Matt Matros is an experienced poker player, author, and coach. He has won $2.6 million playing live tournament poker and holds three World Series of Poker bracelets. He has written several strategy books, including “The Poker Brain” and “The Game Plan”. In 2023, he had a great idea: to compile and analyze the 23 most interesting hands he played that year. This led to the book “23 NLH Tournament Hands From 2023“, and in 2024 he published a new book with 24 hands.
He continued the tradition this year with 25 new hands, and published an additional book featuring the 25 best hands he played in the 2025 WSOP Main Event, where he cashed. We reached out to Matt to ask him about the two books, and after the brief interview you can read a short review of both poker books.
Interview with Matt Matros
This year you published two poker books, adding one exclusively about the WSOP Main Event. How did that idea come about?
I came into the year thinking I would start Law school in the fall, and that the 2025 Main Event would probably be my last one for a while. I really wanted to remember the tournament properly, and so I wrote up a little book containing the most interesting hands. When fall arrived I came to my senses and decided against Law school, but I still had the Main Event book I’d been working on ready to go. So I released it as an e-book, and then proceeded to write my usual end-of-year book, Twenty-Five NLHE Tournament Hands from 2025.
How did you take notes on the Main Event hands?
I used my phone between hands to jot down the details. All analysis came away from the table, of course.
Your last cash in the Main Event was nine years ago at the Rio. How did you feel at the new venue? Do you think the tournament has changed much in recent years?
I’m an old school guy at heart, and I loved the convenience of driving to and parking at the Rio. I also knew all the best dinner break spots within a couple blocks of the venue, and of course I had a lot of success there, so I will always miss the Rio. That said, the Paris and Horseshoe are nice properties, and I don’t know how we survived before the WSOP+ app. That thing is an absolute game-changer. Being able to register for tournaments, keep track of pay jumps, sweat friends, watch the clock on a break, scout a table draw — it all feels like it’s from the future. Bravo to WSOP and their tech team for this app!
READ MORE: Behind the Scenes of the WSOP+ App
As for the tournament itself, I think it’s gotten tougher as poker overall has gotten tougher, but at its essence it’s the same as it’s always been. Rank amateurs mixed with solid semipros mixed with elite superpros playing, by far, the best-structured tournament of the year. There’s really nothing else like it.
What recommendations would you give to someone planning to play their first WSOP Main Event in 2026? How could they prepare?
Study deep-stack situations. Most tournament players (myself included) are much more used to playing with 40 or 30 or 15 blinds than with 200 0r 300 blinds. But the WSOP Main Event remains deep stacked for days! The more deep stack prep you do before the big dance, the better prepared you will be.
What summary would you give of your 2025 playing poker? What did you enjoy most and least?
I’ve turned a small profit at relatively low volume each of the past two years, which is nice, but I’m really looking forward to the day when there are more poker options in my home city of New York and I’ll be able to put in enough volume to reduce the length of downswings. The lack of playing options (including sweepstakes sites leaving New York) is what I enjoyed the least this year. The WSOP Main Event was definitely the highlight.
We saw that you were working with solvers in 2025. Do you think they are a fundamental tool? Do you recommend using them to analyze the hands you play?
Solvers are great–if they’re used as a tool to help illuminate your understanding of the game. If you’re just looking up whether you got a play “right” or “wrong”, or if you’re spending hours setting up a simulation that won’t tell you anything you couldn’t have learned from a chart, then solvers are worthless and possibly even counterproductive. Like any tool, it’s only as good as the person implementing it.
READ MORE: How AI Poker Solvers Are Changing the Game
Do you have any poker goals for 2026? Any topics you’d like to study further?
I’m planning on playing more and studying more in 2026 than I did in 2025. Plus, I would like to continue studying more ICM and deep-stack situations, the two topics I was already focused on in 2025.
Tell our readers why they should read your two new books.
They’re quick, focused, and simultaneously instructive and entertaining. My teaching style is to illustrate concepts through examples, and to reduce extraneous information as much as possible. More hands, more explanations, fewer charts and percentages. I think these two books are a reflection of this philosophy.
If there’s a poker player on your holiday shopping list, please consider this little book. I’ve tried to level up a bit this year by having the ideas build on themselves from one hand to the next. I believe the result is the most instructive of these yet! https://t.co/xgbapWSU23
— Matt Matros (@Matt_Matros) December 13, 2025
Poker Book Review: Twenty-Five NLH Tournament Hands From 2025
Like Matt’s 2023 and 2024 books, the 2025 volume is a short and entertaining read where you’ll always learn new concepts about live and online tournaments. There are no complicated calculations or graphs with hand ranges. Instead, each hand is analyzed simply and clearly, getting straight to the point and trying to make the best decisions with the information available.
Each of Matt’s poker strategy books is grouped into different themes that change each year. The 2025 themes are: bet sizes, when cards don’t matter, river bluffs, and a very important topic in tournaments: ICM adjustments. The fact that the hands analyzed are real adds value to the book. I also liked that when the author is unsure about the action he took, he uses solvers to see what they think is best. A good piece of advice for readers is to try to think about what they would have done in each hand before reading what the author did.
Book Information: By The Numbers
- Title: “Twenty-Five No Limit Hold ‘Em Tournament Hands from 2025”
- Author: Matt Matros
- Year of Publication: 2025
- Pages: 67
- Prices: $15.99 Paperback / $9.99 Kindle
- Where to buy it? Amazon
- You can read an excerpt of the book here
Poker Book Review: Twnty-Five Hands From The 2025 WSOP Main Event
Matt’s second book took me by surprise, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. One of my favorite poker books is “Every Hand Revealed” by Gus Hansen, and this book has the same spirit, allowing us to follow Matt through the WSOP Main Event day by day and see his key hands.
There aren’t many books published about the WSOP Main Event, and if you’re planning to play the 2026 edition, this is an excellent read that will serve as good preparation. For those who play live tournaments, it offers valuable advice on deep-stack play, bluffs, exploitative play, and the bubble.
Waiting on my 25 Hands from 2025 book? You’ll have to wait a little longer. But in the meantime, here’s an eBook appetizer to tide you over–Twenty-five Hands from the 2025 WSOP Main Event. https://t.co/fmcZuSsN86
— Matt Matros (@Matt_Matros) December 6, 2025
Book Information: By The Numbers
- Title: “Twenty-Five Hands From The 2025 WSOP Main Event”
- Author: Matt Matros
- Year of Publication: 2025
- Pages: 58
- Price: $9.99 Kindle
- Where to buy it? Amazon
- You can read an excerpt of the book here.
