Book Review: Painless Poker by Tommy Angelo

The Amazon blurb for Tommy Angelo’s Painless Poker suggests that it’s a coaching book that will be full of tips and tricks to avoid tilt, ‘win the war of words’ and ‘steadily improve any aspect of your game’. It won’t. For all it’s marketing, it just isn’t that kind of book.

What kind of book it is exactly, is not immediately clear even on having finished it. Is it a poker book? Well, yes but... as one character (yes, there are characters) says to Tommy (yes, he appears as one of those characters):

“What you’re talking about isn’t painless poker at all, it’s painless life. You’re just using poker to entice us into listening to your spiritual drivel.”

Is it a self-help book then? Also, yes. His solution to the issue of painful poker is mindfulness and it does contain a guide to meditation. Just not in one place, or in one order. Because it’s framed within this fictional narrative in which seven players find themselves beamed into a nice little card room with Tommy where he proceeds to give them a clinic in pain and meditation.

The nearest thing I can think of is Plato’s dialogues, or Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. But with gambling instead of totalitarianism and choppers.

Pain & Gain

If there is a unifying idea in the book: pain (especially tilt) and the attempt to alleviate it.

It is also about Tommy. It is about Tommy a lot. We are given Tony’s poker autobiography, told in a frame narrative about a bad beat and a long depressed drive he took. The biographical stuff is interwoven with a fictional clinic which deals with the stuff you thought you paid your money for: poker pain, and his solution for it.

In the clinic seven tilted players are beamed in to tell their stories, have story arcs, and listen to Tommy talk about pain. Along the way Tommy instructs them on how to meditate and why to meditate, they also develop like real characters.

Despite the title, the clinic sections are not about quick fixes.

“You’re all way too screwed up for me to talk you out of your thinking problems in two days,” Tommy tells the players at one point. “If things do get better for you, it will be because of effort you put forth after we part ways.”

Cut Your Luvvies

Painless Poker is not a painless read. It is far too long and its tone becomes monotonous after about 300 pages of it. But it’s also a lot of fun – for the most part – and extremely well written for something in this genre. It inhabits an interest place formally, somewhere between fiction and self-help.

Then again, if you want to get your value from the book in knowledge, then perhaps it’s not worth the substantial cover price (£20 in hardback) since it’s content can just be boiled down to a basic introduction and defense of the secular use of meditation. Then again, if you’ve ever had an interest in mindfulness and want and starting text you may as well start here. 

For the rest of you, I can only recommend it as a good read. I was entertained far more than I was edified.