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J.D. Salinger died on Wednesday at age 91. Been a while since we’d heard from him.

Been a while also since I’d thought much about Salinger. Like most, I encountered The Catcher in the Rye as a young person, and like some I went on to read Nine Stories and everything else I could find. As a teen I suppose I identified somewhat with Holden Caulfield’s frustration. And puzzled over Seymour’s suicide in “A Perfect Day for Bananafish.”

But like I say, haven’t thought much about Salinger since, other than occasionally to wonder what he’s been up to, and whether he ever wrote anything again since 1965 when the last story of his to appear in print — the lengthy “Hapworth 16, 1924” — was published in The New Yorker. Perhaps now that he’s gone, we may find out more about what he’s exactly been up to these last 45 years. (Or not.)

Many have speculated about why Salinger — once a genuine literary celebrity, famous not just in academic circles but well beyond — stopped publishing and so thoroughly withdrew from the public eye. One oft-repeated story, appearing in The New York Times article from yesterday about Salinger’s death, concerns him having been interviewed by some high school students for what he thought was going to be an innocuous piece in the local paper. The interview wound up on the editorial page (not on the high school news page), and Salinger apparently was so upset he soon began refusing interview requests.

He also built a six-and-a-half foot fence around his property.

Publishing is a tricky business. One never knows exactly how others are going to receive your words and ideas. As in poker, there’s always an element of risk that must be weighed against whatever reward may come from putting yourself “out there.”

Just so happens that on Wednesday — the day I wrote about driving a lot — I was in the car listening to a National Public Radio segment that had to do with blogging and the way one potentially loses control of one’s message when putting one’s words and ideas on these here intertubes.

The story was about the Pope who is apparently considering whether or not to start some sort of blog. A few experts were asked for their thoughts, and there was some funny, irreverent humor in there with people giving the Pope advice about the need to blog every day, to use hot links (not footnotes), and so forth.

One such expert, David Weinberger (a technology pundit and blogger), came on to address this issue of what happens when one publishes online. “Putting a message out on the internet is exactly the same thing as losing total control of your message,” said Weinberger. “People take it up, they republish it, they make fun of it, they contextualize it, [and] the simple message becomes incredibly complex.”

As if to confirm what Weinberger was saying, there was another story about Apple announcing its new iPad in which the reporters noted that there probably weren’t any women involved in the naming of the new tablet computer. Without being specific, they were alluding to the instantaneous reaction on the internet to the name “iPad” which saw some associate it with a woman’s product. (Some may have noticed that “iTampon” became a “trending topic” on Twitter within an hour of Apple’s announcement.) I suppose you could call that another example of having (somewhat) lost control of the message, with the speed of the ’net significantly accelerating that process.

I’ve been well aware for a long time how keeping a blog — or writing and publishing, generally speaking — necessarily involves “losing total control” of one’s message. But really, who wants “total control”? If, that is, these are indeed “messages” we are delivering, with a hope that those messages might be heard and perhaps responded to in some fashion, and not just “broadcasts” (or sermons?) for which we neither expect or desire feedback.

No, publishing means being willing to share the “control” over one’s messages. Otherwise we’re just talking to ourselves. Like playing solitaire — no risk of losing, but not much to gain, either.

In a rare interview from 1974, Salinger told a reporter of how content he was not to be publishing. “It’s peaceful. Still. Publishing is a terrible invasion of my privacy. I like to write. I love to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure.”

I can respect that, but that’s about all I have to say about it. Not much one can say in response to someone who prefers sitting out to playing.

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Had a long, long day of “real” life applesauce yesterday. Yea, I’m talking about the “day” job, which as of late has been turning into the “night” job, too, I’m sorry to report. Don’t plan to go into detail here — as I said to a friend recently when the subject came up, the only thing worse than a bad beat story is to hear someone whimpering about his or her job. Suffice to say yr humble gumshoe has a lot else he’d rather be doing these days.

Changes are a afoot, though. Like hard-boiled writers do, I’ll leave that as a cliffhanger for now. Let’s turn the page.

