Eat Professional Poker Players Alive! |
Author: Frank Wiese Publisher: Just Fold Enterprises Pages: 304 Pub. Date: 2009 Price: $24.95 |
Book Review: Part 1
Not every poker book is good. Frank Wiese’s Eat Professional Poker Players Alive!, a recent offering, is one of those books better off having never been written. It’s a poorly written, badly assembled pseudo-strategy mélange offering no new insights of value, and your book money is better spent elsewhere.
Wiese, an aspiring player, is reputed to have come from a printing background and therefore had access to publishing facilities. He thereby had the ability to self-publish Eat Professional Poker Players Alive!, his first book. I hope it’ll be his last, too, if just for the sake of the trees needlessly processed in the name of printing up this turkey of a poker strategy tome, despite Weiss seemingly having succeeded in getting his strategy columns published by a few smaller publications.
There’s not much good to report here. The book gets off to a bad start with its promotional blurb and foreward from 2007 WSOP champ Jerry Yang, who despite his momentous triumph may well go down in WSOP Main Event lore as the tourney’s biggest one-hit wonder since the late, lamented Hal Fowler. From there it’s on to a dedication to some of the big-name players the author claims to have learned from while watching them on TV or reading their books, including Doyle Brunson, Phil Hellmuth, Daniel Negreanu, Erick Lindgren and many others. One wonders exactly what Wiese learned, since a quick check of online databases shows no known tournament success for this author. Perhaps it’s cash games where Wiese succeeds, not that any evidence of success is offered herein.
Wiese recommends a step-by-step approach to gaining poker expertise, beginning with “Fish” then moving on “Barracuda” and “Shark”. Here’s part of how the author describes the book’s teaching process:
“Before jumping to the more advanced Shark strategy, I strongly recommend that you read about the Fish and Barracuda strategies. If not, you may get lost at sea. So start slowly and let me teach you how to swim. Soon, my young and sometimes older fishermen, you will be Eating Professional Poker Players Alive!”
If overloading an overworked poker metaphor is cringeworthy, that introductory entry certainly qualifies. So too does the horrible grammar throughout the book by Wiese, who certainly earns no style points in that category. From the start of Chapter Seventeen, “Ultimate Head’s Up Strategy” (sic):
“Ultimate Head’s Up Strategy: If you plan to win any poker tournaments, you have to be able to beat the final player in a match of head’s up. Most players refer this final strategy as a ‘crapshoot,’ as the often outrageous blinds forces you and the other player to fight it out with mediocre hands. The first thing to mention, and everyone knows this, is that starting hand values change tremendously when you are only facing one other player. Sometimes you get lucky and hit a big hand, but there are going to be times when luck determines much of your success in head’s up. Aggression and skill will take up the difference.
