Players on Full Tilt Poker won’t have to wait long to score a copy of Mike Matusow’s brand new autobiography, “Check-Raising the Devil.” From now until June 30th, four daily freerolls will award copies of the acclaimed publication.
“Check-Raising the Devil” weighs in at 267 pages and sports a full page FullTiltPoker.net logo near its back cover. It retails for $24.95 in the United States and $32.99 in Canada and includes a foreword by 11-time World Series of Poker (WSOP) bracelet winner and Ultimate Bet pro Phil Hellmuth. In a similar fashion to the “Poker Brat,” Matusow gained notoriety for his abrasiveness at the table. Hellmuth writes, “This abrupt way of insulting players when he greeted them did not hold Matusow in good stead in the poker world. But as the poker world got to know Mike better, we realized that he really did have a heart of gold.”
The book, which was released by Cardoza Publishing, includes an introspective look at Matusow’s bipolar disorder, ADHD, lifestyle of partying, and drug use. It begins, “My story starts in a trailer park out toward the Boulder Highway, in a dead-end patch of Las Vegas where people never lived their dreams, if they even had any.” Matusow is one of the flagship members of Team Full Tilt, which also includes newly-minted six-time bracelet winner Phil Ivey, Howard Lederer, and Gus Hansen. “The Mouth” has three WSOP bracelets to his name, the first of which came in a $3,500 buy-in No Limit Hold’em event during the 1999 tournament series. In that event, he bested Alex Brenes heads-up and outlasted 204 other entrants.
Matusow has made four career World Poker Tour (WPT) final tables and recorded a $671,000 payday for finishing as the runner-up in the Bellagio Cup III. All told, he has over $1.5 million in WPT earnings and over $7 million in career prize money. Now, Full Tilt Poker is giving its members four chances to score copies of “Check-Raising the Devil” daily. Freerolls are accessible from the tournament lobby within the Full Tilt software client and run at 11:40am ET, 2:40pm ET, 6:40pm ET, and 11:40pm ET every day until June 30th. Each player who reaches the final table in the freerolls will take home an autographed copy of the book.
The Full Tilt Store also carries “Check-Raising the Devil.” It comes with a price tag of 6,900 Full Tilt Points (FTPs) and joins an already impressive lineup of available books that includes “Every Hand Revealed” by Gus Hansen, “Harrington on Hold’em” Volumes 1 and 2, and “Phil Gordon’s Little Blue Book.” Full Tilt players can also redeem their hard-earned FTPs for James McManus’ “Positively Fifth Street” and Vince Burgio’s “Pizza, Pasta, and Poker.”
“Check-Raising the Devil” retails on Amazon.com for $16.47 and it has already garnered a five star rating by reviewers. Matusow dives at length into his battle with bipolar disorder and ADHD. He notes, “The major problem I had during 2006… was balancing my meds for live play. I was having a lot of ‘bad med’ days. The side effects of these drugs can actually be just the opposite of what they are supposed to do. I would take my ADHD meds to help me focus and instead, I would be so out of it that I could barely see my cards.” Despite the adversity, Matusow’s success at the poker felts has been well-documented. He won a “Poker After Dark” heat in December for $120,000 and finished 30th in the 2008 WSOP Main Event for $193,000. His most recent bracelet win came last year in a $5,000 buy-in No Limit 2-7 Draw Lowball event for over $500,000.
Full Tilt Poker accepts customers from the United States and is the second largest site in the world behind PokerStars in terms of real money cash game traffic.
