Of course it has the literal qualities of a top notch English Major, with some milk-toast humor thrown in for good family reading. Poker players however, will surely find this is an unfortunate mix of boring characters, thrown into plots so stretched out that getting through some of the chapters is like drinking hot chocolate your grandmother laced with garlic. The idea of it seems alright, but you got to force yourself to finish it.
Put it this way, the main poker player – character - is Tom McEvoy Just hearing that name could eclipse the power of two strong sleeping pills. Oddly, Sparks actually seeks out McEvoy to teach him better poker, even though the last know tournament McEvoy won was sometime earlier this century. Worse yet, if you search this whole production, I challenge you to find anything remotely profound. "Patience" and "pay attention" keep coming up as some of those invaluable lessons McEvoy breathes into Sparks game. Gee, thanks. If I had patience like that, I too could wait another 50 years for another tournament win, and this time there might be more than 70 competitors in it.
Believe it or not, the better poker player in this book is played by Spark’s wife, Jenny who cleans up at an invitational for media actually covering a real poker event. The event, a Party Poker Cruise, may be the closest some of us get to a big tournament, including Sparks. In his wife’s case, the good bit of the real poker we get to enjoy has no stakes, but Sparks finds a way to stretch another chapter out of it.
Another chapter is devoted to copying the exact transcript of a chat log on Party Poker that Sparks had with a railbird. Sparks actually gives him $50 bucks so as to point out how good natured poker players can really be. Foolishly Sparks dares to embarrass himself by asking a Party Poker official to find this character under another game handle as, wow, big surprise, Sparks never hears from him again. I am sure the office at Party Poker had a laugh about that one at Spark’s expense.
I don’t know whether to give my copy away, or keep it as a reminder of how desperate I was at one time to seek out some new, wonderfully entertaining, poker writing, and found this instead
Marty Smith @ PokerStrategyArticles.com
Second Opinion
There are plenty of poker "how-to" books on the market ("Secrets the Pros Won't Tell You" by Sheree Bykofsky and Lou Krieger is a good one). Unlike other poker authors, Richard Sparks takes as his subjects the who and what and why and where and when of poker. But, in "Getting Lucky" - the sequel to "Diary of a Mad Poker Player" - there is also an element of "how." This is because, after his first book, Richard realized that he needed help with his game. So he got 1983 World Champion of Poker Tom McEvoy to coach him for a year.
The result is an interesting new angle on poker teaching. "How-to" books are always written by the teacher. This one is written by the student. So you get to go through Richard's learning process with him, in real events, with real hands in real situations. You get to witness his mistakes, and hear what his coach has to say about them. The fact that Richard's results improved out of all recognition speaks for McEvoy's excellence as a teacher - for example, in July 2006, Richard finished 20th out of 2,891 entrants in the $1,000 No Limit Hold Em at the World Series of Poker.
Mainly, though, "Getting Lucky" is the story of one player's year in the heart of the current poker boom. There are poker greats and poker degenerates. There is a week of poker bliss on the Party Poker Cruise. There are unusual angles on the game: a lesson in reading body language from an Oxford Professor; interviews with poker luminaries like Lyle Berman, owner of the World Poker Tour. And there is the will-he, won't-he thrill of an ordinary player winning his seat in our World Championship, and playing in the Big One for the first time.
Richard Sparks is a professional comedy writer who clearly loves poker. "Getting Lucky" was obviously a labor of love.
C. Woods "Discriminating reader" (Wilmington, DE) - See all my reviews
