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POKER AUTHORS
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| J David Sklansky |  |
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 David
Sklansky is generally considered the number one authority on gambling
in the world today. Besides his nine books on the subject, David also
has produced two videos and numerous writings for various gaming publications.
His occasional poker seminars always receive an enthusiastic reception
including those given at the Taj Mahal in Atlantic City and the World
Series of Poker in Las Vegas. More recently David has been doing consulting work for casinos, Internet gaming sites, and gaming device companies. He has recently invented a new game called Poker Challenge, soon to appear in casinos. David attributes his standing in the gambling community to three things:
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| Mason Malmuth | |
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 Mason
Malmuth was born and raised on Coral Gables, Florida. In 1973 he received
his BS in Mathematics from Virginia Tech, and completed their Master'
program in 1975. While working for the United States Census Bureau in
1978, Mason stopped overnight in Las Vegas while driving to his new
assignment in California. He was immediately fascinated by the games,
and gambling became his major interest. After arriving in California he discovered that poker was legal and began playing in some of the public cardrooms as well as taking periodic trips to Las Vegas where he would play both poker and blackjack. In 1981 he went to work for the Northrop Corporation as a mathematician and moved to Los Angeles where he could conveniently pursue his interest in poker in the large public cardrooms in Gardena, Bell Gardens, and Commerce. In 1983 his first article "Card Domination--The Ultimate Blackjack Weapon" was published in Gambling Times magazine. In 1987 he left his job with the Northrop Corporation to begin a career as both a full-time gambler and a gambling writer. He has had over 500 articles published in various magazines and is the author or co-author of 12 books. These include Gambling Theory and Other Topics, where he tries to demonstrate why only a small number of people are highly successful at gambling. In this book he introduces the reader to the concept of "non-self weighting strategies" and explains why successful gambling is actually a balance of luck and skill. Other books he has co-authored are Hold 'em Poker for Advanced Players, written with David Sklansky, and Seven-Card Stud for Advanced Players written with David Sklansky and Ray Zee. These two "advanced" books are considered the definitive works on these games. His company Two Plus Two Publishing has sold over 300,000 books and currently has 24 titles to its credit. These books are recognized as the best in their field and are thoroughly studied by those individuals who take gambling seriously. |
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| Ray Zee | |
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 Ray
Zee was born and raised in New Jersey, and spent his college years in
the East as well. Unlike other students, Ray did more than just study.
He began to gamble on the side in school, and when he graduated he was
ready to start his career, which just happened to be in the desert of
Nevada. Ray quickly realized that there were many opportunities in various forms of gambling and began to search for ways to exploit the inequities in many of the games. This included blackjack, horse racing, sports betting, slot jackpots, and of course his favorite game, poker. It wasn't long before he became known as one of the top poker players and most knowledgeable gamblers in the world. And when we say world, we mean it literally because there are very few places where gambling is offered that Ray has not visited. In fact, you can go to many cardrooms all over the world, mention the name Ray Zee, and get an immediate response. Ray usually chooses to play in very high stakes cash games, many of which feature some of the best players in the world. It has been said that "He leaves them with their eyes wide open when he departs." Ray is also one of the very few players that is considered expert in virtually every form of poker played for serious money. He is also one of the very few gamblers (still around) that has been to all the World Series of Poker Tournaments at Binions Horseshoe Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas. Rays book, High-Low-Split Poker for Advanced Players is recognized as the premier book on split pot games, and this has increased his following and helped to promote these games as well. He is considered an invaluable member of the Two Plus Two Publishing team, and his advice and wisdom is widely sought by many of his peers and adversaries at the gaming tables. |
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| Lynne Loomis | |
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 Lynne
Loomis has been a professional freelance writer and editor for 20 years
and has written countless articles on gambling and other industry-related
topics. She also occasionally can be found in casinos and cardrooms
around the country. |
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| Sylvester Suzuki | |
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Sylvester Suzuki is the pen name of a freelance writer who currently resides in southern California. As a teenager in the late 1940s, Mr. Suzuki, who was born and raised in the Seattle area, began his poker-playing career with such penny-ante favorites as "baseball" and "spit in the ocean." He then steadily progressed to no-limit lowball as a merchant seaman in the mid-fifties. Shortly after graduating from the University of Washington in 1959, Suzuki departed for assignment as a civilian administrative officer with the Eight United States Army in Seoul, Korea. During a twenty-five-year career with several Department of Defense agencies, primarily in overseas areas, Suzuki was a poker-playing regular in a variety of officers clubs, bachelor officers quarters, and on-base family housing facilities. Since his retirement in 1984, Mr. Suzuki has been playing poker primarily in the casinos of California and Nevada. |
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| Dan Paymar | |
