Bigger Deal

In 1988, when I played in the ‘main event’ of the World Series of Poker at the start of my book Big Deal, there were 167 starters and the world title was worth $700,000. By 2006, when I take part at the end of the sequel, Bigger Deal, nearly nine thousand starters are vying for a first prize of $12million – the richest, by some distance, in all sport. Compare Jamie Gold’s world-title haul last year with the $1m won the same month by Tiger Woods for the Open golf or Roger Federer at Wimbledon.

Those staggering statistics capture the scale of the poker boom during the first few years of the 21^st Century, thanks to the combined forces of the internet and television. Last year’s prize pool of more than $150 million made the 37^th World Series of Poker the biggest sporting event in the history of the planet. No fewer than 44,500 players took part in at least one of its forty-five events.

For years, despite much pressure and many requests, I resisted the idea of a sequel to Big Deal, my 1990 account of a year spent as a professional poker player. No writer, I believed, has more than one poker book in him. It was the Boom that finally changed my mind.

The Tuesday Night Game from which Big Deal emerged also produced Al Alvarez’s The Biggest Game In Town and the late David Spanier’s Total Poker. People from Walsall to Wisconsin marvel that three such books could emerge from one London home-game. But we were all writers who happened to play poker; my pal Alvarez and I have, between us, written dozens of books on a ridiculous range of topics. It was inevitable that, at some point, we’d come up with vols about the game we love so much.

But I always thought Big Deal was a one-off. I was turning 40 as I lived it, so no spring chicken – even less so now, 17 years on. I’m all too aware that Big Deal has a spring in its step that this older version of its protagonist could not hope to reproduce. It was an adventure story, David v Goliath – which, to my delight and amazement, seems to have succeeded in its goal of appealing to the general reader as much as the poker fiend. In recent years sales have climbed into six figures.

The problem, then, was that poker players generally didn’t read books. The problem, now, is that there are so many poker books for so many more players to read – most of them far better players than me. But few of the recent books are, frankly, that great; most are dry-as-dust manuals, with honourable exceptions such as James McManus’ terrific Positively Fifth Street. ‘Like NASA sending a poet to the moon,’ I said of a real writer finally making it to the WSOP’s final table. But the poker ‘narrative’ has boasted few such gems – other exceptions being Michael Craig’s The Professor, The Banker and The Suicide King and Peter Alson’s Take Me To The River – since the immortal Herbert O. Yardley’s The Education of A Poker Player.

Wherever I go, from 1990 to this very week, people come up to me and say they took up poker after reading Big Deal. Some even moved to Vegas. Most say they’re doing okay; some I haven’t met, no doubt, have gone bust and disappeared. As I was writing it, I had no idea that the book would, for better or worse, alter so many lives.

Bigger Deal won’t do that. But it may, I hope, explain how all this happened, why poker has become a mass-audience game as respectable, even chic now as it was seedy and disreputable when I wrote Big Deal. Bigger won’t improve your play – but it’ll give you a chance to cackle at mine, while meeting today’s leading players and learning the behind-the-scenes story of the game’s amazing growth.

And I hope it may tell you something about yourselves. At one point in the story – another adventure, traveling the poker world from World Series ’05 to ’06 – I sum up what it is I love about the game: ‘The outsider-dom, beholden to no boss; risking going broke to earn a crust (“a tough way,” in the old phrase, “to make an easy living”); the romance of the road; the communal feeling of delight in sharing a particular skill that leaves the outside world baffled. Treating money with the contempt it deserves. The unlikely sense of community among people openly out to rob, even bankrupt each other.’

Anything there strike a chord with you? If not, you must be a cyber-geek, about whom I’m sometimes rather mean in BIGGER DEAL. But I’ve striven throughout not to sound like a grumpy old man, lamenting how much more fun it was in the old days at Binion’s. Online poker has changed the way people play the game, and I may be slower than some at adapting to the new aggression which is its hallmark. But I’m thrilled that the game I love has now become the world’s favourite sport. I’ve tried to capture what it is we poker-players love that the outside world – not least the US Congress – somehow cannot cotton on to. I hope you’ll come along for the ride – and tell me what you thought at this website, which I have set up with some poker pals for that very purpose.

Maybe I’ll even meet you here across the baize?