From dorm-room games at Yale to the World Poker Tour Championship—poker strategy and real-life adventures from one of the game’s rising stars.
Poker has been Matt Matros’s passion since he was fifteen, playing dealer’s choice for plastic chips with his buddies on a Friday night. But Matt always had his eyes on bigger stakes. He wanted to be a pro. And in April 2004, at the age of 26, Matt scored his biggest win to date, finishing third in the World Poker Tour Championship and netting more than $700,000. Now a graduate of the master’s program in fiction writing at Sarah Lawrence, where his earnings paid his tuition, Matt Matros is a poker success story.
The Making of a Poker Player is a strategy book drawn from Matt’s gripping journey into the poker world—from those high school games to his first casino card rooms and on to major tournaments where he played against, and defeated, the greatest poker champions around. You’ll experience the game through the eyes of one of its top players, as he travels to Foxwoods for the Saturday morning tournaments that were more motivating than his Yale math classes, as he picks off a bluff by world champion Phil Hellmuth in Las Vegas, and as he suffers through a prolonged losing streak that wipes out months of hard work and profit—only to turn around and recoup every penny. You’ll take a seat beside all the big names on the circuit and discover how to hold your own against any player—including the aggressive, the outrageous, and the outright cheats. You’ll accrue winning tips and tricks, absorb theory on reading tells, learn how to apply logic and probability, get the basics for playing online, and take in the lingo for discussing every other aspect of modern poker strategy. Matt Matros’s vivid storytelling, nail-biting play-by-play recaps, and insider anecdotes capture all the excitement of the game and its subculture. By the end of this book, you’ll understand what it means to be a real poker player. Odds are, you’ll be one too.
About the Author: Matt Matros graduated from Yale University with a degree in mathematics and now has an MFA in writing from Sarah Lawrence College. He is currently working on his second poker book as well as a novel. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.