Painless Poker

Great read for any player. Thanks for this gem.

Painless Poker is the kind of book that keeps you company at the Rio in between long and wild WSOP sessions, the kind of tome you haul with you while you're freezing your skin off on the endless climb up Poker Mountain. It is your friend. It is your enemy. It is your teacher. It is the most idiosyncratic poker book of all time.

This is Tommy Angelo at his most playful, and most unrestrained. A truly singular and unique read. It's an epic distillation of who Tommy is: a poker professional, a Buddhist, a mindfulness coach, a humorist, a hippie, a reformed degen, a monkey, a musician, a philosopher. It's also a long, insightful, and amusing conversation with the reader, aka poker players, many of whom think he must be full of it but they're in so much pain from a seemingly endless cycle of ups and downs that they're desperately searching for anything to end the pain. Will you find a panacea here, or a story full of crazy BS? The answer is elusive. Like Tommy says, "Painless poker is attainable, its just not sustainable."

As you read PP, you develop a slow-burning appreciation for Tommy's lessons -- and this book is full of lessons, humorous and incisive, earned over years of poker play and teaching clients. They're dispersed in the form of literal conversations between his fictionalized characters (all who have been beamed to his 'clinic,' against their will, at the exact moment of their greatest poker pain) and passages of autobiography that offer insight into his own life and mishaps on the felt.

I can't say I'd recommend reading this before the tremendous Elements of Poker. If you haven't read Tommy, read that first, and maybe even watch his online training videos. But if you love his writing (and you'll see, this dude is hard not to love), or you need a friend, or a teacher... a buddy who can offer you some sorely needed insight into how to calm your mind on the psychological battlefield raging in your skull as you sling chips at your opponents, real or virtual... you have to read Painless Poker. Bring it with you while you climb Poker Mountain.

Also, (SPOILER): it ends with the most hilariously absurd hand you've ever heard of.

I could feel the pain of the longest drive, with its sheer brutal honesty and hilarious rock themed segues, not to mention at least one Monty Python reference. And that's just the first chapter. In short, this is another Tommy Angelo production that I am benefitting from immensely. Unless you're a bot, you will find something that adds to your bottom line in this great work.