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Broke: A Poker Novel
Excellent, entertaining, and extremely well written I couldn t stop reading!
Phil Hellmuth, poker icon and author of Play Poker Like the Pros Forget Wall Street America s best and brightest now seek their fortune at the poker tables. A Poker Novel follows the lives of three talented young poker players as they seek fame and fortune in a world fraught with addiction.
Raf Verheij is a twenty-five-year-old math prodigy who likes to think that his current situation is Poker pulled him out of a deep hole instead of leading him into one. Robert Thompson is a Phil Ivey-like talent with a gambling problem a player who has an almost supernatural ability to read opponents hands by taking cues from their body language. And finally, there s Matt Ingram, a grinder with a penchant for self-destruction.
The world of poker is filled with dangers to one s bankroll and mental health a world where the individual has to worry less about the problems that others will cause him than the problems that he will cause for himself. Broke follows these three top young players in their high-stakes quest for poker fame and reveals just how addictive this world can be.
Phil Hellmuth, poker icon and author of Play Poker Like the Pros Forget Wall Street America s best and brightest now seek their fortune at the poker tables. A Poker Novel follows the lives of three talented young poker players as they seek fame and fortune in a world fraught with addiction.
Raf Verheij is a twenty-five-year-old math prodigy who likes to think that his current situation is Poker pulled him out of a deep hole instead of leading him into one. Robert Thompson is a Phil Ivey-like talent with a gambling problem a player who has an almost supernatural ability to read opponents hands by taking cues from their body language. And finally, there s Matt Ingram, a grinder with a penchant for self-destruction.
The world of poker is filled with dangers to one s bankroll and mental health a world where the individual has to worry less about the problems that others will cause him than the problems that he will cause for himself. Broke follows these three top young players in their high-stakes quest for poker fame and reveals just how addictive this world can be.
- GenresFiction
96 pages, Paperback
First published March 30, 2006
3 people are currently reading
24 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
November 22, 2019
Fun book that struck me as a fairly honest account.
January 1, 2023
Entertaining short novel about 3 friends who play poker professionally. You can read about their lives and how they deal with the variance of tournaments and cash games.
June 26, 2009
Brandon Adams, Broke: A Poker Novel (iUniverse, 2006)
You may not recognize Brandon Adams' name if your only exposure to poker is the World Series, but if you watch any of the cash game programs that show up once in a while, he's quite familiar. Poker books are enjoying the best market share ever as well, so I was wondering why a novel with poker as its focus written by a recognizable poker pro would have been passed up by the major publishers. Then I read it.
First off, poker novel? Using the quick-and-dirty method of word counting (average umber of words from three random lines on a random page multiplied by number of lines per page multiplied by number of pages), Broke clocks in at just over twenty-seven thousand words, which barely makes it a poker novella. Not that this is a bad thing in itself, but one would expect a bit more meat. Secondly, when you're trying to tell a full novel-length story in that amount of time, something has to be sacrificed (and, as I'll get to later, far more than one thing fell by the wayside here). Thirdly, it seemed oftentimes as if some experts who write sports-based novels aimed at players of the game (Thoroughbred writer Mark Cramer, whose nonfiction books are fantastic, is also guilty of this in his novels) seem more as if they're writing how-to books and slapping a fictionalized veneer on top. I didn't get that sense all the way through this book, but it definitely reared its ugly head a few times.
As I said, a novel that runs only ninety-one pages sets the reader up for knowing that something is going to fall by the wayside. The first thing that's absent is character development. Adams does try to get some development across in each of his three main characters, but we never get to know them enough to know whether they're actually progressing here or whether these are just a series of events happening to them. This may have something to do with Adams' thoughts on gambling addiction (assuming they're the same as his main character's); the cyclical nature of addiction that he describes may well preclude the type of character development we (and he) expect from these characters. To be sure, one of them has different behavioral patterns by the end of the story, but the other two just serve to make us wonder how long it will be until he, too, is right back where they are.
Also, while the book does have some semblance of a plot, there's not much that ties the events in each (very short) chapter together (seventeen chapters in ninety-one pages), which adds fuel to the “object-lesson” model I mentioned before. There were a lot of things about the way the book is structured that put me in mind of Mark Cramer's Scared Money, but while I wasn't at all fond of Cramer's cook either, he has a much better sense of how to put a novel together than Adams. In other words, Cramer's book might have been a good novel had he been able to stop teaching long enough to allow the story to get his lessons across. Adams' novel doesn't have that; the underpinnings aren't there for it to hold up without the object lessons. The object lessons themselves contain some good stuff, and you may find the book worth your time because of a few particular situations Adams takes us through towards the end of the book—when he's talking hands, taking you through his thought processes, that's when everything falls into place and the words really start flowing. Unfortunately, there's too little of that. *
You may not recognize Brandon Adams' name if your only exposure to poker is the World Series, but if you watch any of the cash game programs that show up once in a while, he's quite familiar. Poker books are enjoying the best market share ever as well, so I was wondering why a novel with poker as its focus written by a recognizable poker pro would have been passed up by the major publishers. Then I read it.
First off, poker novel? Using the quick-and-dirty method of word counting (average umber of words from three random lines on a random page multiplied by number of lines per page multiplied by number of pages), Broke clocks in at just over twenty-seven thousand words, which barely makes it a poker novella. Not that this is a bad thing in itself, but one would expect a bit more meat. Secondly, when you're trying to tell a full novel-length story in that amount of time, something has to be sacrificed (and, as I'll get to later, far more than one thing fell by the wayside here). Thirdly, it seemed oftentimes as if some experts who write sports-based novels aimed at players of the game (Thoroughbred writer Mark Cramer, whose nonfiction books are fantastic, is also guilty of this in his novels) seem more as if they're writing how-to books and slapping a fictionalized veneer on top. I didn't get that sense all the way through this book, but it definitely reared its ugly head a few times.
As I said, a novel that runs only ninety-one pages sets the reader up for knowing that something is going to fall by the wayside. The first thing that's absent is character development. Adams does try to get some development across in each of his three main characters, but we never get to know them enough to know whether they're actually progressing here or whether these are just a series of events happening to them. This may have something to do with Adams' thoughts on gambling addiction (assuming they're the same as his main character's); the cyclical nature of addiction that he describes may well preclude the type of character development we (and he) expect from these characters. To be sure, one of them has different behavioral patterns by the end of the story, but the other two just serve to make us wonder how long it will be until he, too, is right back where they are.
Also, while the book does have some semblance of a plot, there's not much that ties the events in each (very short) chapter together (seventeen chapters in ninety-one pages), which adds fuel to the “object-lesson” model I mentioned before. There were a lot of things about the way the book is structured that put me in mind of Mark Cramer's Scared Money, but while I wasn't at all fond of Cramer's cook either, he has a much better sense of how to put a novel together than Adams. In other words, Cramer's book might have been a good novel had he been able to stop teaching long enough to allow the story to get his lessons across. Adams' novel doesn't have that; the underpinnings aren't there for it to hold up without the object lessons. The object lessons themselves contain some good stuff, and you may find the book worth your time because of a few particular situations Adams takes us through towards the end of the book—when he's talking hands, taking you through his thought processes, that's when everything falls into place and the words really start flowing. Unfortunately, there's too little of that. *
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews