Bigger Deal

Looking for a last-minute Christmas present for that poker-player in your life? Look no further than The Poker Encyclopaedia, newly published by Portico at a mere £14 (or just £10.49 from amazon). Handsomely bound in green baize, believe it or not, this indispensable work contains all the info you could ever need to check out anything to do with poker, if only to settle a bet. Open it on Christmas morning, and your family will soon be complaining as you’ll find it hard to put down all day.

The last work of the late, great man-about-poker Elkan Allan, left unfinished at the time of his much-mourned death in June 2006, this lavish, exhaustive Encyclopaedia has been completed by his young friend Hannah Mackay, who used to deal to him at London’s Gutshot Club. 

Elkan’s poker career came towards the end of a lively, distinguished career in television and journalism. He was a friend of mine dating back to the early 1970s, so I was delighted to accept the publisher’s invitation to write a tribute to him as a preface to the book.

Here’s (most of) what I say:

“I first met Elkan Allan in the early 1970s, when we were both on the staff of Harold Evans’ Sunday Times – the only place in British journalism, at that time, to be. I was a rookie reporter, Elkan the hip TV exec who had created the ground-breaking pop show Ready, Steady Go!, and had now invented the first critical television previews to challenge (and soon destroy) the lucrative monopoly of the Radio Times. Generous all his life to the wide-eyed up-and-coming, he regaled us with hilarious stories of TV tapes pillaged and pilfered to fill his pioneering double-page spread.

“Our paths then diverged for some years, but we stayed sufficiently in touch to meet up again in the early 1990s in Hollywood, where he had settled as a showbiz journalist with his wife Angie, and I was researching a history of the Academy Awards – really an excuse to stay in that poker-sodden part of the world after living and writing my first poker book, Big Deal. In a piece about me in 2005 for the magazine Inside Edge, Elkan called me the ‘Mephistopheles’ who had then introduced this ‘penny-ante’ player to the world of high-stakes poker; he recalled a particular evening when I had taken him along to the Bicycle Club in Bell Gardens, where we were apparently ‘treated like royalty’ because I had enthused about the place in my book. I myself had forgotten that detail; but I cannot forget the characteristic generosity behind this willingness to swallow his pride and profile a younger man once his admiring junior, now his firm friend.

“By then, of course, after trailblazing careers in newspapers, television and newspapers again, Elkan had become a prominent fixture on the British poker scene. In what he called his ‘semi-retirement’ – very few knew, or would ever have guessed, that he was by now in his eighties ­– Elkan had indulged his lifelong love of poker by advising websites and writing columns for sundry poker magazines. No mean player himself, he was also vicariously living the dream of his gambler father, who (though born Cohen) had gone by the wonderful name of Allan Allan.

“A listings man all his journalistic life, indeed the ‘Listings Editor’ of the brave new Independent at its launch, Elkan revelled in garnering and collating the kind of specialist data, familiar and arcane, that makes this book unique. It will surely prove an invaluable, nay indispensable work of reference for all poker buffs, settling as many arguments as it provokes, while becoming a treasured source-book for suckers like me who can write about the game rather better than they can play it.

“The last time I saw Elkan, fittingly enough, was at a poker tournament at a Soho night-club; around midnight, as for once I reached the final table, he came over to wish me luck before heading home on his beloved motor-bike. It proved the last evening Elkan would ever go out. Six weeks later, after he had borne sudden illness with characteristic fortitude, we foregathered for the funeral of a genial, tireless enthusiast admired and loved by countless friends as if he were a member of their own families.

“His own – Angie, five children and six grandchildren – meant even more to him than poker. ‘Don’t be too sad,’ he told them before moving serenely on to the Great Green Baize in the Clouds. I’ve had a long, marvellous and happy life, and know I’m loved as well as loving.’

“The pleasure Elkan Allan gave them and so many others lives on in this book, an entirely apt monument to his long, active, highly productive and wholly original life.”

Many of you will have known Elkan Allan, or at least come across him in your poker travels. You’re bound to have read some of his poker writings. The best tribute you can pay to such a fellow-poker enthusiast, and/or the best present you can give to the poker fanatic you love (yourself, perhaps?) is to invest in a copy of his Poker Encyclopaedia.

You won’t, believe me, regret it.

Happy Christmas to all of you from all of us here at biggerdeal.com. Thanks to our generous sponsors at PokerStars.com, and to the hundreds of you who have played in our Tuesday Night Games. I’ll look forward to seeing you again at the next one on 15 January.

And may the flops be with you in 2008 !