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Positively Fifth Street
This book is a bit of an oddity in the literature of poker, a subject that McManus teaches along with creative writing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Most of the books in the field are manuals designed to teach a beginning player how to calculate the odds, bluff at the right time, and size up the rivals. The books may be informative and helpful, but the largely clinical approach does little for the casual reader.
McManus doesn't bother much with the rules of the game because he's out to explore the nexus of lust, competition and desire that gives Las Vegas such a hold on the human undersoul. To ensure that no one mistakes this for a traditional poker book, he opens with a sex-and-drug-saturated rendition of the murder of Ted Binion, one of the owners of the casino that sponsors the poker tournament each year. None of the wealth begat by poker helped Binion after he had the misfortune to marry the one ex-stripper who would later face murder charges for his death.
Despite witnessing the pain and agony visited by the money upon Binion, McManus still can't resist chasing after his share in the tournament. He has four kids to take care of and his wife is home clipping coupons. Sure, he could just write about the tournament and play it safe, but wouldn't it make sense to enter just to get a feel of it? And gosh, if he wins, he could really pay down that mortgage. Bad Jim, as he calls himself, thinks it makes perfect sense and grabs some poker software for practice.
Bad Jim has plenty of other journalistic rationalizations up his sleeve. Some of the book is devoted to his interviews with female poker players, a relatively rarity with the politically correct power to trump any complaint that this is just a thinly veiled excuse to leave the kids at home and play poker. This angle reaches a humorous climax when he finds himself in a showdown against one female and confesses, "no one wants this woman to win the event more than I do, just not this pot."
A queen on the board means that the woman wins, "paying Bad Jim back personally for two hundred years of poker domination by men, plus millions of years of the other kind." Any other card lets Good Jim take home the cash to support his wife and daughters. Who will win, Politically Correct Jim or Old School Jim?
The book is a seemingly endless stream of these confrontations where the action on the tables reflects a tension between our high-toned aspirations and baser human longings. There are plenty of learned allusions to remind us that he does teach writing at a fancy college, but they are mixed into a narrative driven by sex and greed. Has evolution given us a need for competition and battles to the death? Is poker a good substitute now that we're more civilized? Has the poker prep software given nerds and geeks an edge over the "leather-assed Texas road gamblers?"
His seemingly endless good fortune and his ability to string the conflicts into a story with various remain the strength of the book. He just can't seem to lose. And this is a good thing because the jury in the Binion murder trial is taking forever to make up its mind. Something needs to keep the tension building and Bad Jim's good luck delivers.
So he manages to string us along for almost 400 pages until we find out who wins the tournament and whether Binion's wife goes to jail. It's a terrific exploration of power, sex and death boiled into one short visit to Las Vegas. It's even better if you love poker because the endless descriptions of the hands must be a bit hard on those who don't see the fun in sitting around a smoky hall dealing cards. If you do, though, this is a wonderful read.
Peter Wayner is the author of Translucent Databases and Disappearing Cryptography. You can purchase Positively Fifth Street from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
For a city that seems to fascinate the geek crowd so much, there is comparatively little tech here. Mostly it's casinos with their AS400's. All the nerdsmart people here (and I know both of them) are here because they're stuck for one reason or another.
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Read Hacking Las Vegas over at Wired about MIT nerds' exploits in Vegas.
I appreciate any and all additions to the non-technical poker canon as I am a degenerate gambler but I will steal McManus's book as he's telling folks on the interview circuit that he's called or bet huge amounts without revealing the difference between real chips and tournament chips. Telling someone that you once called someone's bluff when they raised you $35,000 (should be T35,000 which is how you denote the difference between tourney chips and real chips) without telling them that the chips did not represent real money is like telling them all your old gunfighting stories without mentioning that everyone was using blanks. McManus is a chump.
Although it's about blackjack, not poker, I'd also recommend Bringing Down the House by Ben Mezrich. The subtitle speaks for itself, "The inside story of six MIT students who tooks Vegas for millions." You can't ask for a better story about geeky college students analyzing the mathematics of card counting and beating Vegas at their own game.
I'll just add a couple cool gambling books to the list:
;)
*Bringing Down the House
*Poker Nation
*Telling Lies and Getting Paid
If you wanna learn how to play:
*Doyle Brunson's Super/System
*Mike Caro's Poker Tells
*Hold 'Em Poker for Advanced Players
And of course, make sure you watch Rounders and The Sting.
- adam
Not RF, they used magnetic induction to communicate (there were two wearers, one who only bet black/red and did all the observation of the wheel and calculation of the odds, and the other who then bet to win). RF would have been easily detected, whereas magnetic induction is short range (and less common; also this was back in the late 70's)
Recommended reading for any UCSC grad students in math or sciences.
"It's overkill, of course. But you can never have too much overkill." - Anonymous Slashdot Coward
A little poker trivia here.
You can draw to an inside straight if the pot odds are good enough.
Let's say you're playing draw poker. You've got A-K-J-T-3. You're first instinct is to toss the 3 and hope you get a queen back. Normally, that would be a stupid move.
But let's say, for some reason, there was a lot of betting before the deal or the draw, or maybe you're playing no-limit, and there's a lot of money in the pot. Well, if the bet required for you to stay in is $1, and there's more than $11.75 in the pot, then by all means go for it! Because there are 47 unknown cards, and 4 of them are queens, so there's a 4 in 47 chance of you making your straight (47/4 = 11.75). The odds are in your favor, and if you make this bet a bazillion times, you'll come out ahead.
Of course, you also have to take into account the chances of your made straight being beaten. If it gets beat, you were "drawing dead."
This gets more interesting in 7-card stud. If there are 7 people at the table, and they're all in the hand up to the last card (unlikely, unless you're playing with n00bs), then there are 28 cards face-up, 4 for each player (and 14 cards face-down, 2 for each player). If your cards are A-K-J-T (and 2 worthless cards face-down), then there are only 22 unknown cards available for you to catch. If no one has any queens showing, then there is a 4 in 22 chance that you'll make your straight. So if the bet is $1, all you need is $5.50 in the pot to justify going for that queen.
Of course, you could also semi-bluff, which means that you act like you've already made your straight, and if you catch the queen, so much the better.
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