RIP DAVID SKLANSKY

Well ****ing said, my friend.

To the rest of you dumb ****s: David isn't here and isn't going to get upset that you dislike him or change his ways due to your silly need to type your words. Any bad feelings you are currently having are entirely your own doing.

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Some combo of off-putting people being drawn to poker and long time casino exposure making a bad problem worse.

I got to RGP fairly late, I think 4 was already up. But reading Sklansky, Malmuth, Gary Carson, Russ Georgiev etc go at it in a completely uncensored forum was exciting; a strategist battle royale.

Sklansky indicated that he was a junior actuary and found it not creative enough. In poker he was able to use his mathematical expertise in a creative way. He coined many terms, including semibluff and implied odds. His book Theory of Poker is still a top seller.

Most of his key books were before the poker boom. Doyle must have thought he was a top player and/or poker thinker to have him write a chapter in his book. Those authors are totally epic, including the authors from the 2nd edition with updated game other than NLHE. Caro was also one of the authors, and not sure he was ever a top high stakes player, but he was also a poker thinker. Sklansky was not still a high stakes crusher at the end like Doyle was.

I don’t want to sound like I am writing a eulogy on Mason, who is still with us. However, I agree that Mason could have left his name off the Sklansky books, but Mason probably had a major role in their production. Sklansky’s original form may have been more like notes or even recorded interviews. Mason was very talented at what he did. It is usually more the other way. Alex Haley interviewed Malcomb X and wrote the "Autobiography of Malcomb X" based on that, but his role was played down. It wasn’t his ideas about poker, but he had been a grinder and understood the poker enough to create what he did. It was how he chose the authors and formatted, etc. the books. 2+2 books had a certain format and style. Harrington’s tournament books and the books on high/low games etc. looked similar to the Sklansky books. Mason built both the publishing business and these forums, even though both are not in great shape now, mostly due to changing conditions.

Sklansky and Mason are legends, and just did amazing things for poker literature, etc. They would probably both be in the poker HOF if not for the scandals.

Gary Carson, wow.

The best part of SS2 is “Omaha 8 by Bobby Baldwin (feat. Mark Gregorich)”.

I wonder if Karen Carpenter ever read The Autobiography of Malcolm X in high school.

i feel like saying something nice about david.

while i have distanced myself from many of my past episodes, an everpresent character in my thoughts was david sklansky, due to spending so much time on these forums, and because he was in many ways larger than the normal poster. my memory, is that david was obsessed with "thinking", or at least encouraging others to do so. DUCY became a book of some of his nicer exploits. i ended up with an autographed copy of it.

unfortunately, "thinking" was something i was pretty terrible at. but david inspired me to become less stupid, and in such, i became less mentally ill.

i think it's fair to say his work helped me fix a large portion of my life.

that's what i am thankful for.

Hard to fathom he's really gone. Not particularly old either. As Tuma said, tried his best to approach truth via thinking.

David often made me seem like a math amateur (which I am regarding poker).

I would post a thread or reply using complex combinatorial analysis and he would follow with a simple method using probability. I learned much from TOP and his other contributions.

There is a good answer to that, but this thread is not the place to answer it.

Mat Sklansky AMA

How do you get in the 'Poker HOF' without a scandal?

When their books came out @2003 the poker shelf at Borders only had a few books on it. Supersystem was rarely in stock. Carson and S&M cited each other a few times in the footnotes. Gary was also mentally ill and started to exhibit some quasi-stalking behavior when 4 started to take off.

Sklansky was not, in my limited experience, a particularly good poker player by the time I ran into him. His personal life seems to have left much to be desired. But Theory of Poker is a towering intellectual achievement. It set down for what AFAIK is the first and maybe only time on paper a certain philosophy of probability, economics and the play of games. Poker was the vehicle, but just like Bill James was not REALLY writing about baseball per se, Sklansky seemed to be using poker as a way to say things that otherwise couldn't be articulated. Those ideas, once learned via reading ToP in college, could not be unlearned and shaped my life. To what degree? Hard to say. But there's no question I am more competitive, calculating, and risk affine than I would otherwise be because of his book. I am almost certainly more successful.

Along with Thorp and Nash and Shannon he belongs on a strange Mt. Rushmore of thinking about and navigating uncertainty.

What Mason and Matt have said here and in the AMA about his mental illness does seem to explain some things. Hopefully he finds the peace in death that seems to have eluded him in life.

Interesting there were discussion of his mental health and paranoia in 2005. It could be physical and mental health effected his play in later year. He seems to have been a top player in the 1970s and was playing high stakes, but not nosebleed, mixed in the poker boom, etc.

There are people in the poker HOF with scandals. However, the voters are the members, so mostly old school players. They all know the stories about Brandi, etc. Some of it is whether people are liked, particularly with those who wouldn't be getting in primarily on their play.

IMO, Sklansky and Mason both belong in the HOF. Sklansky as a top player at one time, for has development of a theory of poker, and for key books on limit games. Mason for the book publisher and these forums.

As far as those Sklansky and Mason books, it probably went like Mason interviewed Sklansky. Mason wrote a draft book based on that. Sklansky wrote out his comments and Mason made revisions. Sklansky probably didn't have time to write out all those books and needed someone to book them into a readable / marketable form.

I understand some people don't like Mason. However, it was he, not Sklansky, who really created these forums.

That matched my limited observation. He did not seem mentally resilient and was easy to read. You could just see what he was thinking. The fact that he was thinking put him ahead of lots of people, but still...

I found 2+2, via the TOP as well, over 20+ years ago. The rest is history.

I only had a few in person convos with David, but he was always cordial and interesting. We had several back and forths on the forums over the years. Always respected his intellect and his ability to push the implications of philosophical questions.

RIP Legend.

This is getting annoying. You have no understanding of what I did on the books that we did together. Also, are you aware that of the 21 books that I'm either an author or co-author of eight of them are written solely by me, and six of them are written with other authors not named David Sklansky.

RIP David. Don't think I ever interacted with him, let alone met him, but his works helped me a ton when I still played this game seriously, and I can only be thankful for that

Yes, I know all of that (not exact numbers) and I was defending you. Someone said you just slapped your name on the books. Does anyone read the 8 books written solely by you?

I definitely own and have read Gambling Theory & Other Topics.

So you just blindly repeat what someone, who you probably can’t name, says.

There was a post ITT --- I think it was deleted --- that said you just slapped your name of Sklansky's books and I was defending you. I mostly said good things about you ITT. I don't know why you are arguing with me.

Well, he doesn’t have any understanding of what you did as a poker player either, so at least he’s consistent.

I said you probably belong in the poker HOF. What do you want?

Your father was a genius at poker, but your words show you to be a genius of humanity.

Just with that one post you deserve all of the best. I am very sorry for your loss. I am friends with someone whose father was a famous mixed bag of massive intelligence and, uh, dysfunction all at the same time. That was his public persona, but to my friend he was just "dad".

I am sorry you lost your dad.