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| Dan Paymar was born and raised in Flint, Michigan. Before turning to a career in the poker industry, Dan spent four years at Michigan Tech, becoming an engineer. His first work in the computer industry was in field service for Bendix Computer, which was bought out by Control Data in 1963. In 1967, Dan moved on to develop a text editing system for Encyclopędia Britannica. With two other engineers, Dan started Educational Data Systems. Their goal: to write a BASIC language interpreter and disk operating system for the Data General Nova computer to handle up to sixteen users. As far as we know, this was the first time-sharing system ever to run on a minicomputer. When the company began manufacturing its own computers Educational Data Systems became Point 4 Data Corporation. Always the idea man, Dan then developed an accessory for the Apple-II computer which he sold via his own mail order business and through retail outlets. In 1989 Dan changed his career direction about 180 degrees and returned to school -- to become a poker dealer. That same year, he moved to Las Vegas. After five years working as a poker dealer, playing some poker, and getting interested in video poker, Dan became an instructor for poker dealers at Casino Gaming School. Not satisfied with the instructional materials then available, the original edition of this book was born. Starting as a booklet of fifty pages, the text evolved as new situations and questions came up in class that were not covered. In 1995, the second edition of the original text, with eighty pages, was published and sold in gaming bookstores. Dan has been playing video poker since 1989 and began analyzing it and writing about it in 1991. Several of his articles have been published in Card Player, and he has a regular column in Blackjack Forum. Dan and associate newsletter editor Doug Reul are highly respected among both professional and recreational video poker players for their accurate analyses and easy-to-use strategies. |
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| Donna Harris | |
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| Donna Harris was born and raised in California and came to Las Vegas in 1979 for the World Cup of Darts, which was held at the Sahara Hotel. She was the first female official for this event. Like many Las Vegas visitors, she was fascinated by the prospect of building a career in the casino industry, and in 1980 she returned to Las Vegas to deal blackjack professionally. Her first job was at the Golden Nugget Gambling Hall in downtown Las Vegas. That same year, after becoming intrigued by the game of poker (which was played directly across the pit from where she dealt), and then playing poker after work, Donna asked to be transferred into the cardroom where the legendary Bill Boyd was the manager. Her initial position was as a "shill dealer" -- a dealer who only dealt when the "regular" dealers were out of the lineup -- usually to play poker. Her other early job duties included brushing tables, getting fills and player's checks, and "playing poker" as a shill. She dealt poker until 1985. In 1982 Bill Boyd retired, turning the cardroom over to another legend, Eric Drache. At that time very few women were in poker management and Eric felt that many of his regular customers, who originally played in "smokey back room" type environments, would not respect the decision of a young and inexperienced female floorperson. However, Donna persisted and was given the opportunity to succeed. In 1985 Donna became the relief shift manager at the Golden Nugget. When The Mirage opened in 1989, she was selected to be the swing shift manager for the new cardroom and became cardroom Manager in 1989. She has also held positions in both The World Series of Poker and Grand Prix of Poker tournaments held in Las Vegas. Her experience includes traveling with Poker Cruises International, whose routes to most ports in the Caribbean and Mexico have now been taken over by Card Player Cruises and Classic Poker Cruises. She was also aboard the first "poker cruise" to England on the QE II in 1985, and worked poker tournaments in such exotic locales as Marakesh, Morocco, and Port Vila, Vanuatu. As of this writing Miss Harris is still employed at The Mirage. She has been with the Golden Nugget/Mirage Corporation for nearly eighteen years. |
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| Ray Michael B. | |
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| Ray Michael B. is a semi-retired neuro-surgeon, a recreational player, and a poker aficionado, which he defines as a serious student of the game. |
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| Alan Schoonmaker | |
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| Alan Schoonmaker earned his Ph.D. in industrial psychology at Berkeley. He taught and did research at UCLA, Carnegie-Mellon, and Belgium's Catholic University of Louvain. After running management development at Merrill Lynch, he worked as a consultant in twenty-nine countries on all six continents. He has written or co-authored three research monographs and five books on industrial psychology. His work has been translated into French, German, Spanish, Swedish, Japanese, and Indonesian. A major theme of his work is understanding and adjusting to different kinds of people, which is also the theme of this book. His attitude toward our game is unique for a poker writer: "I play only in smaller games because maximizing my profits is much less important to me than relaxing and learning about people. I became a psychologist because I enjoy people-watching, and a cardroom is a wonderful place to do it." "Players in small games are much more interesting than the more serious players. They are more varied, open, and relaxed. They laugh more, tell better stories, and never forget that the purpose of playing any game is to have fun." "As the stakes get higher, the players become more serious and homogeneous. Most of them study the same books, know the same odds, and try to use similar strategies. In the smaller games there are more rocks, more maniacs, more calling stations, more nerds, more "Deluded Experts," and more oddballs, which means I learn more and get better material for my writing." "Most poker writers focus on how the champions think and play, but hardly anything has been written about ordinary players. I want to help them to understand themselves and the people in their games." |
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| John Feeney | |
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| John Feeney spent his youth in Phoenix Arizona. After attending the University of Colorado he moved to San Diego to pursue graduate work in clinical psychology at the California School of Professional Psychology. His interest in poker was sparked while observing a hold 'em game during a weekend trip to Las Vegas. True to his background, he took an academic approach to the game, studying the poker literature, consulting with David Sklansky, and getting the requisite playing experience. By the time he received his Ph.D., poker was beginning to compete with psychology for his attention. He soon began to log more hours in the cardrooms of Southern California, and ultimately poker became his primary focus. Today John can often be found in games in his area or elsewhere. When not at the tables John now devotes a portion of his time to writing. His articles in Poker Digest have been well received, and he is a regular participant in poker discussions on the Internet. You may spot his "posts" on the Two Plus Two Forums. Away from poker John enjoys spending time with his wife and two young daughters. |
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