Poker Book Report: Getting Lucky by Richard Sparks

This Poker Book honestly tries to be interesting because throughout it's pages, you get to follow the personal trials of a player trying to improve his game, all the while rubbing shoulders with, and interviewing some of the biggest names in poker today. The well know poker personalities like Greg Raymer, Daniel Negreneau, Erick Lindgren, Ted Forrest, and Chris Ferguson and many more, venture in and out of this professionally written dialogue.

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.