At the time of this writing, the Thanksgiving holiday is just a few days behind us, and it made me think how fortunate I’ve been with our companies Two Plus Two Publishing LLC and Two Plus Two Interactive LLC. So it seemed that this would be a good time to quickly tell the story of Two Plus Two and why it came to be and what its implications are for today.

In 1985, I signed a contract with a company called Gambling Times to publish my first book Winning Concepts in Draw and Lowball. Like most young authors, this was a thrilling moment and I immediately went to work on two more books. But two years later no book was printed, my publisher was essentially bankrupt, and worse of all, he refused to return the first book to me.

As it turned out, I had just moved to Las Vegas, and in a phone conversation with John Luckman, the owner and founder of Gambler’s Book Club, he recommended an attorney who could help me get the rights to my book back. (I actually never met John Luckman in person since he passed away a couple of weeks after this phone call, but his advice will always be appreciated.) Anyway, with the help of the attorney, who still represents our companies today, I became the publisher of my own book and Two Plus Two Publishing, even though it didn’t have that name yet, was started.

Well, the books began to sell through a small number of stores that at that time carried gambling books. Even though sales totals were quite small by later standards, I began to work with David Sklansky to write and produce more books. But we also tried, with no success, to get national distribution for our product. So in response to this failure, eight years later I decided to join in on a new project, which became known as Poker World Magazine that was originally designed to compete with Card Player and in which we hoped would bring some national attention to our product.

Unfortunately, and I won’t go into the details here, Poker World was a complete disaster, and this brought us back to the current problem, no national distribution. Since the magazine work was over, it seemed like the thing to do was to try one more time to get major book store chains, wholesalers, and distributors interested in our books. So more samples went out, and in 1996, to the amazement of both David and I, every place accepted us. But that didn’t mean we were going to get a huge amount of orders.

What we quickly discovered was that when you spoke to a book buyer and told them that our books are the best in the field, the reply was something like “That’s what every publisher says.” And confirming this was our initial order from Barnes and Noble – I still have the letter – which was for 10 copies of my book Gambling Theory and Other Topics even though at that time we also had 12 other titles. So we still had a way to go.

This brings us to our website. In 1997, a young lady named Jessica Vechionne – some of you may remember her – was helping me with marketing. Her best suggestion was to start www.twoplustwo.com in an attempt to show the book buyers who we were now dealing with that there was a real interest in our books, and the rest is now history.

The reason for telling this story is that in my early days of publishing there were two disasters. The first was with the company that went bankrupt and wouldn’t publish my first book, and the second was with the magazine that failed so miserably. But things managed to work out better than I ever could have imagined.

This brings us to the current situation concerning online poker. While I’m not optimistic about problems being solved in the short term, it’s my belief, and it may take two or three years, that things will eventually get a lot better. To me, this is just another bump in the road, just like the two problems described above, that will eventually become smooth sailing.