Big Deal
A Year as a Professional Poker Player
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4.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
In 1988, best-selling biographer Anthony Holden spent one year living the life of a professional poker player. His mesmerizing account of that year went on to become a classic of the genre, an inspiration to innumerable poker players and poker memoirists who followed. Big Deal is his story of days and nights in Las Vegas, Malta, and Morocco, mingling with the greats, sharpening his game, perfecting his repartee, and learning a great deal about himself in the process. Poker, Holden would insist, is a paradigm of life at its most intense, a gladiatorial contest that brings out the best as well as the worst in people. The heroes and eccentrics of the poker world stalk the pages of this remarkable book, along with all the hairraising, nail-biting excitement of the game itself.
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.''
