Several of the books that changed how people think about poker contain very little strategy. For roughly 20 years after 1957, the only poker book many players had heard of was a codebreaker’s collection of card-table stories, and it spends almost no time on pot odds.
The Education of a Poker Player by Herbert O. Yardley (1957)
Herbert O. Yardley had been the leading American codebreaker of the First World War era and had founded MI-8, the Army’s cryptanalytic bureau. In 1931 he published The American Black Chamber, an account of that work. His poker book came 26 years later, in late 1957, and sold more than 100,000 copies.
Yardley taught draw, stud and jokers-wild games through stories, from the back room of an Indiana saloon where he learned the game to diplomatic card tables in China. The lesson in each of them is that a player wins by working out what is in the other player’s head, and the book was called the standard text of the game until Super/System replaced it.
Super/System by Doyle Brunson (1978)
Doyle Brunson self-published Super/System in 1978 and sold it for $100. Other leading players wrote chapters for it, among them Bobby Baldwin, Mike Caro, David Sklansky, Chip Reese and Joey Hawthorne.
The book set out advanced no-limit strategy that professionals had kept to themselves. Some of them received it with irritation, on the reasoning that it gave away too much and let amateurs catch up to players who had paid for the same education at the table. Brunson himself came to believe the book cost him a great deal of money. He still returned to the format, and a second volume, Super System 2, was on sale in Las Vegas by the spring of 2005.
The Biggest Game in Town by Al Alvarez (1983)
Al Alvarez spent 3 weeks in Las Vegas in the spring of 1981 on assignment for The New Yorker, covering the World Series at Binion’s Horseshoe in downtown Las Vegas, where Benny Binion had started the tournament. Much of the resulting book first ran in the magazine as a series of sketches of the players who came to town each year for the tournament.
Alvarez was an amateur player and a literary critic, and he wrote about Johnny Moss, Stu Ungar, Jack Straus and Doyle Brunson as characters, with their histories and their habits at the table. The book is credited with starting poker writing as a genre and with bringing texas hold’em poker to a general readership for the first time. It is still described, 4 decades later, as the best book ever written about the game, and it is a work of reporting from start to finish.
Positively Fifth Street by James McManus (2003)
Harper’s Magazine sent James McManus to Las Vegas in 2000 with 2 assignments. He was to cover the murder trial of Rick Tabish and Sandy Murphy, accused of killing Ted Binion, a member of the family that ran the Horseshoe, and he was to report on the progress of women in that year’s World Series.
McManus used his magazine advance to enter the Main Event himself. He reached the final table and finished fifth, winning $247,760. The result is a memoir set in both the courtroom and the card room, with long passages of hand-by-hand play from a writer who had expected to spend the tournament watching it. His run came 3 years before an amateur won the Main Event outright, and the book reached readers in the same year that amateur did.
Harrington on Hold’em by Dan Harrington (2004)
Dan Harrington, the 1995 world champion, wrote the first volume of Harrington on Hold’em with Bill Robertie, and it appeared in 2004. Harrington had been a state chess champion and won the World Cup of Backgammon in 1981, and Robertie was a 2-time world backgammon champion, so both authors came to the book from games that are studied move by move. The book treated a no-limit tournament as a series of problems that change with stack size, and it gave players a single number to track them.
That number is M, which Harrington defined as the ratio of a player’s stack to the current total of the blinds and antes. A player with a large M can wait for good spots. A player with a small M has only a few rounds before the blinds use up the stack, and has to take risks sooner. The second volume, The Endgame, divided the range of M into zones, running from green down to a dead zone, with a recommended style of play for each. M and the zones became standard tournament vocabulary.
The Mathematics of Poker by Bill Chen and Jerrod Ankenman (2006)
Bill Chen earned a doctorate in mathematics from the University of California at Berkeley in 1999, and he won 2 World Series bracelets in 2006, the same year this book was published. With Jerrod Ankenman he wrote a rigorous introduction to quantitative methods and game theory as they apply to the game.
The book showed how a player can mix bets and bluffs in proportions that even a stronger opponent cannot exploit. Jeff Yass, who co-founded the trading firm Susquehanna International Group in 1987 and sends its traders to poker tournaments to sharpen their decisions, compared the change the book described to the arrival of quantitative analysts on Wall Street in the late 1980s, and the book is frequently cited in academic research on game-theoretic strategy.
Yardley wrote about getting inside the other player’s head, and Chen and Ankenman wrote about strategies that hold up without reading the other player at all.
The Biggest Bluff by Maria Konnikova (2020)
Maria Konnikova had a doctorate in psychology and did not know the rules of the game when she asked Erik Seidel, a member of the Poker Hall of Fame, to teach her. Their first target was the following year’s World Series. She studied the game for up to 9 hours a day and followed Seidel and other professionals around the world, taking notes on everything from their folding decisions to their body language. Within a little over a year she was earning serious money in tournaments, and the book she wrote about the process became a New York Times bestseller.
The Biggest Bluff is a book about attention and self-control, which is what its subtitle, How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win, promises. Konnikova uses the table to study decision making and luck, and the book records her mistakes along with the wins.
A Starting Point for the Shelf
Read The Biggest Game in Town before any of the manuals. It takes an evening, and it introduces Brunson and the other players whose methods Super/System had already put on paper. The manuals are easier to follow once you have met the players they were written about.
