Gary Carson

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Gary Carson (1949 - ) is the author of The Complete Book of Hold 'Em Poker, The Complete Book of Casino Poker, and multiple articles and essays focusing on poker, gambling, and probability. He is a frequent contributor to the newsgroup rec.gambling.poker. Several of Gary Carson's unorthodox strategies remain topics of fierce debate years after first being published.

Gary holds an MS in Quantitative Business Methods from LSU, an MS in Industrial Enginering and Management Science from Northwestern University, and is ABD in Criminal Justice from Sam Houston State University. He has taught in the business schools of Lousiana State University, Loyola University (Chicago), University of Illinois (Chicago Circle), and Sam Houston State University.

He often takes a contrarian view of strategic decision making. His writings emphasizes that the loose versus tight conditions of a game are a strong driving force in evaluating a situation. In intermediate betting rounds in loose games it's often more valuable to play a good draw strongly than to do so with the current best hand, while in tighter games the opposite is often the case.

His books and recent gambling related writings have been on poker, although he wrote on horse handicapping in the 1980's.

He has written on gambling for CardPlayer, Poker Digest, American Turf Monthly, Racing Star Weekly, and websites www.pokerpages.com, www.pokermagazine.com, www.pokerhands.com, and www.gaminglinks.com.

Gary currently lives in Cushing, Oklahoma.