Review of Deal Me In

Title:

Deal Me In

Author:

Stephen John and Marvin Karlins

Publisher:

Phil's House Publishing, Inc.

Date:

2009

ISBN:

978-0-9824558-0-7

Pages:

287

Price:

$24.95

Reviewed by Nick Christenson, npc@jetcafe.org

March 26, 2010

There isn't a clear path by which people become professional poker players. There aren't any good courses at the local vo-tech for a person to study. The road to becoming a poker pro is inevitably difficult, circuitous, and filled with setbacks. Deal Me In is a book describing the course by which twenty top poker players became professionals.

A large number of the poker players here are those that anyone would expect authors of such a book would try to include. Phil Hellmuth, Daniel Negreanu, Doyle Brunson, Johnny Chan, Phil Ivey, and other superstars of the poker world are featured. Others, less well known, and therefore less exhaustively chronicled in other sources, include Chad Brown, Tom Dwan, Peter Eastgate, and Annette Obrestad. As the title suggests, these narratives focus on the part of their lives where the featured players transitioned from non-pro to poker professional.

For my own part, I don't need to read a mini-biography on Annie Duke or Doyle Brunson. I've read more profiles of these players than I could count, not to mention the book-length treatments of these players' lives. However, not everyone is as widely read as I, and there's certainly still an audience interested in these celebrities. Predictably, the parts I liked best were the interviews with the players that I knew less well, such as Dwan, Obrestad, Brown, and Chau Giang.

Each of the vignettes contained in Deal Me In measures in at about a dozen pages. The inclusion of plenty of photographs along with the generous formatting make these stories even shorter than one might first expect. Consequently, this makes for a quick, light read, which will probably appeal to a great number of prospective readers. At the same time, it means that there's not room for a great deal of depth on any one subject.

Some of the stories are truly remarkable. Two of the players featured, Scotty Nguyen and Chau Giang, tell about their difficult, and sometimes truly harrowing, struggles to arrive here from Vietnam and then make a life for themselves in a distant land. Most others, though, are noteworthy for their, well, banality. Over half of the subjects of the book were born in the United States, and the vast majority of these into some semblance of a middle-class setting. Sure, most of them suffered some setbacks along the way, usually in terms of a depleted bankroll, but aside from having to step down in limits, take on another job, or raise some capital, it's remarkable to me how much their financial stories resemble those of non-poker playing entrepreneurs.

The point at which a person crosses the threshold from amateur to professional poker player is not always represented by a bright line. It is an interesting transition, and I was hoping to find some insight into this process from all these stories. Many people aspire to be professional poker players and come up to this line, but can't break through. What's special about these twenty players? Unfortunately, the focus of the book seems to be on the more superficial details rather than any deeper themes. There's really not much here I wouldn't get in a feature article in one of the free poker magazines they give out in the local card rooms. I was hoping for something more, especially since there are several books on the market that largely cover the same ground.

The stories here are light and fun, and I'm sure there's a considerable audience for this sort of thing. However, I found them familiar, repetitive, and unremarkable. I've heard most of these stories before, and in too few of the others was there anything I felt that revealed a deeper insight. There's nothing objectionable to this book, I just wasn't impressed by it. For those looking for some light biographies who aren't already deeply familiar with this particular cast of characters, it's entirely serviceable, but for those who keep up on the personalities of poker, I doubt there's much here that's new.

Capsule:

Deal Me In is a collection of miniature bios of twenty professional poker players, emphasizing the point in their careers at which they became professional players. Some of the stories are remarkable, and the book is well written, but generally what's in these pages is quite familiar. Even for those players who are less well known, the lack of any deeper theme prevents this book from standing out from a crowded field. I liked the book, and many other people will too, but I didn't love it.