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Painless Poker
Are you still stewing over last week's bad beat? Does the game you love raise your blood pressure? Do you cost yourself money with tilted bets?
Painless Poker addresses these sources of poker pain and more. Tommy Angelo, esteemed author of Elements of Poker, reveals extreme pain from his own life and those of seven agitated players – and shows how to end that pain. Drawing on his 20 years as a professional poker player and elite coach, Angelo demonstrates effective strategies to make poker – and life – less painful.
In Painless Poker, you’ll learn how to:
− Lessen the depth, time, and frequency of tilt
− Win the war of words at the poker table
− Reset yourself after any beat, however piercing
− Gain reciprocal advantage over your opponents
− Steadily improve any aspect of your game
With Angelo’s trademark humor and insight, Painless Poker is as entertaining as it is informative.
Painless Poker addresses these sources of poker pain and more. Tommy Angelo, esteemed author of Elements of Poker, reveals extreme pain from his own life and those of seven agitated players – and shows how to end that pain. Drawing on his 20 years as a professional poker player and elite coach, Angelo demonstrates effective strategies to make poker – and life – less painful.
In Painless Poker, you’ll learn how to:
− Lessen the depth, time, and frequency of tilt
− Win the war of words at the poker table
− Reset yourself after any beat, however piercing
− Gain reciprocal advantage over your opponents
− Steadily improve any aspect of your game
With Angelo’s trademark humor and insight, Painless Poker is as entertaining as it is informative.
492 pages, Paperback
Published March 1, 2017
26 people are currently reading
60 people want to read
About the author
Tommy Angelo
7 books25 followersOnce, during a poker discussion in Las Vegas, several top strategists were debating how to play pocket kings under the gun. Then Tommy Angelo popped in with “I can tell you the best way to play two kings. Decide in advance that no matter what happens, you won’t go on tilt!”
Insights like that are what drove the popularity of Angelo’s first book, Elements of Poker, a tome highly regarded for its fresh and practical perspectives. Since he began offering coaching in 2004, over one hundred students have paid for his candid advice, wanting more of what they found in his 100 articles and 18 videos.
In 2017, Angelo completed Painless Poker. “I have no words left,” he wrote to his mailing-list fans. "I put them all in here.” Painless Poker combines sections of Angelo’s own history with a fictional poker-coaching seminar featuring seven suffering poker players, in an innovative combination of memoir, fiction, and poker instruction.
When at home in Oakland, California, Angelo writes, cooks, reads, and makes music, as part of what he calls his “urban monastic lifestyle.” He cohabits with two cats, and Kay, his wife.
Insights like that are what drove the popularity of Angelo’s first book, Elements of Poker, a tome highly regarded for its fresh and practical perspectives. Since he began offering coaching in 2004, over one hundred students have paid for his candid advice, wanting more of what they found in his 100 articles and 18 videos.
In 2017, Angelo completed Painless Poker. “I have no words left,” he wrote to his mailing-list fans. "I put them all in here.” Painless Poker combines sections of Angelo’s own history with a fictional poker-coaching seminar featuring seven suffering poker players, in an innovative combination of memoir, fiction, and poker instruction.
When at home in Oakland, California, Angelo writes, cooks, reads, and makes music, as part of what he calls his “urban monastic lifestyle.” He cohabits with two cats, and Kay, his wife.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
May 8, 2017
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 ass 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 shit 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 bullshit? 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 fucked up hand you've ever heard of.
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 shit 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 bullshit? 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 fucked up hand you've ever heard of.
September 7, 2017
This book, part biography, part Socratic dialogue, part self-help book is largely about mindfulness. In its ~480 odd pages it covers most of the basics. But that is its problem, Angelo is an interesting writer, but repetitive in places and very short on pith. The information in this book could have been a 200 page pamphlet. It would have been less entertaining, and perhaps less artistically interesting. But probably more useful. But also maybe less likely to be read. In short it is good but flawed and I would recommend it to anyone interested in either poker or mindfulness.
September 27, 2017
Mindful poker
An explanation of Buddha dharma using situations any poker player is familiar with as evidence. As a meditating poker nerd this book pushed all of my buttons.
An explanation of Buddha dharma using situations any poker player is familiar with as evidence. As a meditating poker nerd this book pushed all of my buttons.
May 2, 2017
A very good read by my favourite poker author. His understanding of poker is phenomenal. I'm also in love with his way of writing and sense of humour. Through poker, he explains his basic philosophy for living a painless life. He also explains mindfulness and meditation practices for improvement in life and in poker.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews