Tweet
For all those Poker Lovers
I don't know how may forum readers like to read but this sounded interesting, posted in the NY Times:
'Poker Nation': All the Man's Kings
By JAMES McMANUS
t may seem as though civilizations master one another with blunderbusses and catapults, avionics and viruses, but really we do it with books. As Jared Diamond makes clear in ''Guns, Germs, and Steel,'' when 168 Spanish soldiers defeated 80,000 Incas in 1532, the decisive factor was the Spaniards' ability to read and write.
Poker, America's card game, is another form of warfare that repays literate groundwork. Basically two kinds of books are available: tactical primers and rogues' galleries rife with hand-to-hand combat. The most worthwhile primers are put together by teams pooling hard-won expertise: David Sklansky and Mason Malmuth, Max Stern and Linda Johnson, T. J. Cloutier and Tom McEvoy. The granddaddy of the genre is Doyle Brunson's ''Super/System.'' Published in 1979 with a $100 price tag, it sold out in weeks and changed the face of poker forever. Much like ''The Simpsons'' and ''The Sopranos,'' it was written by a half-dozen maestros.
The best poker novels are of course single-author affairs, as is the classic nonfiction narrative, A. Alvarez's ''Biggest Game in Town,'' a brief yet comprehensive account, reissued this month, of the 1981 World Series of Poker. Composed in lapidary prose, it is replete with sage insight and a droll use of cowboy patois. One book that productively fuses primer and chronicle is ''The Education of a Poker Player,'' by Herbert O. Yardley. A code breaker during World War II, Yardley had a chance to play high-stakes draw and stud in New York, Hong Kong, Paris and Cairo. His concise volume braids military adventure with tersely conservative poker counsel buttressed by original tables and charts.
Andy Bellin's ''Poker Nation'' loosely follows Yardley's example, though Bellin's range of experience is narrower, his voice distinctly unterse. He says that in college he liked to ''stroke'' his ego and ''show off,'' and now admits to being ''confused and clueless'' as a writer. His struggles with language, in fact, led him by default to a science major. But when a math professor invited him to the poker room of Foxwoods casino in Connecticut, Bellin was hooked. He quit grad school to become a journalist and semipro player, though his more primal motive was revenge on his surgeon father, who refused to take seriously his son's math skill or job at a literary magazine. ''Andy, well, he's a failed astrophysicist,'' Dad carps. ''I played to be bad,'' Bellin tells us, and the low life of the title ensues.
The most appealing passages revolve around the bad boy's tiny mistakes and colossal howlers at the table, which he constructively appraises instead of just licking his wounds. But he also deflates his authority by composing in cartoonish strokes. His opponents are typically ''dead serious'' when holding good cards, ''nonchalant'' when bluffing. When one guy gets dealt a big hand, ''his eyes open wide like a kid being handed a lollipop. When he gets a bad card, he flinches like he just stepped on a tack.'' Another's game ''is completely devoid of all rational thought.'' Bellin then asks us to believe that a friend wins ''almost every hand'' for six months, while a player less preternaturally fortunate -- Crazy Rich -- goes on ''24-hour-a-day tilt'' for almost that long. The anxious author himself overbets $10,000 of tournament chips into a $40 pot; later, a friend sitting close behind him actually slaps him on the back when Bellin hits a flush. Not much timeless wisdom is likely to emerge from such quarters.
More effective chapters offer tips on how to assess the competition and deploy probability, and show how the ideas of Fermat and Pascal lead directly to Brunson and Sklansky. Borrowing charts from other books, Bellin walks the reader through basic rules and tactics. (The numerous pages devoted to roulette and blackjack are simply unwelcome distractions.) Benny Binion, the man who invented tournament poker, makes an energetic appearance as Bellin rehearses the lore of Texas Hold 'Em and cheating, including his own. (He claims to be cured of this habit but neglects to mention how cameras and nonplaying dealers have all but eliminated it from casinos, where most high-stakes poker is played.) Another strong chapter explains how John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern's game theory undergirds warfare and poker. ''There is no such thing as an unsuccessful bluff,'' Bellin says, annotating a principle that may seem counterintuitive to novices; ''if you win as many times as you get caught, you may not make money specifically by bluffing, but you will increase the number of players that call you when you . . . catch a full house. . . . That's where you're going to make your money.''
