Following our last episode of poker advertising fail, the inscrutable plsntvll sent over a copy of the late Amarillo Slim's Play Poker To Win. As a poker book, it's outdated. But as an object lesson in misguided poker marketing, the back cover is solid gold.

Observation: if your ad copy could reasonably have been voiced by Biff of Back to the Future fame, ad copy is the least of your problems.

My gambling philosophy is simple—the losers walk, the winners talk...in this world, there are winners and losers, and all my life I've been a winner.

Our philosophy is simple, too. It starts with never self-proclaim your Winner For Life status. Amarillo Slim may well have popped into the world a fully-formed Winner BabyTM sporting WinnerTMdiapers , wearing a WinnerTM cowboy hat, and suckling a WinnerTM-brand pacifier, but you'd never know it because you'd be too busy reeling from the stench of the faux-Western bragadoccio hanging in the air like a latent invading maelstrom of old-guard poker flatulence.

Why is this a big deal? Why are we being so hard on Slim?

Because when normal people (senators, spouses, bus drivers) catch a whiff of this stuff, it only confirms for them what they've been trained by the media to believe anyway: that poker is a game of slack-jawed belt-busting chance played by grifters. Phrases like "my gambling philosophy" don't help because "gambling" is a loaded word that implicitly paints poker as a game of chance. Stop it. Stop doing that.

Stop using the word "gambling" in poker.

Slim, we can only assume those pesky marketing people put you up to this. For the rest of you poker authors out there, a better way to market to your audience is through stuff like: fun, eagerness, learning, scholarship, competition, merit, mathematics. Profit. These are the long-term viables for poker. Everything else is bullshit.