Big Deal
One Year as a Professional Poker Player
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- £3.99
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- £3.99
Publisher Description
BIG DEAL is the mesmerising story of a year spent by bestselling biographer Anthony Holden in the tough world of the professional poker player. He spent days and nights in the poker paradise of Las Vegas, in Malta and Morocco, even shipboard, mingling with the legendary greats, sharpening his game, perfecting his repartee, and learning a great deal about himself in the process.
Poker, Holden would insist, is not gambling. Like chess it is a paradigm of life at its most intense, a gladiatorial contest that brings out the best as well as the worst in people. Its heroes, its eccentrics and is comedians stalk the pages of this remarkable book, along with all the hair-raising, nail-biting excitement of the games themselves.
A classic of the genre, BIG DEAL is here reissued with a new introduction by the author.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Literate sophistication and urbane wit inform this unusual tale of a British newsman and author ( Charles, Prince of Wales ) who spent 1989 as a professional poker player. More than a chronicle of that year, the book presents stories of the legendary heroes of the game, theories of gambling from Dostoyevski through Freud to David Mamet, and memories of Las Vegas (a town set in ``a vast and utter nowhere''), London and Marrakech, where Holden played. He also writes of his friendship with writer A. Alvarez, a fellow poker addict, and the insights he received from a psychiatrist. For the non-obsessed there are many dull passages in which Holden analyzes hands he played, but the enormous amounts of money won or lost are rarely boring. ``Busted out'' by a four-to-one shot at the World Series of Poker in Vegas, he vows never to sit down with the pros again, even though he wound up his year ``financially ahead.''
