FULL TILT POKER BLOG

#148 – The Full Tilt Guide to Manhattan, Part V – BIGGER DEAL, Bigger Dreams

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As you know, I was in New York to celebrate with Tony Holden the publication of his new book, BIGGER DEAL. If you don’t know anything about poker, BIGGER is the sequel to BIG DEAL, the 1991 classic in which Tony spent a year (between Johnny Chan’s second championship and Phil Hellmuth’s) as a professional poker player.

I’ve told the story before but it bears retelling, because of the important role BIG DEAL played in my life. I had just started playing poker when BIG DEAL came out, encouraged by two poker stories I had read. The first was A. Alvarez’s THE BIGGEST GAME IN TOWN. The second was an article in ESQUIRE by a writer named Peter Alson, titled “Chan is Bluffing (We Think).”

These pieces didn’t teach anyone how to play, but they impressed on me that poker was a game worthy of LEARNING. I was pulled in by the unique personalities and the unusual skills and lifestyles of the best players. Living more than 1,000 miles from any casino, I took up poker, slowly, timidly, playing $3-$6 hold ‘em at the Mirage whenever I could make it to Las Vegas.

On one return trip, I was looking for something to read on the plane. The day before, I saw BIG DEAL in a bookstore. Having already bought the few Sklansky/Malmuth treatises and Alvarez, the poker-book section had predictably slim pickings. I hadn’t seen BIG DEAL before, and the paperback cover – a drawing of cards fanned in front of a face, with eyes poking through the cards – did nothing to assure me that the book would be worthwhile. But it was poker, dammit, and I hadn’t seen it before, so I picked it up.

On the flight back from Las Vegas, celebrating a $150 win (or moaning over a $150 loss – I’m not sure which), I opened BIG DEAL. It starts with the author, an English journalist named Anthony Holden, coming to Las Vegas for the 1988 World Series of Poker. He is an avid home-game player and relishes taking on the $10-$20 and $20-$40 tables in between whatever publication he suckered into paying him to cover the Main Event this year.

He has been drinking across two continents and it’s been days since he has even had a nap. But the tables call! He cons some $3-$6 players out of their money, pretending to be a neophyte, at one point asking the rules of the game. He runs up that profit at $10-$20, and then turns it into $1,000 in a few hands of blackjack. Then he plays the media event and a low-stakes game with some reporter friends. Then, to escape the tedium of the micro-stakes, he gives up his $1,000 profit and plays a one-table satellite for the Main Event. And he wins it!

The second chapter starts with his saga of the Main Event, then played by 177 players, so few that Jack Binion introduced each one personally. Stu Unger is at his table and they tangle on the very first hand.

I was hypnotized, both by the quality of the story and the writing, and by the serendipity of finding it. WHO IS THIS GUY?

I turn to the front of the book. And there’s the dedication, which starts, “For AL ALVAREZ ….”

I was just staggered by my good fortune. The close friend of the author of one of my all-time favorite books wrote this book, which I just STUMBLED upon, and was looking for any excuse not to read?????

BIG DEAL proved to be a treasure. Tony’s year on the “circuit” was a world away from the almost-weekly $10,000 buy-in events and monthly three-weeks-long tournaments of today. He plays in Malta, in Morocco, and goes to Mississippi for an “extra-legal” tournament and finds the police waiting for him. He goes on a poker cruise, one of the first of its kind. He hangs out with Eric Drache and Amarillo Slim, enjoys the largesse of Jack Binion, and does penance by playing the 3 AM “graveyard tournament” at the Marina. He visits the U.S. Playing Card Co.’s museum and explains what the different suits and court card represent. (Sting turned this explanation into a song, “Shape of My Heart”.)

It’s an everyman adventure, long before most people knew there was such a thing as “professional poker players.” But Tony’s not just a participant – he is a great observer. While he talks about his own hands and fortunes, he is able to capture all the marvelous things in this (then) unexplored world.

I can’t say that, upon reading BIG DEAL, I thought about quitting my job and taking up poker as a living. At least not explicitly or with a detailed plan. But I imagined what it would be like. And I thought if I moved up in stakes, parlayed my profit into a tournament entry, and then took down a big prize … who knows?

I also started writing in the mid-Nineties, and my first-person accounts borrowed unconsciously but heavily from Holden’s style. Imagine my joy when, during the 2005 World Series, Eric Drache passed along Tony’s phone number – Holden, after an absence of several years, was back at the Series and was about to play the Main Event – and Tony Holden was as excited to meet me as I was to meet him. (Actually, that wasn’t true. He had no idea how much I adored BIG DEAL or the role it played in my life, both as a poker player and as a writer. But he was a big fan of SUICIDE KING and didn’t need much encouragement to make time for a meeting.)

We had coffee. I joined him and several other English writers for dinner – the group included Des Wilson, who was writing SWIMMING WITH THE DEVIL FISH, and we have since become friends – and I watched him play the Main Event. It turned out he had just started work on the sequel to BIG DEAL, which would be called, naturally, BIGGER DEAL. (Based on some seniors’ events Holden was entering, Wilson suggested the title be “Older Deal”.)

We continued corresponding during the summer and met up again when he came to the Bellagio during the Doyle Brunson WPT event in the fall. And he expanded a trip to Foxwoods to include a sidetrip to join me at Yale, where I was invited to speak to a group of poker-mad students. And we wrapped it up by both winning entries to the 2006 Main Event and meeting up for the Series. (But not, thank goodness, at a tournament table.)

It was all great fun while it was happening, and I was thrilled to learn that I am one of the characters in BIGGER DEAL. It’s a bit difficult for me to write an objective review because (a) Tony’s a good friend, (b) I appear throughout the book, and (c) we had many talks about structure, emphasis, and content while he was writing it. (He could have ignored all my suggestions but I can’t help seeing things I like and think that I somehow had something to do with it.)

But what can I say? I strongly recommend you read it. Naturally, the adventure is not as original as in BIG DEAL. When Tony did it the first time, NO ONE was becoming a professional poker player. There was always the possibility he would strike it rich. And the world of professional poker was such a mysterious place back then. Now, everybody with a home computer is a potential professional poker player, and Holden is not turning his back on his career to pursue this.

Holden, however, has some great substitutes this time around. First, even though he is unlikely to chuck writing for poker, his poker adventures are real. He starts as more of an observer this time, but he eventually gets into the game. You’ll find yourself rooting for him to get back to the Series and take care of business when he gets there. Second, Tony’s observations are better than most peoples’ adventures. So much has happened in poker so quickly that few people have processed it, or have discussed it in an unimaginative and/or unoriginal way. BIGGER DEAL is a great commentary on how the world of poker has changed, and whether those changes have been for the better. And the stories are great, both of his year on the circuit, and about the characters from BIG DEAL (as well as himself) and what they’ve been up to.

But don’t listen to me alone. The New York Times wrote a glowing review.

This may sound like a shameless plug but you should also look at the new book’s web site, www.biggerdeal.com. Tony is writing a blog in connection with the book’s release. (His computer broke down at Foxwoods a couple weeks ago and I have further planted myself in the BIG[GER] DEAL world by bringing him a spare when I was in New York last week.) Very rarely does a writer of Holden’s weight and accomplishment provide a real-time window into his life. It’s very cool, and I’d say that even if he didn’t talk about me in the blog.

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