RIP DAVID SKLANSKY

Rest in Peace sweet prince

We worked together for 40 years.

RIP.

Awful. Not only were his books influential, he was also an endless source of entertainment here. It is a real shame that he's not with us anymore.

His books helped me that is for sure. RIP David.

So Mike Caro is the last author standing from the classic book "Super System".

Bobby Baldwin is still alive no?

Enjoyed his books and thankful for his contributions. Condolences to his family.

30 year friendship. Conversations were always interesting and challenging. He will be missed

Very much a reason for the early success of this site.

Pretty rough that the 2nd line announcing your death is ‘regardless of his thoughts and faults’

Condolences to Mat

So sad, I learned from his books and twitch stream but everyone dies eventually. :(

Right? I assumed Mason would come in a bit late because he needed some time to process. After that I expected him, of all people, to write a very long (and appropriate) eulogy for David. We dont know the full extent of their relationship, whether it was a close friendship or simply a work confidant but a few paragraphs seemed necessary.

I never spoke to the man but he always appeared to have a tumultuous personal life. Enjoyed the forums over the last 20 years tho so im thankful for that.

when i interviewed him on Pokersesh he told me that his parrot turned on his public facing webcam once while he was engaged in coitus (the physical, by the hour, act of making love).

I helped set him up with Twitch. His cockatoo would destroy keyboards and yes, flipped on the stream a couple times.

Dave would jump in the Horse thread to brag on Big Red and a trotter from time to time. RIP David

David used to be a writer for Gambling Times magazine. He came up with a video poker strategy which he calculated by hand. This is extremely difficult to do. Video poker machines were fairly new in the early eighties. They had progressives all over town which became an advantage at $2200 on a 25 cents machine I believe. If you found one at $3000 your expected value would be around $800 over 60 hours of play to hit a Royal Flush. Not a lot of money but $13 an hour was decent money back then as it didn't cost much to live in Las Vegas and food was dirt cheap. As the progressive keeps going up you might find one at $4000. There were also $ dollar games. and now you're earning $50 an hour.

As it turned out David's strategy was too conservative. I believe he didn't have you hold J10 suited. I can't remember for sure but that is a significant mistake just holding the Jack. What I do know it was a landmark article. There was another mathematician in town who came up with a better strategy but it was only given to video poker team members. They were very secretive as their group was hitting progressives in many Las Vegas casinos.

Always looked forward to Dave's articles in Gambling Times. He exploited many promotions in the city. Casino marketing executives weren't too sharp back then. They were clueless as to knowing when they were giving a big edge to the player. Sure they knew about card counters but were lost on anything else. No idea what they were doing when it came to drawings, Keno, horse racing and many other offerings.

There's a lot of things that David was the first one to do, and publishing a reasonable video poker strategy was one of them. However, if my memory is correct, it didn't appear in Gambling Times, but in a small magazine that was actually published by Gambler's Book Club. However, I don't remember the name of the magazine but may have a copy at home. If I do I'll post the magazine name here.

Hard to overstate what Sklansky did for this game. Before him, poker strategy was oral tradition, hunches and feel passed down from whoever had been around longest. He turned it into a discipline, and everything that followed built on his foundation.

Like a lot of people here, I came up playing for loose change against other teenagers who were equally bad. Lose a big pot with K8o and top pair and you figured it was just bad luck, a cooler, move on. But some of us started seeing past that. Developing this organic, almost subconscious understanding of relative hand values, that you shouldn't be playing K8o at all, that you should have a reason to be putting money in the pot. That intuition was a real edge once, which allowed people like me to serendipitously fall into playing poker for a living. Not because it was a choice, just something you realized along the way, oh wow I'm making more doing this than what the jobs I'm applying for will pay me.

Sklansky and everyone who built on his work eventually made very advanced concepts far beyond my own intuition common knowledge. The irony is that while I praise David's contributions to the game, I was likely a victim of it. I know 10x more today as a weekend 1/3 player than I did when I was buying in for 5 figures to play for a living. Not only are the stakes a lot smaller but so is my win rate.

He made some poor choices later in life that were hard to watch, and a long life inside the gambling world has a way of doing that to people. Doesn't change what he built. RIP to one of the most important people poker ever produced, the Bill James of poker. Bill James got everything associated with baseball, a World Series ring and a movie and David got everything associated with Vegas and gambling.

David, I read you books while pretending to pay attention in middle school social studies.

They led me to 2p2.

The combo taught me more than any lecture ever could.

Thank you.

You will be missed.

Rest in peace to the man who transformed not just how I thought about poker, but also about all decision making in life.

TwoPlusTwo has also brought me a true education of poker, immense joy, and worthwhile friendships.

And for that, I say thank you.

Quoth the McLovin, forevermore.

thats crazy was still a poster here as well from time to time.

his greatest invention was this forums io

I knew David for 20 years. He destroyed a huge part of my youth and forever altered the trajectory of my life.

As David once said to me when Brandi died, I’m sorry that you’re sad but I’m not sorry he’s dead.

I believe the magazine that the video poker strategy article appeared in was called Casino & Sports. It was published by Gambler's Book Club and edited by Howard Schwartz.

Not tilting is obviously better than tilting.