Many poker strategy books come in the aftermath, and sometimes as an afterthought, of the author’s success as a poker player. They’re written to capture the market that is ready to listen to advice from someone who has, at least to many people’s perceptions, ‘made it’.
Matt Matros’ 2004 book The Making of a Poker Player is the exact opposite, a book written during the process of becoming a player rather than after the success of that aspiration. We spoke to him about exactly how the book came to be.
“I wrote the book almost entirely before I was considered much of a poker player.” Says Matros, disarmingly open about how the book came into being. “I was a writer first and I wanted to find a writing project. I’d only recently taken up poker as a serious recreational endeavour. I wanted to write the story of how I was learning to gain basic competence. Publishing moves slowly and I’d sold the book before I’d made any success in the tournament world.”
That all changed when Matros, out of virtually nowhere, came third in the World Poker Tour $25,000-entry Championship Event at the Bellagio in Las Vegas.
“The original plan was that [the book] was going to come out and I was going to be completely unknown. In the period of time between when I sold the book and it was scheduled to be book being finished and published, however, I made the run in the WPT Championship at the Bellagio and expectations became quite different so I had to write one last chapter to cover that.”
Matros won $706,903 but only paid $100 to enter the event. On Spring Break from a graduate programme for writing at the time, he played a $100 satellite from home and won a $2,500 super- satellite entry plus the air fare to The Bellagio.
“I barely had $25,000 to my name at that moment so I couldn’t have put the money down and I wasn’t nearly well known enough to get backers. My plan was to fly to Vegas, play the satellite, probably not get into the tournament have fun and fly back home to my graduate writing programme.”
That didn’t happen. Instead, Matros won a huge amount of money and it changed his life… and his book.
“It was a very strange thing in that I was a writer that was writing a ‘writer’s poker book’ but people who were reading expected to learn how to become poker experts, which was never what it was designed for. I hope I was able to weave that extra storyline in there.”
The money as almost too much to cope with. For a comparitively young man, that amount of money equated something he could barely compute, despite being a man steeped in numbers.
“The money completely blew my mind and definitely affected my thought processes at the time. My brain got scrambled. It was more money than I ever thought I’d see. The whole thing was totally surreal. I was in a numb state walking through the motions and trying to keep playing poker at the time.”
While Matros did phenomenally well to win so big, it’s worth noting that had he won the event, he would have won over $2.7 million, a massive pay jump from the six-figure score he earned for his podium finish.
“There are some pretty big pay-jumps, but you’re never going to see – in the WSOP at least – third place be one quarter of first place ever again. There was a no deal policy too, and as much as I trusted both Martin [De Knijff] and Hasan [Habib], I’d only known them a couple of days. I had to just play it out.”
Finishing in third place, Matros looks back on the experience with no little pride. It changed his life, but he managed those changes.
“It was an insane experience and very different from my poker life now. I don’t think I would change too much about it in hindsight even if some of my decisions were wrong. I didn’t jump into super high stakes; I moved up one level, and it took a lot of pressure off me financially. I was going to search teaching jobs and make a living as a college professor and subsidize that as a part-time poker player. I didn’t have to involve the teaching aspect anymore.”
Now 15 years on, Matros credits his age as being the defining factor in helping him to remain calm and control what he did with the winnings.
“I didn’t do anything silly, made a plan, bought an apartment and set aside some money for a bankroll. I took it from there. I’m glad it happened to me at age 27 not when I was 21. I was, in some sense at least, ready to make that score.”
The Making of a Poker Player billed Matros as a ‘Maths Wizard’ in the U.K. version of the book and christened him a ‘math geek’ in the United States. While he was passionate about writing, mathematics was his first academic love.
“I’ve always had a natural affinity towards mathematics, that stuff comes easily; the calculation of pot odds or wrapping my head around the theory. Writing, as it turned out, I had to find on my own. When you have a natural talent for math, everyone assumes that you’re just going to study that forever, and I did for a long time. I realised that I was much more interested in writing but I had to work much harder at it – and still do. In the end, it was where I wanted to take my career.”
The book was a success, and Matros pleased both his publishers and his own passion when it was released.
“My publisher was pleased and it went into a second printing. I didn’t get rich off the book but it’s pretty hard for authors to make a lot of money. There are exceptions in the poker world and there are some books released around that time that made a killing, but mine wasn’t one of them. It did well though and better than some expected.”
Matt Matros would write a second poker book, called The Game Plan, but incredibly, it wouldn’t be published for 15 years. Why did he wait so long to put pen to paper on poker again, and what happened when he did? Find out in next week’s Poker in Print as we get a heads-up on The Game Plan with Matt Matros himself.
