Can you bring a chair?

My quasi-relative Ken is a bibliophile of the old style, visiting book fairs and car boot sales rather than lurking on Amazon or abebooks.com. He knows of my interest in poker and so occasionally turns up with a find for me.

The latest of these is a slim harback volume entitled "How not to lose at poker", published in 1970 and written by Jeffery Lloyd Castle. I think of 1970 as a part of the extended present, by which I suppose I mean my own lifetime, but the style of the book is of an era long gone.

From the introduction: "This book aims to present all those ascertainable facts about the game of poker which enable a player to decide his line of play unhampered by doubt."

It seeks to deal with the earlier stages of each hand - so, before the "critical point at which the preliminary betting ends and the strategic betting begins". Mr Castle has a statistical bent; he's not overly interested in the psychological elements of the game. His mission is to make sure that his readers enter those later stages on a sound footing.

My first habit on receiving a new poker tome is to look for the Hold 'em section - that's my own usual game. I thought 1970 might be late enough to include something, and so it does - just about. Mr Castle devotes a full five pages (the same length as his chapter on poker dice) to the "lately introduced variant of Seven-Card Stud" which he calls "Hold Me".

To put things bluntly, he's not a fan of this upstart. It probably doesn't help that this new game has been promoted to him on the basis of the larger number of people who could take part - indeed, the first part of his analysis of Hold Me considers a game in which there are twenty-three players...

As he says, the problem with this game is that "more than seven players destroys the tempo of the game..." and could make it "very dull" if you weren't getting cards.

I love the idea of trying to set this up for the Friday night home game.

"You up for a spot of Hold Me this week? ... No, it's poker ... well, we've got 14 for definite so far, so we only need another nine ... OK great - can you bring a chair?"

More from this marvellous book to follow...