[LL] “A short book deserves a short review, right?” Leroy the Lion asked rhetorically.
[RR] “Sure, if that makes you feel better about your laziness”, Roderick the Rock quipped. “But your shortcut might be shortsighted.”
[LL] “Don’t be short with me. I know my shortcomings.
Doyle Brunson had already had one of the longest and most successful poker careers ever by the time he wrote My 50 Most Memorable Hands in 2007, so the challenge he faced wasn’t finding enough hands to talk about but reducing his stories down to just 50 (less than one per year). The 168 sparse pages fly by so fast, you might wish he’d included another 50 hands.
Highlights of the book (or lowlights depending on your perspective) include cheating, robbery, and murder (and two other deaths at the table), but there’s also a lot of great poker, including high-stake cash games and ten stories from the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas.
Read this book purely for entertainment purposes. If you happen to learn a little poker strategy along the way, consider it a bonus. The frontier days of poker will never return, so enjoy the reminiscences of a legend who has no shortage of short and tall tales.”
| Title | My 50 Most Memorable Hands |
| Author | Doyle Brunson |
| Year | 2007 |
| Skill Level | any |
| Pros | Entertaining variety of stories with a wide cast of characters, covering half a century of poker. Clear hand diagram graphics with a touch of red for the hearts and diamonds. |
| Cons | Hands are not presented in any particular order.1 Some hands lack details and the book is fairly short. Chapter titles appear in Table of Contents but not in the text, where the hands are simply numbered. |
| Rating | 3.5 |
Footnotes:
- The hands are supposedly in the order in which Brunson remembered them, but there was no excuse for not organizing them by date or topic.