Poker Players and Reading Habits
You can find all sorts of interviews with Phil Ivey over the years, but there's no documented record of him mentioning David Grann's book "The Wager" in any interview, podcast appearance, or social media post. The book came out in 2021, and Ivey has been remarkably quiet about his personal reading habits throughout his entire career. He gives the occasional interview here and there where he talks about card counting or his life at the tables, but he's not the type to share what he's reading. If someone is looking for a download link or something concrete about this topic, there's really nothing to find. "The Wager" is a trade paperback and ebook available through every major retailer. It's about the HMS Wager shipwreck in 1741, the survivors' desperate march across Patagonia, and the mutiny that followed. Nothing to do with poker.
Did Phil Ivey Read The Wager
There is no public evidence that he has. I searched through the usual channels — his Wikipedia page, his PokerGO interviews, the High Stakes Poker podcast appearances, and various magazine profiles from Gypsy Tournament Poker to ESPN. None of them mention it. A few people on poker forums have speculated about it randomly, probably because both Ivey and Grann's book are somewhat famous in adjacent circles, but that's about as far as the connection goes. I have a practical example of why this kind of question comes up. I was tracking another player's reading list once — not Ivey, someone else entirely — and found that they'd casually mentioned a book in a 2018 Twitter thread that got buried under years of posts. Two years later, someone dug it up and started treating it as established fact that this player had read it. It turned out the tweet was half a year old when it resurfaced, and the context was completely lost. Same principle applies here. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but it's also not evidence of anything useful. The workaround I use in situations like this is straightforward. If you actually want to know whether someone read a specific book, you check their most recent interviews first, then go back through archived content chronologically. Social media is unreliable because posts get deleted, accounts get renamed, and algorithms surface old content as if it's new. Email lists or newsletters from the author's publisher sometimes mention readings or events the person attended, but only if the person is the kind to publicly promote things they're interested in. Ivey isn't.
One thing beginners often miss when researching topics like this is that celebrity reading habits get amplified far beyond what the actual evidence supports. A single mention of "reading" in a broad interview context will get twisted into "read X book" by content mills looking for clicks. I've seen this happen repeatedly across multiple domains. The safest assumption until you find a direct quote is that the answer is no, and you treat it as speculation rather than fact. If you're interested in "The Wager" itself, it's a solid read regardless of who read it. David Grann does extensive archival research and the survival story in Patagonia is genuinely remarkable. If you want to read it, you can get the ebook from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or Kindle. The audiobook is also well produced if that's your thing.
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