Ship It Holla Ballas!: How a Bunch of 19-Year-Old College Dropouts Used the Internet to Become Poker's Loudest, Craziest, and Richest Crew Paperback – April 15, 2014

I read a lot of nonfiction and biography. Favorite authors include Michael Lewis, Clay Shirky, Chris Anderson, Malcolm Gladwell, Rick Atkinson, Robert Caro, and Bob Woodward.Great nonfiction doesn't just tell a gripping story populated with vivid characters; it captures the texture of what it all felt like as it was happening. "Ship It Holla Ballas" does that. It's riveting to read about Good2CU, Raptor, Apathy, Durrrr (my favorite name), and their friends -- kids who suddenly find themselves making sick amounts of money gambling online and don't really know what to do next. Not surprisingly, they go a little nuts: strippers, Cristal, expensive cars, XBox360s in every room of the house, etc.That stuff all makes for a rollicking, fun, at times cringe-inducing read. But don't write this off as a story about hedonistic kids. It's about something much bigger, something that's reshaping our society from top to bottom: applied statistics. In the same way that Billy Beane and his brethren rewrote the rules of baseball by using player performance metrics with greater predictive power, in the same way that Nate Silver rewrote the rules of political analysis by dumping "gut" in favor of hardcore analysis, the Ballas made fortunes and earned a seat at the table with poker's top pros (in some cases, taking their money) by developing a deeper understanding of the math of the game than the generation that came before them.If that sounds dry the way I describe it, in the book it's anything but. From bad beats to quad-monitor configurations for playing 8 simultaneous sit 'n gos, the authors render the technical aspects of poker with such simplicity and clarity that you almost feel like you're an expert poker player yourself. And they never lose sight of the fact that this is a human story fueled by poker play, not the other way around.Last thing I'll say is that even if your life is nothing like this (mine isn't -- which is A-OK with me), there's something universal about this story. The Ballas grew up in a world where everything they said and did played out in public. Like it or not, that's our world now. Privacy is a thing of the past. In addition to being a great yarn about poker, this is a story about what it's like to come of age in a time when even regular people have to make their mistakes and figure out who they are under the constant scrutiny of everyone around them -- and even people who aren't around them.I highly recommend this book. Durrrr.

I haven't read anything by Tucker Max, but I can imagine that there's a little thematic overlap between this book and the Tucker Max oeuvre. I enjoyed the hell out of this book, though, because however much Tucker Max there is in this story about young, wealthy poker players indulging alcohol, pot, strippers, and various acts of obnoxiousness, there's also a lot of Michael Lewis.Like the baseball nerds of Lewis' Moneyball, or the finance professionals of his The Big Short, the (very) young protagonists of Ship It Holla Ballas look at the same phenomenon as everyone else (in this case, online poker) and see how they can use math to cut through superstition and conventional wisdom to make money. The parts of the book that describe this process have the thrill of watching a good caper or heist film. These kids aren't stealing anything, though; they're just playing a smarter, better-informed game than everyone else.They make a lot of money doing it, and here is where I suspect there is less Tucker Max than it might seem. The guys are all in their late teens and early twenties, and living for the first time without adult supervision, when they become hundred-thousand- and millionaires; they spend a lot of money on drinking, smoking weed, and visiting strip clubs. In spite of the excess, they're still, for the most part, a surprisingly chaste and decent group of people. They long for hookups with cute girls and act obnoxious in public, but what they really seem to be after is the community, not the debauchery. They learn early on to be courteous to the "lap artists," they make amends for their destruction of other people's property, tip generously, and never seem malicious or hurtful.Aside from the story about the poker players, there's a lot of interesting stuff about how technology and public policy created the poker boom. For instance, there's an especially great observation about how poker was made accessible and dramatic for a television audience. There's a fair amount of poker jargon in the book, but enough context to keep it from ever getting too inside baseball.

Calling Ship It Holla Ballas! a poker book sells it short. This book happens to be about a group of young poker players who take advantage of their mathematical skills and the technological advantages of the game moving to the internet in order to win and lose millions of dollars. But that's just one element that makes the book gripping. Behind the online monikers they adopt, like Good2CU and Raptor, lie interesting people, kids mostly, well drawn by Grotenstein and Reback. You come to care about these idiots, maybe because you used to be like them when you were 18, or maybe because you wanted to be like them. But the point is the writers make them real, and the struggles they face handling their new found success, as well as balancing their personal lives with their gambling lives, keep you turning the pages.But the book is more than that. Ship It Holla Bollas! does what every great piece of cultural history does - it shows you the big picture through the small details. The characters (in the non-fictional sense) portrayed in this book, and the small corner of the booming world of the internet they inhabited, grant us a broad view of a pivotal period of our history as a society. The larger question of how rapidly advancing technology is affecting our culture and society is raised and examined in this book: the big picture comes to life through a small lense.Whatever your interest in poker, or the internet, or rags to riches to rags stories, what clinched this book for me was that I simply did not want to put it down. It's a non-fiction page turner, and the pacing of the narrative is pitch perfect. I challenge you to pick this one up and stop reading it, because bottom line you will want to know what happens next.

Would not recommend this book to a non poker veteran. For poker enthusiasts its a decent read but there are a lot better ones out there.

An enjoyable fast moving story about how a bunch of college kids take up online poker, drop out of college, party like rock stars, move to vegas and make millions. A great coming of age story with a twist.

Fun read

tt ok

Man, it's really good to read this. So funny to see how these guys made it so much fun and careless. Very good!