This is from the June 12, 2025 edition of "The Anthony Curtis' Las Vegas Advisor"
Question::
My father-in-law is a lifetime poker player and he just loves telling poker stories. In his 80s, we’ve all heard them all 100 times and he’s gotten the message that we’re pretty much over them already. So now, he loves reading poker stories. He loved your book The 50 Greatest Poker Stories and told me that he wished it never ended and is waiting for the sequel. Are you working on one? And if not, do you have another book of poker stories you can recommend?
Answer:
We waited awhile to answer this question — until a great new book of poker stories was published. We’re not planning a sequel to The 50 Greatest Stories in Poker History, but the new book, Missouri & Me — A Poker Odyssey, will more than suffice.
Missouri & Me is written by Glen Garrod, a poker pro for nearly five decades. His career began in college in California in the 1960s, then moved up to Lake Tahoe and Reno in the early ’70s, where it stayed on and off, mostly on, for the next 25 years. This was decidedly old-school poker, as Glen writes, “a time when the poker community was small and connected by yearly tournaments that weren’t overly populated and by road gamblers who spread stories that became embedded in poker mythology.”
From his home base in northern Nevada, Glen roamed the U.S. and Europe, playing as he went, with numerous back-in-the-day adventures that your 80-year-old father-in-law can no doubt relate to. The stories in the beginning are more about the players, eccentrics every one, and various settings on the long road trips that involved poker and plain old hippie wanderings, than the games. But as the chronology progresses, they turn more to the tournaments and individual hands that stand out in Glen’s memory, which is ferocious.
The Missouri of the title refers to “Missouri” Dave, a legendary poker player on the old road-gambler circuit, with whom Glen formed a lifetime friendship. He writes, “Missouri Dave is a laser-focused assassin to whom most of his weaker opponents appear mentally naked and defenseless. Bolstered by a lifetime of playing, he has total command of every aspect of the game. His intuitive abilities are finely tuned. It would be fairly accurate to say Missouri Dave plays poker on a higher plane than most.”
More characters your father-in-law will enjoy reading about include Sailor Roberts, Flyer, Cornbread, Laughing Al, Cowboy Tom, Suitcase Jimmy, Tuna, and Lenny the Levitator, among many others. There are also appearances by Benny Binion, Amarillo Slim, Freddie Deeb, Richard Pryor, David Mamet, and the Grateful Dead. Vietnam, cocaine (“a tsunami that swept through many of America’s poker rooms”), “The Biggest Pot I Ever Won,” and numerous World Series of Poker stories round out the book.
The stories are fast-paced and entertaining, but when Glen describes the individual hands, such as in Chapter 7 on the World Series of Poker and with seven “Big Hands in the Big Game,” they slow down to the tempo of the poker, with all the attending drama, tension, agony of bad beats, and triumph of scooping big pots that you’d expect from a 313-page book of poker stories. Also, we were happy to see the suits of the playing cards in the text and the graphics of the cards themselves in the showdowns. That’s impressive, especially for a self-published book, and bring the hands to life.
Missouri & Me is available as an ebook on Amazon for $9.99. But we suspect your father-in-law will be happier with the trade paperback, which can be purchased at the book’s website for $19.99 (plus shipping); also at MissouriAndMe.com, you can get a little deeper look into the book.
We’re confident when we say that Missouri & Me will keep your father-in-law in poker-story heaven for a good long time — and hopefully, he won’t repeat them to you and your family, though we’re sure he’ll be tempted to!
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