Speaking of, for those who like hard-boiled fiction, my non-poker-related detective novel, Same Difference, is available for purchase. Makes a great Christmas gift! Am still waiting for it to turn up over on Amazon and other sites. (Thought that would have happened by now, but am still in limbo on that front.) Meanwhile, you can get it directly from Lulu by clicking here.

Big thanks to those who have picked it up already, and especially those who’ve read the sucker and sent along nice feedback. It’s a first novel, and I’m much encouraged to take what I’ve learned on this one as I set to work on a second.

The fact is, I have been thinking a lot recently about books and authors and the publishing world these days, mainly thanks to the books I happened to be reading. I’ve had the opportunity to review James McManus’s new one in a couple of places, Cowboys Full: The Story of Poker, including over at Betfair where I’ve begun a new weekly column. As I mentioned last week, I was able to interview McManus as well, and will be posting that interview as a follow-up piece over at Betfair tomorrow.

Other current poker reads at the moment are also in the non-strategy category. Am moving through Vicky Coren’s For Richer, For Poorer: A Love Affair with Poker, a smart, funny, literary memoir telling the story of Coren’s life and poker career. Coren does have an EPT title and other poker achievements to report, but she’s also a genuinely gifted writer, thus making her book especially enjoyable. Fans of McManus, Alvarez, Holden, et al. should really like this one, I’d think.

Also have just recently cracked open a copy of Doyle Brunson’s recently published autobiography, The Godfather of Poker, written with Mike Cochran. Have only glanced at the contents, but first appearances suggest a comprehensive telling of Texas Dolly’s story, which I imagine will include several familiar anecdotes — especially for those who have read his Super/System or other books that include Brunson yarns — as well as new material.

The book is a handsomely bound hardback with what’s called “rough trim,” meaning that when the book is closed the pages have a jagged edge — the kind of thing you see sometimes with older books, but not so much these days.

As I was reading about on the Gamblers Bookshop blog last month, some might think the use of this cut “looks like it’s defective but that’s the way the publisher wanted it.” I kind of like it (see pic), which along with the cover photo kind of lends the book a stately, dignified appearance that seems to suit Brunson’s status in the poker world.

As understood by just about everybody but Joan Rivers, that is.

Will be reviewing both Coren and Brunson’s autobiographies in the coming weeks elsewhere, though I’ll say something here about them as well, I imagine. Like I say, reading these books — all of which can be regarded as the end results of long-term, carefully-nurtured meaningful projects for the respective writers, has gotten me thinking more and more about “the writer’s life.”

And how such a life seems to me like it might be worth living. (Stay tuned!)

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This week Mike Matusow’s autobiography, titled Check-Raising the Devil, finally hits the shelves — both virtual and actual. If you didn’t know it already, two of our friends, Amy Calistri and Tim Lavalli, helped Matusow write the book, which tells the story of his rise and fall. And rise and fall and rise and fall. And rise.

Starts in the early 1990s with Matusow in his early twenties playing video poker and living in a trailer, then eventually moves through his becoming a poker pro and winning three WSOP bracelets and over $7 million in tourney earnings. Along the way, Matusow describes in detail his period of drug use and self-destructive behavior during the early part of this decade, his getting clean and properly diagnosed as suffering from both bipolar disorder and ADHD, his arrest for drug trafficking and six-month jail term, and his triumphant return to poker as well as to a more balanced existence.

I’ve had the chance to read Check-Raising the Devil and can say without hesitation that it is a compelling story, very well presented. It most certainly does not lionize Matusow, and in fact most often brings him down to our level (or below) in its bald confessions of the author’s many limitiations — some involuntarily imposed on Matusow (e.g., his disorders, other psychological issues), others brought on himself (e.g., the drug use, his ruinous sports betting). Actually, it isn’t always simple to sort through where Matusow’s culpability begins and ends, but on the whole the book doesn’t do too much passing of the buck. This is a man owning up to everything — the good and the bad.

So Check-Raising is a very interesting character study, and since he’s a character most of us already know at least a little bit about (probably more than a little), the book is all the more intriguing.

