Until then, coming very soon, like in less than a week, your second favorite Tao of Pokerati podcaster is going all iPad prior to going iPod:

If you still want an old-fashioned paper version of the most read and most talked about book of the 2010 WSOP, go here.

(I sometimes forget I actually call this place home now, despite Pauly’s warnings not to descend through the gates any more than I had to.)

All hope abandon ye who enter here?

Lost Vegas: The Redneck Riviera, Existentialist Conversations with Strippers, and the World Series of Poker…

Las Vegas lures you to shed moral responsibility and piss away your money on indulgences like decadent food, entertainment, gambling, and sex. If you don’t enjoy these pastimes, then what’s the point of visiting the land of compromised values? Where else can you get a cheap steak, crash a Mexican wedding, get cold-decked in blackjack by a dealer named Dong, play video poker for thirteen straight hours, drink piña coladas out of a plastic coconut, bum a cigarette from an 85-year-old woman with an oxygen tank, speed away to the Spearmint Rhino in a free limo, get rubbed by a former Miss Teen USA, puke in the back of a cab driven by a retired Navy SEAL, snort cheap cocaine in the bathroom at O’Sheas, and then catch a lucky card on the river to crack pocket aces and win a poker tournament? Only in Las Vegas.

Click here to buy your copy now.

Check it out … the New York Times Book Review, as part of a holiday gift guide, have put out their “100 Notable Books of 2009“ … and making the list is Cowboys Full: The Story of Poker by Jim McManus.

Of those 100, 55 are non-fiction. Cowboys Full sits between ‘A Country of Vast Designs: James K. Polk, the Mexican War, and the Conquest of the American Continent’ by Robert Merry, and ‘Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression’ by Morris Dickstein. Granted, the list is alphabetical, but still …

Take a look at the excerpt the NYT ran last month — titled “Pokertician“. Considering all the good recent press poker has gotten from the likes of the Times, the Wall Street Journal, the National Journal, NPR, et al, you can see how McManus’ book — and his or his publisher’s attached promotional efforts, of course — has done more in 2009 to spread contemporary poker ideology to America’s liberal elitist intellectual set than any press release from PokerStars ever could.

(No offense, Matt, just sayin’ …)

Of course the NYT’s review of McManus’ book is hedlined the (“The Cheating Game“) … so maybe that’s a reminder that despite efforts that may seem to legitimize poker pursuits, the game still will always be thought of as … similar to dieting and matrimony? If so, that might explain why this tome — currently ranked in the Top 500 on Amazon — has apparently struck a chord with at least a few people who aren’t otherwise thinking ’bout poker.

You really should buy Cowboys Full: The Story of Poker by Jim McManus. No one’s paying us to say that, but Pokerati will earn at least $0.14 if you do.

Not to be a spoiler, but the closing line features a sound clip from Darvin Moon, with weekend host Guy Raz saying, “That is Darvin Moon, and he’s about as far away as you can get from poker royalty.” That is a funnier line than Raz even realizes, considering Moon’s resistance to all things sponsorship.

Raz does a follow-up the next day, just on Darvin Moon:

For more academic intellect surrounding Cowboys Full: The Story of Poker, check out our favorite new older-than-25 Betfair blogger Shamus’ interview with McManus here.

And for a little low-brow historical perspective on McManus from a pre-Darvin Moon era, here’s my interview with the author of Positively Fifth Street from 2004.

(Yikes, 2004!?!)

Neato. “It’s gonna ROCK!”

But probably not before reading two books that we can expect later this year: Lost Vegas, by Dr. Pauly … and Check-Raising the Devil, by Mike Matusow (with Tim Lavalli and Amy Calistri). Lost Vegas will be based on much of what we’ve been reading over the years on Tao of Poker, though I personally know the book is what Pauly’s been saving his best, so-far untold stuff for … so I’m confident every poker-industry douche insider will be eager to read what he’s been holding back.

Likewise, Matusow’s tale promises to be the kind of interesting auto-bio that even my grandmother could enjoy — lots of sex, drugs, and crime that just so happens to be set in the world of high-stakes casino gambling and/or prison — by a guy who has seen up-close-and-personal the good, the bad, and the really bad side of it all. Judging both these books by their recently completed covers (click to enlarge), I gotta think there might be something to these pokery stories, even though neither promise to tell you anything about how to play Ace-King.

The Feds are reviewing the matter.

The answer in the negative was, C’mon, Dan, you’re no Michael Craig time and money, dude. Fair enough, but maybe I was on to something, as just three weeks ago Harrah’s filed a trademark application for the phrase “World Series of Poker” to be theirs as it pertains to:

Books featuring information, news, and entertainment related to gaming and the game of poker; magazines featuring information, news, and entertainment related to gaming and the game of poker

Everything I Know about Business I Learned from Poker

It’s a pretty comprehensive analogy … though he does leave out one chapter I’ve got working in my poker/business book — “Beware of Fuggit Mode”.

(Thanks, Shamus, for the link.)

Also like the fact that it is available as a downloadable audio book … because you know, actual reading is hard. Kenna James does some of the reading.

I won’t waste your time trying to tell you what it’s all about without having even read/listened to it … but as much as Blowers’s photo frightens me (he looks like The Butler), the first 20 seconds of his promotional vid makes me think it’s gotta be better than Lucky You.

Official website here.

Hmm, all this time I thought …

Padraig Harrington, brother not-the-brother of poker-great Dan Harrington, won the British Open yesterday at Royal Birkdale in Scotland. Congrats, distant-cousin (several times removed) to poker! That’s two-in-a-row at the British Open for Harrington — making him the first European to repeat in more than 100 years. Wow.

Meanwhile, a lot of people have finally read and are talking about the more pokery Harrington’s new(ish) back-to-back cash game books. Supposedly they’re great — that’s what everynone’s saying. I’m starting to wonder if one of the reasons I’m doing so poorly in golf tournaments these days isn’t because I’m one of the few players who hasn’t read his Iliad on tournament play yet.