You can't really call me out for stating something that is true. I'm assuming my readers don't have the dust cover handy. I'm just making it a 100% clear to people who haven't yet looked at the book that it is, in fact, strategy-free. I wasn't disappointed, I'm just getting it out there.

I think I made it clear that I liked parts of the book, but most of what I liked can be summed up in McManus' article here: http://chronicle.com/article/What-Poker-Can-Tea…

“Poker now has what must surely be its definitive history in this excellent, comprehensive account of the game.” Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Entertaining, informative and genial. . . . McManus writes with verve [and] authority. [A] copious, lively account of poker’s past and present.” Robert Pinsky, New York Times Book Review
“If there were a World Series of Poker Writing, then James McManus just won the main event. It’s not only that McManus delivers the definitive history of the game with Cowboys Full: The Story of Poker, it’s that he’s so entertaining doing it that even non-pokeristas will get swept along for the ride. [He] manages to transform poker into a character in a historical novel—a character we follow from its ancestry in Asia, Europe and the Middle East to New Orleans in the early 1800s, then up the Mississippi on riverboats to every corner of the inchoate country. . . . Just as Doyle Brunson’s Super System and Dan Harrington’s Harrington on Hold’em are the books on playing poker, Cowboys Full is now the book about the game.” Rathe Miller, Philadelphia Inquirer
“Mr. McManus writes about our American love of poker like James A. Michener describing the Plains Indians’ discovery of the buffalo: ‘Wait a second . . . I can eat it, wear it, make it into a drum . . . there’s nothing I can’t do with this sonofabitch.’ I would throw in ‘A joy for poker players and non-players alike,’ but, of the second group, who cares what they read—and I don’t think there are enough of them to affect Mr. McManus’s royalties.” David Mamet
“A history of the game with all its unsavory and distinguished practitioners. [It] explains a lot about who we are as a culture. America is where the game was popularized, and in his new book McManus lists dozens of powerful Americans who have spent long nights hunched over a card table betting — and bluffing — their way to riches or ruin. [He] reads the game’s lessons as a necessary ingredient in the development of the American ideology.” Guy Raz, All Things Considered
“The book is sensational. McManus is a writer of immense talent, deft with language and with an ear that seems to catch all the right conversations. And he has a cast of characters that would be the envy of the most imaginative novelist.” Rick Kogan, Chicago Tribune
“Cowboys Full is a deal-me-in delight. Starting with a sweeping survey of the history of the game and its role in American culture, McManus ends with a smart, insiders’ analysis of how poker has been—and should be—played. . . . Stuffed with anecdotes. . . . Beyond its importance as a model and metaphor for American culture, society, and politics, Cowboys Full demonstrates, poker is fascinating in its own right.” Glenn C. Altschuler, Boston Globe
“Passion is enlivening, and authors who have it draw us in. We want it because without it we would be angels, and no one, really, wants that. James McManus is passionate about poker, not a game for angels but one once associated with sin and played in murky rooms by rough men. [His] Cowboys Full is 516 pages of all things poker: history, trivia, strategy, analysis. It’s a compendium, an omnium-gatherum, an anecdotal encyclopedia of poker. [He] shows its influence on every American war, the building of the great cities, the settlement of the West, politics and [how it] teaches us like no other game can how to survive in life, maybe even win more than we lose.” Tom Dodge, Dallas Morning News
“A poet and novelist, McManus revels in the language of the game . . . whose long, colorful history in the U.S. comes to life through [his] research and narrative wit. McManus knows the green-felt world, having entered the World Series of Poker in 2000 while researching a magazine article. He finished fifth and produced a classic book in Positively Fifth Street. . . . With its detailed history and 87 pages of notes, glossary and index, Cowboys Full manages to be authoritative and entertaining. The book closes with a look at the global explosion of Internet poker, the electronic fraud that quickly emerged with it and the U.S. legislative efforts to ban or rein in Web gambling—efforts that McManus convincingly portrays as uncommonly wrongheaded even by Washington standards.” Jeffrey Burke, Bloomberg News

Still going strong! I don't need a fresh coat of paint to stay fresh, unlike your puny site.

You “playing” poker again?