Remember Teddy? He came to the table armed with insight and information and logic. Their names are Albert and Ken and Jane and Teddy. You will feel all around you the presence of the departed. You will sit in this cemetery the next time you play poker. It’s a cemetery for the most inexcusable deaths that have ever occurred. I remember, many years ago, asking publisher Avery Cardoza why he’d left out Poker Teddy. There’s a cemetery cross inscribed with Teddy’s name, decorated by two American flags, and the caption: “This playbook is dedicated to ‘Poker’ Teddy … a fictional poker player who never was, but could have been.” I was looking at one of those earlier out-of-print editions today and found an illustration on page 8. And the recent versions don’t include Poker Teddy. It was only in its later Cardoza Publishing editions that it got its modern name. It was first published as Caro’s Poker Seminar Playbook and later just Caro’s Fundamental Secrets of Poker (without the “Winning”) by both myself and Trump Taj Mahal. I’ve written quite a few books, and one of my favorites is called Caro’s Fundamental Secrets of Winning Poker. If there’s anything I can do to help or to make you feel better, please let me know. A version of this entry was originally published (2011) in Bluff magazine under the same title.
