For Richer, For Poorer: A Love Affair With Poker
Before you start with ‘For Richer for Poorer a Love Affair with Poker,’ you must know that the author, Victoria Coren, won the European Poker Championship, becoming the first female EPT title winner. What more, she not only won it once but was the first player in history to lift two EPT Main Events. But how? That’s what the book is about…
- Easy and understandable writing style
- It will hold your interest in the story until the end
- The openness of thoughts
- Enjoyable for both players and none players
- Humorous illustrations of moments and characters
- Sentimental attachment to the 7,4 unsuited 😉
- Lack of strategies
- It probably won’t improve your game.
Review
The structure of this book is chronological throughout Coren’s life. It presents a transition of a woman poker player from a novice to a champion. A story of happiness and heartbreak, a memoir of friendship and belongingness, For Richer and For Poorer: A Love Affair With Poker by Victoria Coren could eventually make you fall in love with its story.
In this true story, Victoria Coren wonderfully expressed heartbreak, friendship, love, and loss. Holding back nothing, she has described her relationship to poker with great openness. Victoria has used beautiful phrases of literature in the book. In simpler terms, she has expressed the inner soul of the game through her book. Coren’s excellent style of writing and sense of humor adds more success.
SUMMARY
Following Coren’s introduction to the game as a teenager, this book delivers all the juicy stories that even a none poker player would thoroughly enjoy. Victoria Coren’s memoir about becoming the first million-dollar female winner of the European Poker Tour will surely win many hearts.
Dealing with school’s miserable days, the author starts with how she finds an escape in the mysterious world of poker, which welcomes her with all love. The excellent, insightful, and honest work always impresses a little more at the end of each chapter, where Coren details something or the other in her progress to the European Poker Championship.
For Richer and For Poorer is an overall ride about the author’s highs-lows and love-betrayal in poker. Her life’s dramatic story troubles and pokers’ journey keep the readers engaged in the book. About traveling first time to Vegas, she writes:
” This might be a city of whores, guns, drug addiction and sick gambling, but it feels like we’re six years old and playing hopscotch in the garden all summer.
There is something almost unbearably happy about all of it. Pure pleasure, pure contentment, always curls around a small, sad centre because you known there is nothing permanent. Even as you look at a river, it flows on to something else. A shadow of cloud on the stream changes minute by minute. Even as you hold the water in your cupped palm it trickles out.”
PRAISE AND CRITIQUE
The fluent and accessible writing style of the author will keep your interest connected with the story. A poker memoir through a female perspective in a male-dominant, sexist, and challenging poker environment makes it more visible. Additionally, the way Victoria Coren writes the story will almost take the readers to her world.
The author ends each chapter in a way that will make you more curious about the next one. Readers can feel accompanying her on the roller coaster ride of her emotions. The handy brief glossary at the back makes it easier for the readers to understand the story. It is overall a fascinating book by a beautiful author and an intelligent player.
On the negative side, the book will probably not improve your game as there is not much strategy discussed. Therefore, if this is what you are looking for, then this book is not for you.
RECOMMENDATION
The interesting stories in For Richer, for Poorer: A Love Affair with Poker kept me reading throughout the end. I never really expected that a book on poker could make me emotional about the aspects of life, but this one has all my heart. Even if you are not a poker player, I would recommend you to read this because it’s a fun read for both poker players and non-players alike.
About The Author
Victoria Coren was born in London, in 1972. She is a presenter, writer, and poker player, she won two EPT Main Event titles. First one in 2006, in her home city, earning a prize of £500,000 and defeating a professional player Emad Tahtouh. And the second title she won in 2014, in San Remo.
Victoria Coren was the first woman to win an event on EPT and the first player to win two EPT Main Event titles.
In 2011, she finished second in the International Federation of Poker’s inaugural The Table World Championship and won $100,000
Coren has been a member of Team PokerStars Pro until November 2014 when decided to leave PokerStars after they started an online casino. Victoria said she was upset about possible addiction by people to a site where the odds are in favor of the PokerStars.
“I can’t hang around, sleep on it, have meetings and talk myself into staying, when my gut tells me that the right thing is to walk away,”
She also added:
“I cannot professionally and publicly endorse it, even passively by silence with my name still over the shop. Poker is the game I love, poker is what I signed up to promote.”
Coren Mitchell was inducted into the Women in Poker Hall of Fame in 2016
You can find her full poker results on Thehendonmob
Quotes - For Richer for Poorer a Love Affair with Poker
“… nostalgia is a primal emotion, like fear and anger and (maybe) love. It just seems otherwise, because it has a long name and is tricky to define out loud. So you might mistake it for one of those fiddly, sophisticated feelings like scahdenfreude or low self-esteem. But nostalgia is simply, basic, instinctive and it was always there. You can see it on the face of a zoo monkey that once lived in the wild. Or even one that never did. It still knows that it has lost something.”
On a place where she won her EPT title:
It doesn’t look like my dream. It doesn’t look like the Desert Inn. It has garish carpet and cheap fruit machines. The air is a soupy smog of B&H cigarette smoke, Middle Eastern aftershave and non-specific Man Smell. Everybody looks miserable. This is not a holiday casino at all.”
Victoria Becomes the First Ever Double EPT Champion - Video
Book Testimonials
Book Details - For Richer, for Poorer: A Love Affair with Pokera
Number of Pages: 352
Game: NLH
Live/Online: Live
Required Skill Level: Beginner
Format Available: E-book, Paperback
Free with Kindle Unlimited: No
Free with Audible: N/A
Publication date: Sep, 2009
Reprinted: Yes, June 2014
Special Features: N/A
Languages: English
Publisher: Canongate UK
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Tags: Victoria Coren