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.
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