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The Biggest Game in Town
Product
The Biggest Game in Town by A. Alvarez
Hits
- Very well written
- Offers war stories from some of the game's legends
- An engaging representation of the old World Series of Poker
Misses
- If you're looking for ways to improve at poker, this isn't your kind of book
Review
Some players, says Mickey Appleman, have the gamble in them. They are the high rollers who indifferently splash pots with $25,000 chips, leak money on horses and absurd prop bets and whose only hobbies outside the casino are, well, eating and sleeping.
These characters assemble in The Biggest Game in Town, A. Alvarez's non-fiction narrative of the 1981 World Series of Poker and the day's best players - men with gambling in their bones.
The slim book is thick with war stories from the legends of poker - Doyle Brunson, Amarillo Slim Preston, Jack Straus, Chip Reese, Appleman and Bobby Baldwin among them - and with insight into what it takes to be a success at the game.
The Las Vegas poker tables, Alvarez writes, are "the graveyards of hometown champs." The Biggest Game in Town serves to find the commonality among the men who dug those graves.
"Desire," says Jay Heimowitz, a player who final-tables at the '81 series. "That's what distinguishes a top player from the rest - the strong, competitive will to win."
That and a curious detachment from money. Alvarez's lengthy interviews with poker pros date back to a time of what was then a record-breaking World Series: 75 entrants and a $375,000 first prize. When asked by a reporter what he would do with his winnings, Main Event champion Stu Ungar - who remains as elusive in this book as he was in life - replies, "Lose it."
While this might seem incomprehensible to the small-stakes gambler or home-game poker player, it is, as Alvarez points out in the book, characteristic of seasoned rounders. "The next best thing to gambling and winning is gambling and losing," Alvarez quotes Nick "The Greek" Dandalos as saying before he died in 1966.
"Money means nothing," contributes Chip Reese.
"If there's no risk in losing, there's no high in winning. I have only a limited amount of time on this earth, and I want to live every second of it," opines Jack Straus.
The high-stakes gambler's motivation aside, The Biggest Game in Town is flush with colorful detours into players' personal lives, card play, the temptations of Las Vegas, tangles with the law and bizarre tales from the days of illicit cash games.
As a poet, novelist and literary critic, Alvarez is an unlikely author of a poker book. But the result is precise and illustrative prose coupled with clear-cut, if somewhat secondary, reporting from the tournament. Alvarez captures the event, but does a better job at revealing why the big boys of poker are driven by taking chances.
It's a messy business, poker. And yet, through the eyes of those who have the gamble, the game is something else entirely.
As Appleman explains to Alvarez, poker is a skill, an art and a science that can't be mastered. "I'm a romantic, and for me gambling is a romance," he says. "That's what I enjoy; the rest is by the way. I play and I play and I play; then I pick up the pieces and see how I did."
Details:
- $15.95
Chronicle Books