The book also provides a nifty overview of the last ten years or so of poker from the point of view of a professional player who was there for just about every major happening — both live and online. There’s much about the WSOP in there, as well as other major tourneys. There’s some chronicling of the online scene, too, including Matusow’s getting cheated by Russ Hamilton over at UltimateBet. (No punches pulled there.)

All of which is to say, there’s a lot to recommend here for both casual fans and hardcore players. Matusow’s life to this point has been full of extremes, although there’s a lot in his story to which most of us can relate, including the highs and lows caused by poker itself. Even if we haven’t experienced the euphoric triumphs and soul-crushing defeats to the degree Matusow has, we all know what he’s talking about.

I also want particularly to recommend what I perceive to be the contribution of our friends, Amy and Tim. This is an especially well written and well presented book (better than yr average poker text, and I’ve read a bunch), and we’ve got to believe Amy and Tim had a lot to do with that being the case.

When you start a blog, then keep at it for a while, it doesn’t take too long to become aware of this here nifty community of blogs, forums, podcasts, and other interwebby connections via which people with similar interests interact. And while there are tons of poker blogs, forums, podcasts, and now Twitter pages and so forth, the community is nevertheless still relatively small, especially compared to some other ones out there. So if you keep writing — and, importantly, keep reading — you are gonna find these folks eventually, I’d think.

It was probably just a few months after I began writing Hard-Boiled Poker that I became aware of Amy Calistri’s blog, Aimlessly Chasing Amy. I’m pretty sure it was via Iggy that I did. There was a good long stretch there during which we all routinely found each other through Iggy’s “uberposts.” Soon after that I was listening to Amy when she co-hosted Keep Flopping Aces with Lou Krieger. She gave that gig up about a year ago, I believe, somewhere around the time she also went back into the “real” world of business and scaled back her work with poker media.

Found Tim Lavalli not too longer after that, if I remember correctly. Probably was those series of investigative articles he wrote with Calistri about the extra two million chips that mysteriously showed up during the latter stages of the 2006 World Series of Poker Main Event, titled “Two Million Questions: Will Poker Answer?” That series began in September 2006 (if yr interested, click here for part one). Somewhere around there I started reading Lavalli’s “Poker Shrink” articles (which he began in 2006) as well as his personal blog.

Ended up meeting Tim last summer near the end of the WSOP. Didn’t get the chance to meet Amy, who after several years in a row at the WSOP didn’t make the 2008 one. Am hopeful to see both this time around to congratulate them on having made it through the several-years-long journey that got them to the book’s publication this week.

I’ll also thank them, because while Matusow’s story is itself somewhat inspiring, as a writer I’m also inspired by seeing Tim and Amy — two of “us” — realize this terrific achievement and get themselves “into print.” Am looking forward to seeing others in the blogging community make that move as well one day. And those that do, I assume, probably will have been inspired somewhat by Tim and Amy, too.

(By the way, if you are interested in hearing more about the book and how it was written, tune into to Keep Flopping Aces this Thursday [5/14] where Matusow, Lavalli, and possibly Calistri will be Lou Krieger’s guests.)

Some of you may recall a post I wrote back in December titled “This Book Might Be Out of Your Range.” In that one I passed along some news regarding a new eBook on no-limit hold’em strategy authored by Cole “CTS” South and Tri “SlowHabit” Nguyen titled Let There Be Range.

I’d heard about it on a podcast, then looked into it a little further, mainly intrigued by the book’s prodigious price tag — $1,850. I had a little bit of fun in that post regarding the book’s cost, and I concluded with a jokey comment about how the authors could send me a review copy.

I ended up getting a bit of feedback on that one, including eventually hearing from Tri Nguyen who sent me a nice note saying he liked the post. A couple of weeks ago Nguyen got back in touch to let me know he had a new book coming out on pot-limit Omaha, and in fact wanted to know if I’d be interested in reading it and perhaps writing a little something about it. I told him I suspected I might not be squarely within his target audience, but I’d be glad to do so.

