GAMBLERS BOOK CLUB GRAND OPENING--MAY 25, 2011

05/30/11 • 48 min

THIS PODCAST CONTAINS INTERVIEWS FROM GUESTS IN ATTENDANCE AND THE OWNER AND GENERAL MANGER OF GLAMBERS BOOK CLUB AT THE GRAND OPENING OF THE NEWLY RENOVATED STORE. THE CLUB IS ALSO PROUD TO ANNOUNCE THE OPENING OF THE GAMBLERS BOOK CLUB STATE OF THE ART AUDIO AND HD VIDEO STUDIO. WE BELIEVE THAT THIS IS A FIRST FOR A BOOK STORE/CLUB IN THE WORLD AND HOPE WHEN IN LAS VEGAS YOU WILL COME AND VISIT OUR STORE AND STUDIO.

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EPISODE 82---DONNA MABRY

Donna Foley Mabry

When Donna was five years old, her father gave her a red and white Singer sewing machine for Christmas. It was powered by turning a little wheel on the side, and it was just what the little girl wanted. Somehow, Mabry says, she already knew how to make simple dresses for her dolls.

Over the years, her machines included an old foot-treadle powered White, then her first electric, another Singer, with a cast-iron body that was so heavy she couldn’t lift it by herself. She made clothes for herself and her daughter, Melanie. When her children were small, she didn’t work outside of the home, but earned her own money dressmaking for wealthy ladies.

When the family moved to Florida, Melanie was fifteen and immediately became involved with the Venice Little Theatre. Soon, the whole family was spending their free time there. Husband Lonnie acted and helped with props, son David acted and did lights. One Christmas, David was a witches helper in, “The Wizard of Oz,” and grew so much over the summer that the next year, he was the Scarecrow.

The costume designer, Joan Dillon, taught Donna the finer points of costume construction. Over the years, Donna sewed, acted, and performed various other duties at the theatre, and her daughter went on to study acting and dance at USF and became a professional actor. That led both of them to Las Vegas.

Melanie came first, doing a show at the MGM Grand for a year, then deciding to settle down. She went into marketing, starting in events and tournaments at the Sahara, then working her way up to Entertainment Director at Harrah’s on the Las Vegas strip.

While she was working there, Melanie persuaded her boss to hire her mother to make costumes. Melanie introduced Donna to her friends and workmates, colorful people to say the least. She set up a work area for her Mom in the back of the dressing room. Soon, Donna was making notes on things she heard while she was sewing.

Donna hadn’t written since college, but thought about the interesting people and great stories and decided to stitch them together into her first novel, “The Last Two Aces in Las Vegas.”

Everyone in it is based on at least one real person. Some of the characters are two or three people put together.

“My leading man, Alberto, is actually three people, he has one person’s childhood, a different one’s early adulthood, and another’s older years. Many of the stories told in the book are true, and a few of them didn’t take place until after the book was finished. I’m very interested in what makes people do the things they do, so given their personalities, it wasn’t too difficult to see how they would react in certain situations. It‘s fun when a Vegas old-timer reads it and tries to guess who the character is in real life. Sometimes, the guess surprises me, and sometimes they‘re right on the money. It‘s not always who you might think.”

With four books now published in the series, the story lines seem almost endless. “These are sort of backwards mysteries, like the old TV show, Colombo. You know right away who the killer is, the mystery comes in finding out what will happen to trip them up,” Donna says.

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EPISODE 83---“Don’t Listen to Phil Hellmuth,” Dusty “Leatherass” Schmidt

Dusty “Leatherass” Schmidt is one of the real success stories of online poker. He’s the “Average Joe” who started playing micro-stakes games and eventually turned that into millions of dollars and a sponsorship deal with PokerStars. In his first book, “Treat Your Poker Like a Business,” Schmidt revealed some of the secrets to becoming an internet success story and laid out the blueprint for how micro- and small-stakes players could follow in his footsteps.

Coming off the acclaim of his first book, Schmidt teamed up with Christopher Hoppe to write his second book, “Don’t Listen to Phil Hellmuth,” which claims to correct the 50 worst pieces of poker advice you’ve ever heard. The book is available for $49.99 either as a hard copy or a PDF file that can be loaded onto most popular e-reading devices.

The concept of the book is pretty provocative and clearly the title was meant to stir the pot and create a bit of controversy. For a book being sold strictly online, there’s some leeway when it comes to self-promotional methods, so I can’t come down too hard on the shameless attempt to grab headlines through the title alone.

Nevertheless, as a player who plays small-stakes games and looking to make the jump into mid-stakes games by the end of this year, I find myself agreeing with the concept of the book more and more: the advice we all heard when we first jumped into poker is woefully outdated. The books aims to take that advice and give it a real world spin.

The books starts with an unapologetic look at the advice of years gone by from poker commentators on television and instructors on websites. The tone of the book is much more analytical than anything else, which was a good move since a book with a bratty and spiteful tone would have lost a lot of readers. The introduction sets the tone well and demonstrates the reality that poker is an organic game that is constantly evolving.

The book consists of 50 chapters, each of which has a common misconception in the game of poker. Each chapter states the misconception and then deconstructs the truth and falsehood behind it while demonstrating its reality in today’s micro- and small-stakes games. Each chapter is about four pages long and most have hand history examples if the concept calls for one.

I’m sure there will be plenty of debate regarding the advice, but the idea is that the mind will be thinking about interesting poker spots. There’s a real world look at the games in the context of each misconception and there’s definitely bound to be some nuggets of golden advice for all readers in the 50 chapters in the book.

The book isn’t necessarily linear, meaning the chapters don’t have to be read in order to make sense. If you find some of the misconceptions particularly juicy from the table of contents, skipping to them is appropriate and doesn’t take away from the experience of reading the book.

The second part of the book is a section entitled “25 Hands with Dusty Schmidt,” where the authors take a look at hands from the mid- and high-stakes cash games and break down the play. There are a lot of interesting spots that Schmidt played and there’s a strong emphasis on playing back at an opponent type and range. Again, there’s bound to be discussion about the lines Schmidt took and the summaries given.

After about 80 pages encompassing those hand histories, the final part of the book is the “Study” section, which contains a 27-page, 60-question quiz. The answers to the quiz are given on the last page so you can check.

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