The stance on a Sticky Thread.

[Mason Malmuth]

HI everyone:

There are many reasons why we are negative towards a sticky in this forum. One of them is simply that when it comes to books the opinions differ. So we prefer to let the discussion lead our posters to what is top notch versus what is questionable.

Another is the fact that new books are coming out all the time, and it's not just a few. In the old days I use to read every poker book that got published. Today, it's just not possible to do that. So this makes me afraid that worthwhile, but somewhat obscure books, would be left out of the post.

A third reason is that we are often accused, though it's completely false, that the only books we give good reviews to are our own, and that we deliberately downgrade competitor's books. While this is certaily not the case, the fact of the matter is that there are only a small number of non-Two Plus Two books that we do recommend, and we of course have favorable opinions of our stuff. So this is an issue we prefer not to introduce to this forum since it has the potential of distracting from the high quality discussion that happens here.

And finally, or the last one I will mention, we prefer not to deal with irate authors who would feel slighted because we did not mention their books. Most authors, even those who consistently produce a great deal of garbage, feel that their books really are quite good and can't understand our attitude towards them. Many of these authors are already unhappy with us, especially when we don't allow them to put glowing posts up about their books which are little more than press releases / advertisements, and it's not in our interest to make this unhapiness more extreme.

Best wishes,
Mason