If you don’t know Tri Nguyen, he’s been a highly accomplished online player for some time now. He also made a fairly deep run in last summer’s WSOP Main Event (finishing 103rd). There’s a short interview with Nguyen in the latest Card Player magazine (Vol. 22, No. 7 — the one with Huck Seed on the cover) where one can learn a little bit more about his background going to Berkeley and earning a degree in computer science, then his getting into poker and rapidly moving up stakes.

Nguyen tells me the new book targets PLO50 to PLO600 players, primarily short-handed, with a special focus on trying to help the no-limit hold’em player looking to move over to PLO. The title is The Pot Limit Omaha Book: Transitioning from NLH to PLO, and it is due to be released on April 30th. The price tag on this one is going to be $375, with the preorder price being $275. One can find out more about the book and ordering info over at the Daily Variance website.

On the one hand, I’m not that well-suited to review the book, given that I don’t exactly resemble the player profile of the reader Nguyen has in mind for it. I have played quite a bit of PLO50, but am hardly part of the crowd Nguyen is really addressing, both because of the size of my bankroll and because I’m not really one of those NLHE players looking to make a transition to PLO. On the other hand, I have read quite a few pot-limit Omaha books and have written my share of book reviews, and so can probably say at least a little something worthwhile about Nguyen’s book.

The book is relatively short, but packs a good amount of material in its pages, avoiding the usual filler one often finds in longer poker strategy texts. I’ll be honest — I wasn’t too crazy about reading it on the computer screen, as I’m one of those who likes to mark up books as I read, especially if I’m going to be reviewing them. (The security software attached to the book prevents printing.) But it wasn’t too arduous to get through that way.

After an introductory section, the book starts with a chapter covering preflop play that discusses starting hands and the games people play before the flop with regard to raising, 3- and 4-betting, and so forth. There’s some good advice here about the assumptions many players have about the significance of preflop raising, as well as a couple of points about the equity of certain starting hand matchups I hadn’t necessarily realized before. There are also some graphs illustrating certain observations that I’ll admit to having passed over since such things tend to hurt my brain.

The next three chapters cover various concepts and common situations one encounters in PLO. While some of what’s covered here I’ve seen discussed elsewhere, there are some ideas and explanations that were new to me. A theme that emerges here is the difference between NLHE and PLO, and one of the things I liked most about the book was the way Nguyen frequently uses analogies from NLHE to explain what’s going on in a given PLO situation. For instance, when explaining the ways a starting hand like Q-T-4-5 can get one into trouble in PLO, Nguyen refers to how A-9-offsuit plays in NLHE to make the point clearer. This frequently employed strategy is handy, I think, and is something that might distinguish his book a bit from other PLO texts.

Subsequent chapters cover flop, turn, and river play, and are filled with a large number of sample hands that apply some of those concepts discussed earlier while introducing new ideas, too. It was during this part of the book that I most consciously felt that I might not be part of the target audience. It’s hard to explain, exactly, but has to do mainly with the way Nguyen talks about hands, which I know would make perfect sense to a certain group of NLHE players but was different from the way I would think and talk about hands. (I’m I making sense?)

The overall organization of the book could be better, I think, but in the end one comes away with a fairly coherent approach to PLO that I do think will prove useful to Nguyen’s target audience. Is it worth $375? Hey, my name is “Short-Stacked.” How can I respond to that? I’ll just answer that question as any existentialist would and say it’s up to you.

On a personal note, Nguyen and I ended up exchanging a few emails regarding the book and he struck me as a very friendly, smart dude who genuinely has something to contribute to our pokery knowledge. And I much appreciate his good humor regarding my earlier post, as well as his invitation for me to read the new book.

As I say, if you are interested, check out Nguyen’s site, Daily Variance, for more on the book.

Some of you may recall a post I wrote back in December titled “This Book Might Be Out of Your Range.” In that one I passed along some news regarding a new eBook on no-limit hold’em strategy authored by Cole “CTS” South and Tri “SlowHabit” Nguyen titled Let There Be Range.

I’d heard about it on a podcast, then looked into it a little further, mainly intrigued by the book’s prodigious price tag — $1,850. I had a little bit of fun in that post regarding the book’s cost, and I concluded with a jokey comment about how the authors could send me a review copy.