For a writer confessing to cheating and other foul deeds, Bellin comes off as a bluenose at times. ''I have a friend named Eric who always justifies his dalliances with prostitutes by saying how gorgeous the woman was. What's the difference? He's still sleeping with a hooker.'' Four chapters later Bellin quotes with approval a female poker player who moonlights as a masseuse and makes extra money by giving ''the special treatment'' to willing customers. Ahem.
''Poker Nation'' focuses on low- and medium-stakes games, which today means contests with buy-ins below $10,000, the figure Matt Damon calls ''high society'' in ''Rounders.'' And much like that movie, Bellin is more concerned with New York-area poker than he is with ''a gambling country.'' In the end he admits that the game ''has ruined every relationship I've ever had in my life but one,'' his current girlfriend being the exception, though the cause-and-effect remains vague: ''For most of my early 20's I was nothing more than a grab bag of various insecurities and emotional afflictions.'' Why did Crazy Rich go on tilt? Bellin shrugs. ''There could be a million reasons. Pick your cliche -- abusive parents, bad skin as an adolescent, it could be anything,'' he says, before concluding, ''I now believe that all poker junkies are alike.''
They are not. Alvarez was 53 and had been playing and writing for decades when he brought out ''Biggest Game.'' Cloutier at 57 was acknowledged to be the greatest tournament player alive when his first primer appeared. And then there was Yardley, who published his ''Education'' at 68, less than a year before he died. ''Poker Nation,'' the product of its author's early 30's, may be a jot premature.
James McManus's most recent novel is ''Going to the Sun.'' His account of the 2000 World Series of Poker, ''Positively Fifth Street,'' will be published next spring.
'Poker Nation': All the Man's Kings
By JAMES McMANUS
t may seem as though civilizations master one another with blunderbusses and catapults, avionics and viruses, but really we do it with books. As Jared Diamond makes clear in ''Guns, Germs, and Steel,'' when 168 Spanish soldiers defeated 80,000 Incas in 1532, the decisive factor was the Spaniards' ability to read and write.
Poker, America's card game, is another form of warfare that repays literate groundwork. Basically two kinds of books are available: tactical primers and rogues' galleries rife with hand-to-hand combat. The most worthwhile primers are put together by teams pooling hard-won expertise: David Sklansky and Mason Malmuth, Max Stern and Linda Johnson, T. J. Cloutier and Tom McEvoy. The granddaddy of the genre is Doyle Brunson's ''Super/System.'' Published in 1979 with a $100 price tag, it sold out in weeks and changed the face of poker forever. Much like ''The Simpsons'' and ''The Sopranos,'' it was written by a half-dozen maestros.
The best poker novels are of course single-author affairs, as is the classic nonfiction narrative, A. Alvarez's ''Biggest Game in Town,'' a brief yet comprehensive account, reissued this month, of the 1981 World Series of Poker. Composed in lapidary prose, it is replete with sage insight and a droll use of cowboy patois. One book that productively fuses primer and chronicle is ''The Education of a Poker Player,'' by Herbert O. Yardley. A code breaker during World War II, Yardley had a chance to play high-stakes draw and stud in New York, Hong Kong, Paris and Cairo. His concise volume braids military adventure with tersely conservative poker counsel buttressed by original tables and charts.
