The Poker Players

A group of men in their 70s gathers weekly for their beloved poker game in The Poker Players, but their game is just that: an emotions-barred affair that involves beer, gambling, and little more, until George's divorce is revealed. It's an event six months in the making that he's been unable to talk about to the men he's known for thirty years.
This revelation shakes the group and leads each player to confront his own emotional failings and lack of connections to men, crafting story that quickly evolves from poker to the game of hiding one's true persona and life events even from those who are supposedly friends.
In many ways, The Poker Players feels like a throwback to the 1970s, when men's groups and discussions of men's consciousness-raising became part of a perfect storm of demand by women for men to be more emotionally engaged. However, in this story, women are only peripherally involved and it's the men who come to demand honesty and transparency from one another. This is a different approach that Edward A. Dreyfus employs with great precision and power to explore how a disparate group of friends both hold each other at emotional arm's length and learn how to dissolve the emotional barriers that create distance between them.
Each poker game and each chapter brings a new revelation. It turns out that each player holds a close emotional secret that shocks the group and further reinforces the fact that these men's interactions have been anything but close despite the decades of familiarity and a shared gaming interest.
As readers traverse these life changes and confessions, the poker players become more than gamers, finding themselves drawing closer in emotionally frightening ways that they never anticipated from a men's circle. Conversely, their discoveries about each other and their revised reactions to these revelations begin to spill into their personal lives.

As readers absorb this progression of events, they receive much information about self-discovery, intimacy, sharing, and men's emotional make-ups. It turns out that The Poker Players isn't about poker, but the larger challenge of forming meaningful relationships in life.
The main premise of the story revolves around revealing close-held secrets to achieve greater intimacy ("I'll bet we all have secrets. More than one, I imagine. Things we've never told our wives or even our best friends." "I'm sure that's true for most of us," said Dave. "As Richie said, the bigger issue is whether holding those secrets creates distance in our closest relationships."). As the men begin to let go of shameful or life-altering experiences and share them with others, trust builds--and so do changes based on group input and revised moral and ethical goals.