David Sklansky, RIP
Legendary poker author and thinker David Sklansky has passed away.
People always point to The Theory of Poker but for me the book that changed my life was Seven Card Stud for Advanced Players. My dad bought a copy of it when it came out, and I can distinctly remember the first time I read it. It is the only piece of writing that I am certain has directly had a positive 5-figure impact on me financially. At one point, I more or less had it memorized. I still think about it at least once most weeks.
David overtly thought as an EV-maximizer, long before that became a thing, in all aspects of life. He was yelling about how screwed up 2-point conversion decisions were long before most everyone else. He could be really cantankerous at times, and interacting with him on the 2+2 forums was often frustrating. But it was rarely dull, especially in the late 90s and early 2000s, when his mode of thinking about things was less common. The Sklansky Special Subforum was really fun for the short period of time it existed. I never got to meet him in person, but I will always wish I did. DUCY?
All of this is to say, I think Sklansky probably had a bigger impact on my cardplay---and how I think about politics and things in general---than anyone else in my life, except my father.
David's influence waned, I think, because he was a better big-picture thinker than he was technician. It's wild to go back and read the game theory chapter of Theory of Poker, or revisit the Sklansky-Chubokov numbers, or watch the intellectual takeoff of Sklansky-bucks. All of these things were important insights into modern poker. But David was never going to be the guy who took those insights and converted them into the applied quantitative analysis that later made them all so relevant. He was much more the philosopher, both by talent and temperament.
He also probably wasn't as smart as he thought he was. He was way ahead of the old-school gamblers in the 70s, but once the money rushed into poker and a huge number of really smart people started analyzing it, he looked a lot more pedestrian. I can't think of a particularly important insight he had after about 2007. His work was foundational, and he was a figure during the transitional period. But he wasn't really part of the cutting-edge development of modern poker theory.
His appearance on the Thinking Poker Podcast will always make me laugh. He was an outlier from the norms of society in a number of ways, and it comes shining through in the episode.1
RIP David.
He was also not without his controversies and run-ins with the law.↩