Roll over, Mozart
Stuart Wheeler BIGGER DEAL by Anthony Holden Little Brown, £17.99, pp. 336, ISBN 9780316730778 © £1439 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 The author is nothing if not versatile. Apart from being the Observer's music critic he has written books on a very wide variety of subjects. This book is about his experiences in the world of poker, specifically the form of poker that has taken the world by storm, No Limit Texas Hold'em.
There is much good stuff. Poker players can be single-track-minded. 'Who in the hell is this guy Saddam Hussein?' asks one of the top poker pros. It reminded me of a Las Vegas blackjack dealer many years ago asking me where I came from. 'England', I told her. 'Oh, that's in Paris, isn't it?' she replied. The author has an amusing, though unkind, name for a holding of Ace King. He calls it `Kournikova' because it is very pretty but never wins.
People on the poker circuit say, 'It's unlucky to be superstitious!' Another thing I like is the expression 'leak'. That is when a pro wins everyone's money at poker and then gives it to the casino at roulette or craps, games with no skill. The same thing used to happen at London's Clermont Club where a backgammon expert won all our money and then lost it 'upstairs' to the casino. Incidentally, I have to object to the statement that blackjack is one of the casino games in which the odds are stacked against you. The fact is that it is so well known that there is a winning system at blackjack that the best books on blackjack are not mainly about the system itself; they are about how to disguise from the casino that you are playing the system, lest the casino turns you out!
Bigger Deal is a sequel to the author's Big Deal, written about 15 years ago, which described a year he devoted to becoming a poker pro. That book did well and, poker having taken off to an almost incredible extent, a sequel was natural. The trouble is that it does rather read as a sequel. I am not quite sure who it is for, although I expect the same could have been said of the earlier book. If you are a poker player you may find the description of hands the author has played nothing special. If you do not play poker I do not think you will follow the hands.
There are many touching references to `the Moll', the author's estranged wife for whom he evidently still has a great affection and who apparently turns up to support him at tournaments from time to time. Also somehow rather touching, given that he is a music critic, is his admission that, much as he loves listening to Mozart, he would rather be playing in an exciting poker tournament.
Why has poker taken off to the extent that Party Gaming, one of the biggest online gambling companies, having started from nothing in 1997, came to the UK stock market in 2005 valued at five billion pounds (yes, billions not millions), more than ICI and British Airways combined? The answer is mainly television and the internet. Television discovered how to place a camera under a poker table so that the viewers could see each player's cards. During the betting, the commentators tell the viewers what each player's precise chances of winning the hand are if it is played to the end. Poker has become compulsive viewing and it can be seen on several channels every night in the UK.
An even greater stimulus to poker is the internet, which enables one to play 24 hours a day against players all over the world except, due to a recent dramatic change in the law, the US. You can place your mouse over the names of each of your opponents and discern, for example, that they come from Australia, Costa Rica, Russia, Vietnam, Canada, Germany, Estonia, Argentina and the UK. I have to admit that I am one of the thousands who are making the owners of these sites multimillionaires. I try to play when my wife is not looking.
There is one unattractive, to me, feature of televised poker. It has encouraged people to behave very much as footballers now behave, either like thugs or with a ridiculous and highly distasteful sense of selfcongratulation. Oh well, I am even older than the author. Perhaps I just need to get with it. The Archers have managed to. Apparently poker is now part of the 'everyday lives of country folk'.
This book will not enable you to win the 12 million dollars first prize in Las Vegas but it gets the atmosphere over very well.
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