I'm surprised that anyone in the poker community is willing to lend anyone else a huge amount of money, given the horror stories we hear on a regular basis.

Lenders aren't innocent. A lot of times money was lent to keep uncontrollable degenerates in the game. I don't feel sorry for any of these people.

Massive generalisation, and for the most part, completely untrue.

Sometimes, and especially in large games where player pools are small its quite awkward as a big winner to refuse cash loans to people who are losing. There is loads of ways to handle such a spot but that doesn't make it not a very difficult social spot.

The notion that people are saying "hey, no don't leave... we'll lend you money I'm sure you'll win you just been unlucky so far" whereas i am sure it HAS happened, and will happen I'd say that's very very rare compared to just a guy who came with $50k to a game, lost it quickly and put someone in a tough spot for a cash loan.

YOU SHOULD JUST SAY NO- YOU'D BE AN IDIOT TO SAY YES. This would be a perfectly sensible approach to the situation, but if you stand by it, you've obviously never been in the spot.

Lesson learned from this..

If you want to make a book sale ,dont f with you lendors.
Never ghost them! It will cause bad publicity.

Pay them back before you play 200 400 and possibly before you start with the booksale.

Assumption: Invest 40k in paying up your debt to cole South and the have a fair chance to succeed
With your the book sales.

The book is doing well on amazon.

It could do a whole lot better if people didn't think he is ghosting cole South bc he owes money imo.

How is it doing well on Amazon?
It only has 12 feedbacks! That doesn't look good at all imo, it.looks like only a few max 100 books sold there.

https://www.amazon.com/Pulling-Trigg...=eli+el&sr=8-1

250K sales rank is decent in Books category. And still selling at 25/book is high. I’d say they are selling 3-5 per week, easily.

I’m not sure how that is from the publisher perspective, but I buy and sell liquidated books that cost $1 per book and that’d be about $12-14 profit per book minus all amazon fees.

I also highly doubt anybody buying an Eli book is swayed at all by him scamming people. Not enough buyers to tip the decision to write a book either way

Hi Was:

Your numbers are way off. We sell the book at wholesale which is usually 50 percent off. Our production costs were $5 a book (because of the color insert), and that’s far higher than liquidation prices, and then we pay a far higher royalty rate than other publishers. We need to sell about 2,300 books to break even and we‘ve had orders for 489 in a little over a year, and we hardly getting any orders now.

Best wishes,
Mason

Basically, before the book was published and Eli made a couple of "mistakes" Mason already knew the book would take a loss.

Then this thread happened and it confirmed that.

This isn't accurate. We anticipated the book doing much better, but then problems occurred.

Mason

I thought it would have sold a lot more due to the great poker economy,some people are saying the greatest ever.
Who knew?

Sounds like my book volume sales were correct, sorry to hear the projections didn’t get hit for you to profit.

Still doubt 5x the copies sell without the controversy

10 years and few gray hairs late. Few are concerned with the controversy.

If there was no controversy would way more 2plus2 users buy the book?

surprising. a book by eli elezra should most certainly sell at least 650 copies...?? (there's many poker hipsters who would potentially buy it ironically..??)

Hi Justcall:

We certainly think so. The AMA thread would have lasted much longer with lots of discussion of playing in the big games and winning some prestigious tournaments. We thought that this would create much interest and selling many more books seemed a certainty (at least to us at 2+2).

However, when the problems occurred, as I posted when this stuff happened, it killed book sales.

Best wishes,
Mason

I bought the book and enjoyed the read. Eli answered questions before the heat got to be too much and I appreciate him making the effort.

The book business, like most, carries risk. There is no such thing as a sure thing.

The take away I got was all during his bio a theme of not following the rules seemed to prevail. Some people get rich by not following the rules, most go broke.

Being young and dumb, I didn't follow rules either (and paid dearly) but when it came to money I never borrowed from family or friends. Banks loan money and if they won't loan to someone there is probably a good reason.

Anybody that thinks it's socially difficult to not lend other players money is an idiot. A simple "I don't lend money" does the trick.

The socially weird thing is idiots asking for money. They're ****ed in the head.

I wouldn't be surprised if the karma of the universe had online poker shutdown because these sponsored guys who were banking off it were scumbag idiots. **** all of them. Seriously, what % of them are broke now, except the ones who got away with robbery.

Hi jcorb:

The main reason we did the book is that when I reviewed the material my conclusion was that much of it was very interesting, and I thought that many people would enjoy it. This includes his growing up in Israel, his time in the IDF (Israeli Army), and his time living and working in Alaska.

Best wishes,
Mason

Mason,

If you don't mind answering, are Kindle buys a big part sales?

Yes, and it varies from book to book, but we sell approximately twice as many paper backs as compared to kindles.

Best wishes,
Mason

Ok so the spine of your points are tough to disagree with, I admit. My point was in high stakes games in particular where player pools are a lot smaller, getting instant access to funds present legitimate logistical issues, and people tend to have slightly deeper personal relationships... It can be socially awkward when put on the spot.

It was more a response to the accusation that money is often lent as a way to entice losing players to play on and lose more, anyone who has played even a modest amount of high stakes live poker will know the situations crop up fairly often where people ask to borrow money, and it's a socially difficult spot for some players to say no.

I think saying something as broad as, if you lend money you're an idiot, or anyone asking to borrow money is fu**ed in the head is just a lack of understanding of the situations.

In recent years, I've refused to lend people money in spots where in my early twenties I would have just buckled and said yes. Just because the right answer is "obvious" to someone not in the situation, doesn't make it easy to do the right thing.

Just curious if there's a pallet of these books sitting in a warehouse or your garage or something or is it printed to demand?

He was on an episode of Poker After Dark last week, with his dumb book next to him on the rail.

... Nobody cares if you're a scumbag, the new lifelong cycle is like 6 months these days