This is a pretty sick book. Gus Hansen records hand-by-hand his win at the 2007 Aussie Millions. Every one of the 329 hands he played over five days to win AUS1.5 million.

First off, the prose is hilarious. It’s littered with emoticons and exclamation points and Scandinavian gems like:

“With a 5k ante and blinds of 15k-30k the playing-it-safe days are over! This is a level for brute force, meticulous violence, and bad behavior” – p.204

But that’s why it reads so well. It reads like it’s dashed off on the way to yet more poker success. Like it’s a Blackberry email from the cutting edge of the game.

He discusses a complete poker strategy discounting huge swaths of mainstream poker wisdom. The game Mr. Hansen describes is a triumph of relative gameplay.

Maybe the reason it contains so many exclamation points is because of Chess notation.

Anyway, it’s a great book for those exploring beyond the Harrington paradigm of “wait for a good hand and then make positive-expectation wagers”.