Big Deal Book

Published in 1990 in hardback by Bantam Press, this is Anthony Holden's 'A Big Deal: One Year As A Professional Poker Player', 272pp, ISBN 0593017870. About this book:For most of his adult life, Anthony Holden (bestselling biographer of Prince Charles and Laurence Olivier) has been a devoted amateur poker player. The high point of his week was the Tuesday Night poker game he played with a diverse assortment of fellow addicts. For him, as for the millions of other regular players around the world, poker is not a matter of life and death: it's more serious than that. For ten years he had visited Las Vegas each May to watch the game's top professionals fight it out for the world title and a prize approaching a million dollars. In 1988, almost inadvertently, he found himself competing in the world championships, ending up as possibly the highest-ranking British player in the world. At that moment, or soon after, was born a bizarre ambition: to set aside his amateur status, and much of what passed for a normal life, and to devote a year to seeing whether he could make it in the tough world of the professional poker player. Big deal is the story of that year, in which the author spent days and nights in the poker paradise of Las Vegas, in Malta and Morocco, even on ship-board, mingling with the legendary greats (even on occasion beating them to a pot), 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 peopleRead More