Cheap The Education of a Poker Player (Book) (Herbert O. Yardley) Price

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Customer Reviews of The Education of a Poker Player

Sound Poker stragegy laced with colorful life adventures.
Expecting a dry litany of statistics on the various games of poker, I was pleasantly surpirsed at the colorful pictures Yardley painted with the semi autobiographical story of his 'Education of a Poker Player'. The book starts with a shadey near-turn of the century poker room frequented by his youth. Much of the time the book focuses on this relationship with mentor and friend Monty. The book pleasantly shifts from pure strategy, to the philosophy and art of Poker, to the stories of Yardleys middle aged adventures as a code decriptor in China approaching the second World War. The only dissapointment in the book was the abrupt ending, no wrap up. While the story left you wondering what happened with the rest of his life, your knowledge of how to play and win all popular forms of the game Poker will be very much closer to complete

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The best I've ever read on sound poker play.
My dad had this book in his library, in hard cover, more than forty years ago. While in college, and after my first exposure to poker, I came home one vacation and devoured this book.

I have used its teachings profitably ever since.

You can find no better book on sound poker strategy -- and, believe me, I have read them ALL.

In addition, Yardley's tales of actual games during turn-of-the-century Indiana, and later during World War II in China, are priceless.

If you take poker at all seriously, you MUST read this book!

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The Underground Book for Good Poker Players!
I have an old moth eaten, doggie-eared copy of this, in pocket book form. I think I got it for pennies in the discount bin way back when. What a steal! My good friend and I used to practice magic, had all kinds of card books by John Scarne and others. I bought several on card manipulation, and poker strategy. When you like to play around with card tricks, I guess poker just comes along naturally as a game. This book was put aside for a long while, and then one bored evening, I started to read it. Wow, what an entertaining book I thought. It featured colorful stories of a young punk, getting involved with a cagey veteran gambler. What he learned in each of these stories is a strong life's lesson on playing poker.

Actually, if you can believe, and adhere to the next few statements you don't need this book. The book teaches you in an interesting story like format to, play the odds. It teaches you not to go after loser hands, to get out, even if you're leaving money on the table "if" the odds are against you. It teaches there is no such thing as luck. Some nights you can do no wrong no matter how badly you play, but if you play badly in the long run, you will lose! I still recommend you read the book, even if you buy into what I just said. Losers will take exception to this I know, but that's why they lose!

Here are a few of my own experiences. I had attended a mid-west university on a shoestring budget. I was down to my last few hundred dollars, with gas and food to buy for the rest of the semester, nearly three months! I got involved in a poker game that some of the guys did on Friday. It was a popular game with six to seven regulars, and a few occasional players. I'm not one taken to gambling; I'd never bought a lottery a sweepstakes ticket before this, and in the years since, have only bought one in an office pool. Playing for money was serious business to me, and this book served as my bible. The first night I played I was going from memory, the books lessons served me well. I won that night and continued to play for the next few months every Friday. I re-read the book just to bone up on the finer points of playing again, but never showed it to the competition.

In about 15 weeks or so of playing, (not big time games, this was nickel ante poker, we were poor college kids) I lost once, about 8 dollars. The other 14 games (we generally played for about six hours), I routinely won around $15-$30 each evening. The interesting thing about this was that most of the other players, some good, and others very poor, typically won and lost between $5 and $75. Sometimes even the bad players had a good night. Because of the way, this book had me playing, I rarely lost, and neither did I win every hand either. Poker is about odds and tactics not luck. If you are not going to win, you fold!

It was interesting what came of this; my reputation in the game was of someone with great luck, who always "had" the cards. It even enabled me one evening to pull a legendary bluff. I had a friend named Art who had played with me in several games. He was a classic loser, because he was one of these guys, whose greatest fear, was giving away money to a good bluff. Consequently, I'd seen him call people in a stud game, when it was obvious he was beat, even from the "cards on the table"! I had made it a point in many games with him to, "always have the cards" when he was left in the game. One night in a game we played with about a dozen wild cards, I had started by making a bad play. I forgot about all the wild cards, because my regular hand looked so good, and I was still in the hand, well after I should have dropped out. The hand came down to me, and Art. I thought, "oh heck with it", I looked at him, smiled, and raised him the maximum limit. I knew he had me beat, and I knew he had this thing about having to call. He'd never beat me head to head, and I guess something told him it was time to give it up. He folded! His hand was a wild card laced "royal flush"! I had a full house, which was a weak hand, with that many wild cards in the game. Art said later, he was certain I had five aces to beat his royal flush, I'd done it to him too many times before. This kind of mentality is explained in the book. There's a reason the used copies, cost twice what the list price was. Try it out, you'll see what I mean!