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As in countless Westerns, poker was used merely as an index of male virility. — Anthony Holden, Big Deal — Let’s finally make the strip-club sign ours: Girls! Girls! Girls! Barriers [...]

You fold because in live cash you answer to no one. You fold because reckless tribal hero calls are for sissies. You fold because you cherish your stack and every dollar counts. You fold because [...]

Poker is hypnotic. A siren call. We enter a weird expensive world in a kind of trance. It takes years to get our brains right and generate profit. So the road to that exquisite Maserati is [...]

Maybe Christian Soto’s right. Light em on fire: Poker books put players in a box. Once the player is in this box, it is really hard to break them out. Poker is a fluid game. Game flow dynamics, [...]

In this early Twilight Zone episode convict James Corry runs toward the rocket ship bringing his supplies. The year is 2046. Corry has been sentenced to a solitary life on an asteroid nine [...]

Fact: women play live poker in tiny numbers. Maybe they’re busy changing diapers or working three jobs or they live too far from casinos. Or maybe they’ve been harassed by tilted aggressive men [...]

How did I learn to fall in love with low-stakes poker’s adorable hard-charging sardines? Patience. Process. Hours. Over time, interlocking levels of awareness composed my Obi Wan fish [...]

As a novelist, I stalk narrative. I get high on connective story tissue. Cause and effect. This begets that. Life and heart stuff. A staunch right-brainer, I’m deeply creative and subjective. I [...]

Phase One: Terror When I left tournaments for a cash life, my poker membrane was still brittle. I grew smarter about the game every session, but couldn’t yet see much beyond my own cards. Those [...]

Why are poker players infants? We can’t have it both ways. We can’t launch ridiculously profitable surprise attacks then complain bitterly when a “fish” (however defined) makes us the victim. We [...]