I ended up getting a bit of feedback on that one, including eventually hearing from Tri Nguyen who sent me a nice note saying he liked the post. A couple of weeks ago Nguyen got back in touch to let me know he had a new book coming out on pot-limit Omaha, and in fact wanted to know if I’d be interested in reading it and perhaps writing a little something about it. I told him I suspected I might not be squarely within his target audience, but I’d be glad to do so.

If you don’t know Tri Nguyen, he’s been a highly accomplished online player for some time now. He also made a fairly deep run in last summer’s WSOP Main Event (finishing 103rd). There’s a short interview with Nguyen in the latest Card Player magazine (Vol. 22, No. 7 — the one with Huck Seed on the cover) where one can learn a little bit more about his background going to Berkeley and earning a degree in computer science, then his getting into poker and rapidly moving up stakes.

Nguyen tells me the new book targets PLO50 to PLO600 players, primarily short-handed, with a special focus on trying to help the no-limit hold’em player looking to move over to PLO. The title is The Pot Limit Omaha Book: Transitioning from NLH to PLO, and it is due to be released on April 30th. The price tag on this one is going to be $375, with the preorder price being $275. One can find out more about the book and ordering info over at the Daily Variance website.

On the one hand, I’m not that well-suited to review the book, given that I don’t exactly resemble the player profile of the reader Nguyen has in mind for it. I have played quite a bit of PLO50, but am hardly part of the crowd Nguyen is really addressing, both because of the size of my bankroll and because I’m not really one of those NLHE players looking to make a transition to PLO. On the other hand, I have read quite a few pot-limit Omaha books and have written my share of book reviews, and so can probably say at least a little something worthwhile about Nguyen’s book.

The book is relatively short, but packs a good amount of material in its pages, avoiding the usual filler one often finds in longer poker strategy texts. I’ll be honest — I wasn’t too crazy about reading it on the computer screen, as I’m one of those who likes to mark up books as I read, especially if I’m going to be reviewing them. (The security software attached to the book prevents printing.) But it wasn’t too arduous to get through that way.

After an introductory section, the book starts with a chapter covering preflop play that discusses starting hands and the games people play before the flop with regard to raising, 3- and 4-betting, and so forth. There’s some good advice here about the assumptions many players have about the significance of preflop raising, as well as a couple of points about the equity of certain starting hand matchups I hadn’t necessarily realized before. There are also some graphs illustrating certain observations that I’ll admit to having passed over since such things tend to hurt my brain.

The next three chapters cover various concepts and common situations one encounters in PLO. While some of what’s covered here I’ve seen discussed elsewhere, there are some ideas and explanations that were new to me. A theme that emerges here is the difference between NLHE and PLO, and one of the things I liked most about the book was the way Nguyen frequently uses analogies from NLHE to explain what’s going on in a given PLO situation. For instance, when explaining the ways a starting hand like Q-T-4-5 can get one into trouble in PLO, Nguyen refers to how A-9-offsuit plays in NLHE to make the point clearer. This frequently employed strategy is handy, I think, and is something that might distinguish his book a bit from other PLO texts.

Subsequent chapters cover flop, turn, and river play, and are filled with a large number of sample hands that apply some of those concepts discussed earlier while introducing new ideas, too. It was during this part of the book that I most consciously felt that I might not be part of the target audience. It’s hard to explain, exactly, but has to do mainly with the way Nguyen talks about hands, which I know would make perfect sense to a certain group of NLHE players but was different from the way I would think and talk about hands. (I’m I making sense?)

The overall organization of the book could be better, I think, but in the end one comes away with a fairly coherent approach to PLO that I do think will prove useful to Nguyen’s target audience. Is it worth $375? Hey, my name is “Short-Stacked.” How can I respond to that? I’ll just answer that question as any existentialist would and say it’s up to you.

On a personal note, Nguyen and I ended up exchanging a few emails regarding the book and he struck me as a very friendly, smart dude who genuinely has something to contribute to our pokery knowledge. And I much appreciate his good humor regarding my earlier post, as well as his invitation for me to read the new book.

As I say, if you are interested, check out Nguyen’s site, Daily Variance, for more on the book.