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For Richer, For Poorer: A Love Affair with Poker
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More About the Author
Product Description
Review
Victoria Coren writes, on several levels, with wit, honesty, and perfect freshness. --Martin Amis
Shrewd and - for a poker player - astonishingly modest and frank. A class act. --Al Alvarez, author of THE BIGGEST GAME IN TOWN
It's faithful, epic, and true to every loveable miscreant she's faced across the green baize. --Jesse May
Honest, funny, highly personal and nostalgic memoir about friendship and belonging.
--Financial Times
Shrewd and - for a poker player - astonishingly modest and frank. A class act. --Al Alvarez, author of THE BIGGEST GAME IN TOWN
It's faithful, epic, and true to every loveable miscreant she's faced across the green baize. --Jesse May
Honest, funny, highly personal and nostalgic memoir about friendship and belonging.
--Financial Times
Review
Shrewd and - for a poker player - astonishingly modest and frank. A class act.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
104 of 117 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Belter,
By
This review is from: For Richer, for Poorer: A Love Affair with Poker (Hardcover)
A lifetime ago I saw Vicky Coren in a pub in Oxford. Didnt know her from Adam Dalgliesh at the time - she stuck in my mind because although she looked like a right posh bird, she laughed like the lovechild of Sid James and Dot Cotton.
A few years later she turned out to be An Famous and more especially, An Famous who played cards on the telly. An Famous who played cards on the telly, who I'd seen in a pub. Brilliant. Pub Story Gold. According to the rules of popular culture she became an anecdotal fixture in my life whenever poker, laughing and/or posh birds came up in the conversation. "That Vicky Coren, yeah she used to drink in my local, got the best laugh in the world that girl, and she plays cards on the telly. She's lovely she is." All based on nothing of course but clearly repeated often enough to ensure that when Once More With Feeling hit the bookstores I got 7 copies as birthday presents. I had to return 6 of them and to this day I'm still known to the staff in my local bookshop as "the porn book guy". So, skip some years and replay the scene. This year I only got 4 copies of For Richer, For Poorer - clearly I've lost some mates over the years - but still not a bad show. In the birthday gift Top 10 that got her third spot behind some rather nice malt whisky and a painting by Sadie Hennessy - a good result for a random, one anecdote, half serious, 14 year old, pretend celebrity crush. And now she's gone and ruined it. Not only has she written one of the most honest books about the poker lifestyle ever, but in a surprise move she's thrown the rules of conventional Celeb-Biography out of the window - she's only gone and been straight up about herself. No more mysterious, half imagined, poker playing posh bird with a cockney sparrow laugh, no more saucy funny bird tucked up on Charlie "it's not a panel show" Brooker's silly chair. Oh sure, she's still An Famous but now she's gone and revealed herrself as an actual real life person. A real person who has the same thrills and spills as the rest of us. A real person who gets down about herself sometimes, who sometimes gets overdrawn at the bank, who muddles on just like we all do. How on earth am I supposed to have a pretend celebrity crush on her now? Play the game Coren! I suppose we had a good run but it looks like I'll have to buff up the Tracey Emin anecdote now and god alone knows where that'll all end up. Buy this book. It's a belter, and so by all accounts is she.
18 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A gripping roller coaster ride through the world of gambling.,
By A Common Reader "Committed to reading" (Sussex, England) - See all my reviews (VINE VOICE) (TOP 50 REVIEWER)
This review is from: For Richer, for Poorer: A Love Affair with Poker (Hardcover)
Victoria Coren has been playing poker for 15 years and unlike most gamblers, has won quite a nice sum of money, not least in 2006 when she won $1m in the European Poker Championships. The subtitle of her book, "A Love Affair with Poker" hits it on the nail, but this is a love affair with no happy ending, just a roller-coaster ride of ups and downs, complete ecstasy when things go well and misery when they don't.
You have to admire her persistence. She joined the world of poker when it meant mixing with disreputable people in dingy clubs, the lure of the cards overcoming the distaste for her surroundings. The book, For Richer For Poorer, chronicles her journey from playing her big brother Giles and his friends for pennies, through to the time when she carries a fat roll of bank-notes around with her. You'd expect the daughter of humorist Alan Coren to be witty, and For Richer For Poorer is certainly light-hearted enough. Victoria can laugh at herself, and her self-deprecating, almost confessional tone makes the reader warm to her. The book is autobiographical throughout, starting with stories of her childhood and ending with the sad death of her father, the much loved writer and broadcaster. Victoria hated school with a passion but writes amusingly enough about her childhood and her family. When she is freed from school she develops a stand-up comedy act and travels around America before going to University to study English Literature. On leaving she commences her career as a journalist and begins serious poker playing at the Victoria Sporting Club (the "Vic") in Edgware Road and at the Stakis in Russell Square. It seems difficult for a woman to get accepted into these poker playing circles, but Victoria persists and before long is mixing with people with strange names and starting to win small amounts of money. Around this time (the year 2000), the game of poker is being transformed by television, with Late Night Poker on Channel 4 being well known and attracting large audiences. Victoria finds herself playing with Martin Amis, Ricky Gervais and Stephen Fry, and as online poker develops, she finds more opportunities and also sponsorship (gambling with other people's money certainly makes life less stressful!). The autobiographical sections are interleaved throughout the book with a running account of the tournament which led to Victoria's big win. These sections tend to be a little technical but provide great insight into the calculations you need to make and the sheer wads of experience you need in order to win. While playing poker with friends at home for small stakes may be fun, to play competitively for big money you need an obsessive streak which will keep you at the card tables for most of your spare time. Victoria is obviously very good at poker, and prepared to spend the time and intelligence to think about her playing strategies. There are some sad stories about lesser people who have a large win and immediately leave the poker tables to lose all they've won on blackjack or roulette. At one point in the book, Victoria is set up on a radio programme to discuss gambling with Gamblers Anonymous and this is a sad affair with neither side communicating effectively. I wouldn't want this review to appear at all judgemental - this is a very entertaining book and allowed me to learn what motivates poker players and to understand the world they inhabit. One can't help but warm to Victoria, whose remarkable candour makes this a fascinating read. She speaks frankly about her broken-heart when love affairs fail, and also about the resulting depression which affected her for months afterwards.
15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Quality in your hand,
By
This review is from: For Richer, for Poorer: A Love Affair with Poker (Hardcover)
Of all the books I have read on poker in the last few months this is the only one that conveys any atmosphere, real feeling or depth. You can explain anything technically, but if someone described kissing the way most books talk about poker you'd never want to try it. This book conveys what it's like to give poker a passionate snog and feel your knees wobble. The prose is a joy to read.
By way of explanation - I'm learning about poker from a starting point of no knowledge whatsoever, hoping to make it into the gaming industry and a friend recommend I read up on Victoria Coren's articles on poker and her website. I was lucky - this book was due out the week after and I yummed it up, cover to cover. Poker aside, it's an honest and moving memoir, as well as being pant wettingly funny in places. Oh and I start my new job in poker next week. I can say this book was instrumental in helping me understand so much more than the technical. I've snogged poker and I liked it...
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