They say no one writes the book they start out to write, and I am no exception. I started to write a book to explain the ideas of John Law and Fischer Black, with the broader idea that finance needs more creative fun and fewer people looking for comfortable, overpaid jobs. Real innovation in finance is challenging, exciting and good for everyone. Poker figured in that book because it stands at a crucial historical and intellectual nexus. The book was aimed at college students and young people in finance, and assumed quite a bit of mathematics and finance knowledge.
As I wrote, the poker kept growing and crowding out the technical stuff. I started writing more about myself, why I believed things and the life experiences that led me to them. That became more important to me than proving that my contentions were true. I realized that I wasn't writing a conventional argument, establishing points and building them up to conclusions, I was asking the reader to look at the world from my perspective. I wanted them to take my ideas as an integrated whole, not a series of contentions to be evaluated one at a time. I don't expect anyone to accept everything in the book, but I hope everyone who reads it looks at finance, risk and poker a little differently afterwards.
I read a lot as I wrote, and I found myself putting aside new books and rereading classics. My original book was something of topical interest to finance professionals, something that might sell for a couple years and then either get a new edition or die. My ambition grew to write a book that people will read twenty years from now. Influence from books like Lombard Street, The Education of a Poker Player, Speculation as a Fine Art, Where are the Customers Yachts?, Beat the Dealer, The Great Crash, A Random Walk Down Wall Street and Practical Poker crept in to my work. In all these books the author explains in clear, simple terms something that everyone else makes complicated; and opens himself up in the process. You don't just learn about the subject, you learn about the author, and how the author views the subject. All these books have timeless interest, Lombard Street, for example, 150 years later, remains the only clear explanation of what a bank does. Modern books that encouraged me were Fooled by Randomness, My Life as a Quant, The Death of Gentlemanly Capitalism, Iceberg Risk, Blink and Positively Fifth Street.
After the fact, I realized another common denominator to most of those books. The author had spent a long career in finance, in other cases, a lifetime in poker. Many financial books are written by people with no professional experience in the field, others by people who worked at entry-level jobs for a few years. You don't have to love finance to be qualified to write about it, but it's important that some finance lovers communicate their ideas, for balance if not for expertise. Similarly, many poker books are written by people with only casual interest in the game (the ones above are notable exceptions). Some of these authors are card players or gamblers, some are mathematicians, some are good writers, some have no qualifications at all. Most of the serious players who do write books are full-time professional tournament players, and for the most part I think they do a poor job of communicating the nature of the game. They may teach you how to play, but seldom why.
That's my book. I hope people like it. When I started writing, that was my main hope. Now that I'm finished, I'm proud of it no matter what happens. If it doesn't sell a copy, I won't be sorry I wrote it (my publisher, on the other hand, will be sorry it paid me to write it). Whether you liked it or not, whether it changed your thinking or not, please let me know what you thought.
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I've just come out with my first book. I've written chapters in other people's books and been written about in books, I've written about ten books worth of articles, but this is a new experience for me. I always wanted to do this, and so far the experience has been better (and harder) than my expectation. I always envied people who had "author of" after their name, more than other degrees or awards. I didn't mean to let so much autobiography slip in, and I'm nervous about going public, even though there isn't anything terribly scandalous or even unusual about my life. I did what seemed right and fun (not necessarily in that order) at the time, and I like the way it worked out.