I love books. Well, I guess better said, I love reading. I’m actually not looking forward to ubiquitous WiFi on airplanes. They’re kind of the last internet-free zone in the world. And even this retreat is disappearing as carrier after carrier puts WiFi on its planes. It’s like the Berlin Wall in 1989 – pretty soon, nothing will be left.
You see, with no internet, I have an excuse not to work, review e-mail, or see what’s happening in the “real world.” So, I settle into my seat, put on the noise-canceling headphones, and disappear into a world that exists only in some writer’s imagination.
I must admit, I’m not reading anything heavy. A good Jeffrey Deaver, Sharyn McCrumb, or Laurie King mystery is all I need. Take me to a different place, a different time, give me evocative writing and a tight plot, and the miles at 35,000 feet fly by.
The other reading I love to do is about (you’ll never believe this) poker. But no dry tome for me on a plane flight, please. Strategy books are incredibly valuable and I have a library full of them. But for whiling away the hours, I want something with a plot or at least a narrative.
Now, if you have limited your poker reading to the “how-to” books or (gasp) you don’t read at all (unless it’s on your laptop screen), you’ve missed out on some wonderful tales. Here are my favorites:
“The Biggest Game in Town” by Al Alvarez. Alvarez is an Oxford-educated British writer and poet who has penned authoritative studies of suicide, the offshore oil industry, and, bless us all, the World Series of Poker (WSOP), circa 1981. An absolute amateur, but great lover of the game, Alvarez brought his classic writing skills and vocabulary to bear on our pastime. Listen to this description of the “Big Game” in the early 80’s – even then, featuring Doyle Brunson:
“The men chatted while they nonchalantly unloaded their racks of chips and arranged them at their places at the table: massed towers of black, a couple of towers of gray five-hundred-dollar chips, and then, as an afterthought, a lower bastion of green twenty-five-dollar chips. Each player seemed to have his own architectural plan in mind, but the final effect was of so many grim desert fortresses.”
This excerpt is from the first chapter in the book. Alvarez takes the reader back to the 1981 WSOP; you can smell the cigarette smoke and hear the chips riffle.
This is poker as it was 22 years BC (Before Chris) and it is an invaluable time capsule both for those of us who remember it (even a little bit) and those who wonder about the ancestry of the modern game.
“Big Deal” by Anthony Holden. In some respects, “Big Deal” was the natural sequel to “The Biggest Game in Town.” Holden, also Oxford-educated, is good friends with Alvarez and they participated in a long-running Tuesday-night home game in London for years. Unlike Alvarez, who never (it appears) aspired to play in and around the “big boys,” Holden wanted to take the game more seriously and spent a year in 1990 “on the professional tour,” such as it was then. His snapshot, a decade later than Alvarez’s, is much more about Tony’s actual play and results. But it still brings back the giants of the game from that era and conveys beautifully the world in which Doyle Brunson could slip into a darkened WSOP buffet at Binion’s, slide a giant piece of chocolate cake out from under a tablecloth, and nobody would care.
Holden has also written scholarly biographies of Elizabeth the Queen Mother, Shakespeare, and Tchaikovsky. His writing and contextual touchstones demand a fair amount more of the reader than a Grisham paperback, but that only makes the book stand up to multiple readings. I must have gone through its pages a dozen times during the early 90s.
“Positively Fifth Street” by James McManus. Any book whose title riffs on a Dylan song title can’t be all bad, and in fact, this one is great. McManus, a poet and writer for the New York Times, went to Las Vegas during the summer of 2000 to cover the trial of Sandra Murphy and Rick Tabish, who were charged with the murder of Ted Binion (yes, that family). McManus also satellited his way into the WSOP Main Event and, somewhat miraculously, made it to the final table (ultimately won by Chris Ferguson).
McManus is another legitimate capital-w-Writer who raises poker writing to a rarely seen level. His interweaving of the trial and the WSOP captures the essence of Las Vegas and peeks through the holes in the curtain between the glitz and the shady reality.
Interestingly, this book is set almost exactly a decade after “Big Deal.” Reading these three books will give you an extremely good time-lapse view of the poker world leading up to the quiet immediately prior to the Moneymaker Explosion.
“For Richer For Poorer” by Vicky Coren. Coren (the third Oxford degree holder of this bunch) was a writer, journalist, and poker junkie who happened to be in the right place and the right time when the Moneymaker/internet poker boom hit. She parlayed her natural broadcasting and journalism skills into a key position in the nascent world of English poker TV. Then, she capped that by winning the London European Poker Tour (EPT) event in her “home club,” the Grosvenor Victoria on Edgware Road in London.
This book takes the reader from her home game (on Tuesdays, in a nod to the Holden/Alvarez Tuesday game of prior years) to her triumph at the EPT, introducing us to many people who are common names in today’s poker world. Her love of (addiction to?) the game is apparent from the early going and dedicated poker players will feel an immediate kinship.
Coren also, more than the other books, sheds her emotional clothing and gives you an insight into what makes her tick and the heartaches and pain she experienced over the years her book covers. This demands more of the reader than the more detached narrative of the prior books in this list. On the other hand, it leaves you feeling more “connected” to Coren than the other authors.
Other notes:
· All of these books are available on the Kindle now (and presumably other e-book readers). When I got my Kindle, I wondered if I’d miss the tactile delight of turning pages. I do, but not nearly as much as I enjoy being able to throw a few dozen good books into my backpack.
· I’m acquaintances (going on “friends”) with both Tony Holden and Vicky Coren. Don’t let that taint your reading of this review. Their books are both must-reads for poker junkies.
· Honorable mention, only because these are books that you probably have read:
“The Professor, the Banker, and the Suicide King” by Michael Craig
“Ace on the River” by Barry Greenstein
“One of a Kind” by Nolan Dalla and Peter Alson (Stu Ungar biography)
· Books I can’t wait to get to:
“Cowboys Full” by James McManus (a encyclopedic history of poker)
“The Godfather of Poker: The Doyle Brunson Story” by Michael Cochran
Lee Jones is the Card Room Manager of Cake Poker and has been in the online poker business for over six years. He is also the author of “Winning Low Limit Hold’em,” which has been in publication for over 15 years.
