I’m trying to understand what his value add is outside of having the followers and platform to get big names on. Isn’t it just the Joe Rogan model applied to poker?
For the third time now, he’s invited a disingenuous know-nothing deplorable who has pushed extreme conservative politics on the largest poker forum for years and who very recently made a despicable pro-life argument based on slavery. He brought on two (that I’m aware of) dfs players with major cheating accusations against them. He was unable to articulate why Postle was cheating and tweeted this after the case was dismissed:
https://twitter.com/Joeingram1/status/1268326433698373634
https://twitter.com/Joeingram1/status/1268328104209952768
He’s either extremely naive or giving a scammer a platform to lie in exchange for clicks.
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I think there’s plenty value in stuff like Joey’s Podcast and Twitch streamers for getting poker in the public spotlight and getting casuals interested again. But as a hardcore player, I don’t really care for much of Joey’s content, but still appreciate what he’s doing. That being said, I did love his breakdowns of the Galfond v. VeniVidi match and a few other videos.
The Spanish Armada is also referred to as the Invincible Armada. Here, in what is clearly another Carrasco chapter, the choice is to translate that as the “Invincible Navy”, which Google suggests is a rare way to discuss this topic. I chalk that up to a likely combination of someone who is not a native English speaker being edited by someone who is not knowledgeable on the topic.
The authors believe that the Earps shot first in the gunfight at the OK Corral, yet describe the incident as a self-weighting disaster on the part of their opponents because they were just shooting. But if the Cowboys didn’t fire first, then “just shooting” was a reasonable reaction. What this chapter lacks is an explanation of what a non-self-weighting strategy on the part of the Cowboys would look like.
Improper placement of the apostrophe in a plural possessive. (“Cowboy’s perspective”)
The chapter on trench warfare fails to address the strategy of fighting a war of attrition.
A missing space is a sign the editor failed Proofreading 101. ("…of the United States in1867…")
I find it weird that the location for the Rumble in the Jungle is referred to as “Zaire, Africa” multiple times, but the city of Kinshasa is not mentioned once.
The authors choose to write “hind-sight is the twenty-twenty” instead of “hindsight is 20/20”.
The 2016 chapter correctly notes in a footnote that Maine is an exception to winner-take-all electoral votes, but does not mention Nebraska.
Yet another sentence ending in a comma instead of a period.
I’m done.
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NotBruceZ the entire time he read this book
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Having finished, this is how I might write a review of the book.
Overall, the idea for History of the World from a Gambler’s Perspective isn’t awful, but the execution is horrible. Most of the chapters begin with a lengthy restatement cribbed from Wikipedia. The use of quoted sections from Wikipedia seem like they were intended to lend gravitas, but they are completely random. These historical sections come across as written by an incompetent high school student who is too lazy to paraphrase the entire article and haphazardly chooses certain parts to be direct quotes.
The chapters end with an assertion that some sort of gambling has taken place. The authors appear to lack the imagination or the depth to posit counterfactual scenarios whenever the claim is that a historical figure made a bad gamble. This leads to the perception that the book is results-oriented in its interpretations. There might be a token example of someone making a good decision but getting a bad outcome due to variance. A book that wanted to about how to think like a good gambler should be making this point more often.
A better way to write and organize this book would be to come up with several topics important to a gambler–bluffing, metagame, bankroll management–and coming up with several examples that illustrate those concepts. This book feels more like a few chapters on people the authors wanted to write about, plus some shallowly-researched chapters to pad things out and make it a book-length effort. In many chapters, it feels like a struggle to shoehorn the story into a gambling motif. This might be forgivable if the book consisted of entertaining re-tellings of historical events with crisp narratives that put us inside the heads of historical personages, but what we get instead is clunky prose that is significantly more awkward than the Wikipedia articles that the facts are cribbed from.
Combine this with a comically amateurish proofreading job–I have never seen more typos, misspellings, and grammatical mistakes in a book–and this is not really a book worth reading, but it could have been. Instead, what we have is a vanity press offering from a man who owns a publishing company.
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A real review, if written to be published, would cite examples from the text. I didn’t do that, but I could insert some from my lengthy notes. If I weren’t trying to compartmentalize my various online identities, I would polish this and post it on 2+2 or Twitter or somewhere it might be seen. I am not averse to someone doing a cut-and-paste job and spreading it in an appropriate spot.
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Thanks for your service, before you started I half thought I’d buy it myself for a laugh.
I have tried to get through this thing multiple times and feel like bruce is downplaying how bad it is. The amount of hate that must have been involved in that hate read is staggering.
Thanks for doing it, I found it very entertaining.
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If it can motivate me to write a book, just to prove I can do better, it will have been worth the cost.
I actually found this book an easy read. If I hadn’t been taking notes, I could have zipped through it in one night.
But it’s easy for me because there’s little substance. I don’t have to think a lot to digest the information, partly because much of it involves things I’ve already read about. If you’re not a reader like me, someone who actually used to read reference books for fun, then this is a very uninteresting book. It’s history stories told by a boring storyteller plus some uninteresting commentary. It would have been improved by lifting paragraphs straight from Wikipedia without trying to paraphrase anything. If you hate reading and prefer to learn things by watching video, this book will suck (even more). For most people, it will be easier to listen to Mason talk about the book on a podcast than to actually read the book.
That’s a scary thought.
At the moment the Amazon page has no customer reviews. Just putting that out there.
For the hate readers, did MM cite Gladwell in his book. Sounds like he’s been telling the story with the Goliath acromegaly angle for some time.
“By the way, these ideas are not original with us. They can be found in many places on the Internet and elsewhere.”
Did he cite at least one specific source? Even wikipedia?
Of course not.
lol
Lawnmower man thinks Postle didn’t cheat?
terrible read