Everyone put your poker faces on

The Poker Night KnackPack

By Jude Nosak

KnackPack publishing company

2002…

The Poker Night KnackPack

By Jude Nosak

KnackPack publishing company

2002

Are you desperately lonely? Is there nothing good on TV? Do you seriously have nothing better to do than read a “book” about how to play poker?

If this is you, get a clue – don’t pick up this cheap excuse for a handbook.

The company that makes “KnackPacks” – how-to guides – has made one for poker games. And what a great idea, seeing as how no one on Earth knows how to play poker, and there aren’t enough poker how-to guides out there already.

Jude Nosak, who apparently thinks he’s God’s prophet of poker, wrote this book so that normal, God-fearing patrons and consumers in the United States would learn how to cheat their friends out of some money while “having a good time.”

And it’s about time someone taught people how to steal other people’s money in a game of cards, because card games are about money and definitely not camaraderie. This “KnackPack” goes out of its way to make sure that you, the reader, aren’t the innocent victim of pros, easily distracted by shiny objects and cards with pretty colors and numbers on them. And just so you know the difference, the handbook is equipped with crude, kitschy drawings to help you understand the difference between a rube and a ringer. Because, you know, you’re an idiot and you can’t already tell.

Even the lingo Nosak uses is just too much. The definitions of “high hand” and “low hand” are “clarified” with the diction of a 5-year-old. And what’s a declaration in poker? What the hell is “simultaneous, by chip” and “clockwise, by player”? Seriously, these are cryptic terms the likes of which shall never be grasped by novices. He should’ve made a lexicon or something, because this jibber-jabber is out of reach.

Ignoring the awful part of the book – which is called “general information” and spans pages one through 25 – this handbook isn’t half bad. It offers 52 different versions of poker games, rates each version and expresses how to play these games in surprisingly easy-to-understand terms. The descriptions for games like Seven-Card Stud and Five-Card Draw are actually easy to follow. There’s also a glossary for what each type of hand counts for, which makes learning the games a lot easier.

This book wasn’t looking too bad until Nosak and his KnackPack cronies had the gall to insult “Hold ’em,” a community game that’s used for the World Series of Poker and is possibly the greatest game of poker ever, by giving Hold ’em a 3-out-of-13 rating. How dare they? No one insults Hold ’em and gets away with it.

Bottom line: with the exceptions of the “general info,” the cryptic lingo and the insulting of Hold ’em, this handbook is nothing but a description of different types of poker games to play, which isn’t very useful.