Live to Fold Another Hand: The Recreational Player's Code: 15 Mistakes That Quietly Drain Your Bankroll (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798189875182)

Professionals have been teaching you poker for forty years. This time a data scientist gets a turn.

I am not a professional player. I make my living reading data - data science and program management, where a wrong read arrives with an invoice attached. At a poker table I am the recreational player two seats to your left on a Friday night. That combination is the whole book: I stopped trying to out-play anyone and pointed my actual profession at my own game instead.

I tracked every hand I played, ran the report every Sunday morning, and kept finding the same fifteen leaks at the top of the list. Small stakes are not beaten with brilliance. They are beaten by finding what the data says you keep doing wrong, and then proving the fix in the one place that cannot flatter you: your own database.

Then I stopped making them. Same stake. Same hours. Same brain.

Before: 98,417 hands, minus 4.8 big blinds per hundred.
After: 98,669 hands, plus 5.8 big blinds per hundred.
The difference: not one new move. Fifteen old mistakes, made rarely instead of routinely.

Where the money went, by leak (big blinds per 100 hands):

• Reflex c-bets on the wrong boards - from -3.52 to -0.82
• Cold-calls out of position - from -2.19 to -0.20
• Flop calls with no turn plan - from -1.68 to -0.43
• River hero calls - from -1.59 to -0.24
• Big-blind defense - from -1.44 to -0.43
• Tilt and stake discipline - worth more than any single one of them

This book will not teach you to continuation-bet. Every poker book has already taught you that, and taught it well. What no book teaches is that the player who c-bets every flop is quietly paying for a lesson he learned correctly. The advice was right. The dose was wrong. And nobody sends you the bill for the dose.

Fifteen chapters, each one a move you already know, applied one notch too often. Each with the rule at the top, the math behind it, the tracker data that caught me doing it, and a one-minute checklist you can read between hands.

The last page is the one you will actually use. THE LIST is all fifteen rules condensed to fifteen lines - one page, no math, no stories. Tear it out, photograph it, keep it in your pocket. It is the whole book in the ninety seconds you have between hands.

Who this is for: you play four to twenty hours a week. You have read a strategy book or two. You still cannot quite say where the money goes.

Who this is not for: anyone chasing the top of the skill tree. Read it as the complement to any book a professional will sell you - seal the fifteen leaks first, and every book you buy afterward finally gets a chance to pay for itself.

You already know enough poker to stop losing. This book is about the part you know too well.