craig's recent THE PROFESSOR, THE BANKER AND THE SUICIDE KING, as well as Jim McManus's POSITIVELY FIFTH STREET.
Not all books are simply one or the other, because as the market has grown and expanded, hybrids that are a mix of the two have emerged. These books attempt to combine the best of #1 and #2, but in my experipence, rarely succeed. For instance, a hybrid poker book will focus on poker stories, as well as strategy, in an attempt to make poker strategy more readable and interesting. But in so doing, these books rarely provide enough technical depth on given situations or needed mathematics to be truly helpful. Thus, hybrid books will tend to be the weakest in those chapters that are devoted purely to strategy. An example of this is several of Phil Helmuth's books, which are more about Phil Helmuth than they are about poker.
I consider Matros's book a hybrid, and like most hybrid books I've read, it fails at offering substantive analysis and technical depth of the game. His training in creative writing is definitely evident in reading the book, as he is truly gifted writer of nonfiction. I found myself genuinely liking Matt after reading about him in tournaments. He also does a good job of putting the reader at the table, in certain hands - something which only talented writers can successfully do. He is like Michael Craig, in that sense - he is able to take you experientially into the tension and excitement of gambling, and that alone makes this book worth reading.
But I thought the book was weak in the chapters where Matros appeared to be providing technical information to the reader. For instance, the game theory chapter is slim on actual game theory. We learn nothing about solving actual games; we're simply recounted anecdotes involving problems suggested to an Internet discussion forum, and a prediction by Matros that game theory will one day revolutionize the science of poker. As an economist, I've heard this prediction before - not with poker, necessarily, but with any number of fields. It was once predicted that Chicago price theory would be supplanted by a game theoretic approach, but that day has not arrived, despite the signficant contributions to the field that game theory has made. Hence, Matros came across to me as more of a cheerleader in that chapter than he did someone who could open up the black box of game theory and relate it with relevance to a layperson.
Hence I felt the book was not balanced well, and suffered the fate of most hybrid poker books. It worked well as a narrative about poker-playing, but worked poorly at explaining poker strategy to the reader. Nevertheless, I think Matros understands poker very well, and the few nuggets I did get from the book on playing were helpful.
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