Andy Bellin's ''Poker Nation'' loosely follows Yardley's example, though Bellin's range of experience is narrower, his voice distinctly unterse. He says that in college he liked to ''stroke'' his ego and ''show off,'' and now admits to being ''confused and clueless'' as a writer. His struggles with language, in fact, led him by default to a science major. But when a math professor invited him to the poker room of Foxwoods casino in Connecticut, Bellin was hooked. He quit grad school to become a journalist and semipro player, though his more primal motive was revenge on his surgeon father, who refused to take seriously his son's math skill or job at a literary magazine. ''Andy, well, he's a failed astrophysicist,'' Dad carps. ''I played to be bad,'' Bellin tells us, and the low life of the title ensues.
The most appealing passages revolve around the bad boy's tiny mistakes and colossal howlers at the table, which he constructively appraises instead of just licking his wounds. But he also deflates his authority by composing in cartoonish strokes. His opponents are typically ''dead serious'' when holding good cards, ''nonchalant'' when bluffing. When one guy gets dealt a big hand, ''his eyes open wide like a kid being handed a lollipop. When he gets a bad card, he flinches like he just stepped on a tack.'' Another's game ''is completely devoid of all rational thought.'' Bellin then asks us to believe that a friend wins ''almost every hand'' for six months, while a player less preternaturally fortunate -- Crazy Rich -- goes on ''24-hour-a-day tilt'' for almost that long. The anxious author himself overbets $10,000 of tournament chips into a $40 pot; later, a friend sitting close behind him actually slaps him on the back when Bellin hits a flush. Not much timeless wisdom is likely to emerge from such quarters.
More effective chapters offer tips on how to assess the competition and deploy probability, and show how the ideas of Fermat and Pascal lead directly to Brunson and Sklansky. Borrowing charts from other books, Bellin walks the reader through basic rules and tactics. (The numerous pages devoted to roulette and blackjack are simply unwelcome distractions.) Benny Binion, the man who invented tournament poker, makes an energetic appearance as Bellin rehearses the lore of Texas Hold 'Em and cheating, including his own. (He claims to be cured of this habit but neglects to mention how cameras and nonplaying dealers have all but eliminated it from casinos, where most high-stakes poker is played.) Another strong chapter explains how John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern's game theory undergirds warfare and poker. ''There is no such thing as an unsuccessful bluff,'' Bellin says, annotating a principle that may seem counterintuitive to novices; ''if you win as many times as you get caught, you may not make money specifically by bluffing, but you will increase the number of players that call you when you . . . catch a full house. . . . That's where you're going to make your money.''
For a writer confessing to cheating and other foul deeds, Bellin comes off as a bluenose at times. ''I have a friend named Eric who always justifies his dalliances with prostitutes by saying how gorgeous the woman was. What's the difference? He's still sleeping with a hooker.'' Four chapters later Bellin quotes with approval a female poker player who moonlights as a masseuse and makes extra money by giving ''the special treatment'' to willing customers. Ahem.
''Poker Nation'' focuses on low- and medium-stakes games, which today means contests with buy-ins below $10,000, the figure Matt Damon calls ''high society'' in ''Rounders.'' And much like that movie, Bellin is more concerned with New York-area poker than he is with ''a gambling country.'' In the end he admits that the game ''has ruined every relationship I've ever had in my life but one,'' his current girlfriend being the exception, though the cause-and-effect remains vague: ''For most of my early 20's I was nothing more than a grab bag of various insecurities and emotional afflictions.'' Why did Crazy Rich go on tilt? Bellin shrugs. ''There could be a million reasons. Pick your cliche -- abusive parents, bad skin as an adolescent, it could be anything,'' he says, before concluding, ''I now believe that all poker junkies are alike.''
They are not. Alvarez was 53 and had been playing and writing for decades when he brought out ''Biggest Game.'' Cloutier at 57 was acknowledged to be the greatest tournament player alive when his first primer appeared. And then there was Yardley, who published his ''Education'' at 68, less than a year before he died. ''Poker Nation,'' the product of its author's early 30's, may be a jot premature.
James McManus's most recent novel is ''Going to the Sun.'' His account of the 2000 World Series of Poker, ''Positively Fifth Street,'' will be published next spring.