| Professor, the Banker, and the Suicide King, The: Inside the Richest Poker Game of All Time |  | Author: Michael Craig
Publisher: Warner Books
Category: Book
List Price: $14.95
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Rating:  67 reviews
Sales Rank: 770,799
Format: Bargain Price
Media: Paperback
Pages: 288
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 8.7 x 5.7 x 0.8
Dewey Decimal Number: 795
ASIN: B000LP66RU
Publication Date: June 5, 2006
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
A tale of outsize egos, appetites, and ambitions, here is the completely true, heart-stopping story of one man, 20 million dollars, and the most expensive game of poker ever played-with never-before-revealed details of what really happens at the game's highest levels. In 2001, a stranger from Texas descended on the high-stakes poker room at the world famous Bellagio Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas. His name was Andy Beal, and he had come to play. Challenging some of the best players in the world, including Doyle Brunson, Johnny Chan, Howard Lederer, and Jennifer Harman, the result was a series of seven unforgettable poker games, including the final showdown-a single game with a jackpot of more than 20 million dollars.
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 67
 Something major is missing from this book July 15, 2010
Publicagent
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
The author does a great job of relaying the story line, although I could do without some of the extra detail on poker business. I have read the majority of the book, but the one thing I really want to know cannot be provided: specific hands from the games. Of course there are some memorable hands that were recounted to the author, but more often than not, it's just something like, Jennifer Harman won 9 million in 3 days and I am left wondering how some of the bigger hands were played out. Now there is nothing that the author can do since there is no record of these hands. In that sense, the book does a solid job. But if you like to hear about specific poker hands, this is not the book for you. (I recommend Gus Hansen Every Hand Revealed for that: he notated every hand he played in a tournament!) As a reader of novels, I don't think it reads like a novel, but Andy Beal is by far the most intriguing character, and it is the business aspect overall in which this book shines. It's very readable as well. Support local bookstores if you can.
UPDATE: I just finished and was extremely disappointed to discover that Phil Ivey's legendary victory over Beal took place after this book was published. I kept waiting for Ivey to come in and clean up. Wow. The book clearly needs a second edition. Very disappointing, but again, it's not like the author knew.
 waste of paper, I returned the book,booring who cares? March 29, 2010
Paul Morris (New York City)
0 out of 4 found this review helpful
this book is no good, waste of time, booring, who cares, never should have been written.
zero star
 Great read for poker-lovers and non-poker-lovers alike. March 15, 2010
Jonathan C. Winick
The story itself was great fun to read. Real poker lovers will know most of the characters alredy, but will still find the background fascinating.
The Kindle version had only rare typos, and otherwise presented the text in a very well formatted way.
all poker players will love it February 6, 2010
seetheflop (arizona)
The author knew poker and the players he profiled. An inside look at the "big games" and the "biggest players"
 The game's not the thing, for once. September 1, 2009
Robert P. Beveridge (Cleveland, OH)
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
Michael Craig, The Professor, the Banker, and the Suicide King: Inside the Richest Poker Game of All Time (Warner, 2005)
The interesting thing about The Professor, the Banker, and the Suicide King is that the actual poker game detailed, which went on and off over a period of years, is the least interesting thing about the book. It was limit hold'em, which is much more a game of playing your cards than is no-limit, and lends itself to far less variance. (While the dollar amounts thrown in the book may make that seem like a laughable statement, when it comes right down to it, a unit is a unit. Whether your big blinds are twenty cents or two hundred thousand dollars, a unit is still a unit.) Limit hold'em is normally a game for grinders, those of us who don't mind putting in the time to make one big bet per hour at the table. (That said, the poker books are wrong about that in at least one case; the lower the limits at which you play, the more big blinds you can make per hour, as long as your game is rock-solid. I rarely leave a fifty-cent/one-dollar game before doubling my buy-in, as long as I'm having a winning session. It rarely takes me more than an hour.)Andy Beal was not that guy, not by a longshot, and yet his chosen game was heads-up limit hold'em. Yes, he evened the odds a bit against the world's top hold'em players with his relentlessly aggressive play, but when all was said and done, aggression in a limit game is much less useful than aggression in a no-limit game, especially when each player has $5 million on the table. You push all-in with a stack like that in a cash game and very few players will call you with less than kings. In limit, all you can do is raise another big blind. Still, as I said, the game is far less interesting than the players, and in recognizing that fact, Michael Craig did himself, and those of us who like to read about poker, a great service.
Andy Beal was (still is, probably) a banker with a taste for poker. He also had a taste for buying things no one else would buy just before they got really, really big, which made Andy Beal a very, very rich man. (Still does, probably.) When his business interests took him to Las Vegas, his taste for poker developed into something of an obsession, and having the game's best players at his beck and call prompted him to make a little side bet with himself: could he get good enough to play these folks at their own game? And how far would he have to raise the stakes before the pros were out of their comfort zone? By the time the game had concluded, most every major high-stakes player in Vegas, and a number from California, had gone up against Beal, including both Doyle and Todd Brunson, the late Chip Reese, Johnny Chan, Jennifer Harman, Ted Forrest, Howard Lederer (the Professor of the title), John Hennigan, and a host of others you've heard of if you watch any televised poker whatsoever. Beal would do reasonably well, losing far less than anyone expected him to, then limp back to Texas, do some more research, play a lot more hands, and go back to Vegas armed even better than he was the time before.
But, again, that's not what the book is about. It's about the backgrounds of the people who played in the game. It's about the economics of poker (taking shares, staking people, and all the stuff that no one ever talks about because, let's face it, that math you need for that ends up being more advanced than the math you use in calculating pot odds). It's about a rank amateur and his underdog dream. Good thing Andy Beal did not have an obsession with football. I'm sure the Denver Broncos, for example, would have wiped him out fast. But poker is a game where anyone with a good grasp of the rules, a decent amount of experience, and a dash or two of luck can sit down across a table from Barry Greenstein and end up with all his chips. It's not likely, but it can happen. That's a big part of what attracts us, the amateur contingent, to the game, and Michael Craig--being an amateur poker player himself--understands this and lets it shine through. To me, it's obvious that this is a book written by a poker player for other poker players. The fact that the public glommed onto it is icing on the cake.
Fascinating, highly readable, and for a nonfiction book, incredibly well-paced. Even if you're not a fan of the sport, this one's worth a read. ****
Showing reviews 1-5 of 67
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