She Plays Poker

The Man Behind The Shades

By Nolan Dalla and Peter Alsom.

Shut Up and Deal

By Jesse May

I’ve played over 100,000 hands of limit hold’em so far this year. There have been ups, and there have been downs but always Jesse May’s story of a struggling professional player continues to inspire. Shredded nerves and drained emotions are part and parcel of limit hold’em, where everyone, I mean everyone who plays, sees more swings of fortune than even the toughest person should have to deal with. It’s a brutal game.

As May says, “Poker is a combination of skill and luck. People think mastering the skill part is hard, but they’re wrong. The trick to poker is mastering the luck. That’s philosophy. Understanding luck is philosophy, and there are some people who aren’t ever gonna fade it. That’s what sets poker apart. And that’s what keeps everyone coming back for more.”

Mickey Dane is a streetwise kid playing the high-stakes poker rooms in the mid 1990’s. The book is his story, and the stories of dozens of the low-life and high-rollers he is up against. It’s not an old-fashioned novel in the way that novels used to have beginnings, middles, and ends. After all, poker is not like that, it has no end. You win a hand. Deal the next. Lose it all. Borrow a dime and buy-back in. Life is just one big poker game and money the way of keeping score.

Session after session, the book meanders along, building towards its denouement as the great East Coast blizzard of ‘96 sweeps into Atlantic City. Mickey Dane is left sitting in his chair, stuck almost everything he ever had, with no one interested in playing him any more. But this book is not a bad beat story because when we finally leave Mickey, he understands better than anyone ever before what it’s all about.

bitterness and denial aren’t
realistic ways
to deal
with something that happens again and again
never to know exactly when
but that the only stop is not to play.
but to play
that’s thing.
shut up and deal.

A streetwise poker pro writing poetry? Maybe it’s meaningless. Maybe it is to somebody who hasn’t tilted off a month’s expenses in a hour of madness; to those who haven’t been on the wrong side of the last 18 river cards; to people who don’t know what it’s like, not to crave money, but to crave the bankroll to play that super-loose aggressive high-stakes game going on in the corner, right there.

Those 38 words of the poem are quite simply the best possible expression of the inhumane nature of the game, as well as its attraction, and the only possible credo for those who want to play it.

The Education of A Poker Player

By Herbert O. Yardley

Should you open with queens in 5-card draw? What happens when a guy dies holding quad aces? And how do you catch a Nazi spy in Kuomintang-controlled China (and beat him out of his money first)?

Take or leave the poker advice - chances are you won't be playing the same games anyway - but read it for the gambling stories. Ian Fleming said it contained a hatful of the finest in the genre he had ever read. He was right.

You also get more of Fleming, who wrote the foreword to the book, as well as Jesse May on entertaining form in the preface.

Did I mention I'm writing a screenplay for a Yardley biopic?

Small Stakes Hold'em

By David Sklansky, Mason Malmuth and Ed Miller.

Big Deal - One Year As A Professional Poker Player

By Anthony Holden.

There is no way that Big Deal should miss the flop but when the cards are flipped at showdown, Anthony Holden is holding rags. He has the anecdotes, he has the hard-earned experience, he even has the dust-jacket endorsements - David Mamet, Salman Rushide and Martin Amis. But he just doesn’t have the nuts.

Poker until the late 1970’s was a game of hard-ass Texan hustlers, a Runyon-esque romp from coast-to-coast. Poker since the late 1990’s has been dotcom boom time, an ever-expanding entertainment industry and a blue-chip business in both its casino and online forms. Big Deal sits somewhere in the middle, harking back to the golden age, but unable to look forward to mass-participation.

The old-time stories, and literary-Londoner-in-Las Vegas observations are lifted straight from Al Alvarez’s The Biggest Game in Town. Alvarez, is Holden’s real-life mentor, and the pupil never threatens to overreach his master.

The book recounts Holden’s experiences on the professional circuit in 1988-9, book-ended by a pair of appearances at the World Series of Poker Main Event, the $10,000 buy-in No Limit Hold ’Em tournament. He comes 90th in 1988, then 111th in 1989. But Holden gets outdrawn on these experiences which should be his book’s big draw.

James McManus, another journalist/author and literary type entered the tournament in 2000 - and made the final table, winning a quarter million dollars. Positively Fifth Street, McManus’ tale of his exploits, woven into his coverage of the murder trial of Vegas legend Ted Binion, really tells you what it’s like for an amateur to sit with the pro’s.

Don’t misunderstand. Big Deal is a good book. It is a worthy book. The poker is real, the players are real and the writing is real. But it is not a great book. It is neither as entertaining nor perceptive as Alvarez’ original, and it is not as exciting or informative as McManus’ update.