For the Poker Player in Your Life

Poker players, like golfers, are cursed by easy gift syndrome, whereby anyone who knows you thinks that a poker-related gift - even if its a furry thong with the ace of spades stapled to the front - wi II demonstrate how well they know you, and how hard they must have searched for an apt and personal birthday present.

This syndrome has given rise to another - Poker Books written by People Who Know Jack about Poker and Care Even Less. Where any old poker tat is assembled into a book by a couple of hacks in a spare afternoon.

The Wit and Wisdom of Poker, by Fiona Jerome and Seth Dickson, is one such tome. The usual creaky old anecdotes about Amarillo Slims camel-riding prop bets and Wild Bills Dead Mans Hand are sandwiched between jokes, excerpts from books and the slightly poker-sounding names of towns (Ace River, Carolina etc). Talking of sandwiches: there are no less than FOUR sandwichrelated items in there, from the fabulous idea of using novelty suit-shaped biscuit cutters to theme your homegame sandwiches, to a tenuous link with the Earl of Sandwich who (extremely dubious legend has it) invented the bread-based meal so he could play cards (though not poker) and eat at the same time. The book tells us that Stu Ungar won 10 of the 30 major tournaments he entered in a bravura four-day show (including three World Series Titles. In four daysl Yes, he was that good!).

It also informs us that Joe Hachem was the tenth rated IPF player of 2005, yet it omits him from the list of players who have made more than a million dollars from WSOPs (oh, and it calls him Joe Hatchem). It includes lots of dreary old cartoons about patience and bridge, tips from pros culled from websites, snippets of poker lore (if I read that bloody Richard Nixon fact one more time ... ) and 1ascinating facts about the great game that must have taken a good hour on Google to find, and it is padded out with entries that have a poker connection so tenuous it would take the Hubble telescope to find it.

Its money for old rope, isnt it? So here it is: the first two pages of Charlie Chimps Lazy Book of Poker, a compendium of poker gems that will make any cardplaying friends eyes light up on tearing back the wrapping paper: