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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.
I read an article from James McManus in the December 2000 issue of Harper's Magazine about the World Series of Poker. It was absolutely facinating. There are quite a few characters in the high stakes poker world. I haven't read the book, but read this article for a sample of what it's all about.
Random is the New Order.
Between this fine book, the recent publication of Andy Bellin's Poker Nation, a biopic on fallen poker legend Stu Ungar in the can, and the World Poker Tour program now showing on the Travel Channel, popular works on poker have been coming faster than ever.
If there are any regular poker players out there, either in home games or casinos and card rooms, can you comment on whether this has brought a tide of newbies into the game? If so, have these fish provided any sort of windfall for the more experienced players?
The Education of a Poker Player by Herbert O. Yardley is one of the best books I've ever read on poker. Incidentally, H.O. Yardley was one of the first employees/agents of what became the National Security Agency; His specialty was cryptology/cryptanalysis.
Although McManus spends a bit less time than the others explaining how a poker player thinks, his glossary is actually better so you can follow along with phrases like "I got sucked out by the case nine on the river".
- adam
P.S. If you are instead a fan of the "gamble with your writing advance in Vegas" genre, 24/7 by Andres Martinez is pretty good.
I think this book came out of a Harper's article.
Imagine if Neal Stephenson played poker. It's like that--but the tournament actually happened. My favorite part is where McManus ends up playing at the same table with the author of the poker book Mcmanus studied in order to prepare for the tournament!
If you've never read about poker, or don't understand it, you might think that this isn't News for Nerds.
If you have read about poker you'll know that poker is the only game for nerds in Vegas.
--- Often in error; never in doubt!
Maybe this is on slashdot bc poker is one of the competitive mind games that a computer will never win.
"Maybe I'm just too narrow-minded in wanting only nerdy things on a nerdy site."
I think you just have too narrow a definition of 'nerdy'. Nerdy isn't just gadgets... it's anything that relates to an (often excessive) interest in intellectual pursuits.
Poker is a game that relies heavily on understanding complex probability, strategy, and psychology, and it has always had a strong attraction for smart or geeky people who (rightly) see it as one of the rare forums where one can excel based on brains over brawn. All of the geekiest people I know play poker regularly.
It's at least as nerdy as Chess, and I for one enjoyed the review and will probably go look up a book I might have otherwise missed.
Freaking hilarious.....
There is a war correspondent here in canada who has footage of CNN's cow Amampour telling her crew that the refugees she has as a backdrop were not haggard looking and to get them to stop playing baketball...
How about the British network which took a german journalist to court when he uncovered that a bosnian 'camp' didnt have barbed wires as shown on worldwide tv but that the cameraman had gone inside the barbed wire enclosure (which was used to protect some kind of hydro pole) to film through?
How about a Pulitzer prize winner writing (and furthering his reputation(!) ) about a top 25 most wanted war criminal and his deeds only to find out 2 years later that the name was that of a fictitious folk hero?
Thats the great thing about the US...
unlike totalitarian regimes, poeple there actually believe all the crap you just wrote.
Travel throughout Europe and south america and you will get a sense of this.
Sit at home and watch the Pravda like drivel that is shown on all US networks and you will see a uniformity of thought that is scary.
But hey, one mans terrorist is anothers hero and one persons liberation is anothers occupation.
Look for "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" in the Constitution. You won't find it. That's from the Declaration of Independence, which was an actual revolutionary document. In fact, look for human rights or civil rights in the original body of the Constitution, and you won't find it. That's all in the Bill of Rights and later amendments. The Constitution is simply a detailed and mundane plan for how to form a practical government.
Interestingly, our first attempt at forming a government, the Articles of Confederation, *was* a revolutionary document like the Declaration of Independence - it tried to overtly express ideas about human rights and philosophical notions of government. But it was a disaster, and so the Constitution was written more as a nuts-and-bolts approach of how to actually formulate a government.
But you're right, this discussion has no place in the context of poker. I teach US history to college freshmen; I'd rather talk about poker. What about "Card Counting for Meatheads?" A classic book on card counting.
I for one enjoyed Rounders, though I hate Ben Affleck, as it emphasises the huge difference between casual poker players, who think the game's about luck, and professionals, who know how to read other players' hands, calculate odds, keep track of cards, and bet such that they gain more than they lose, at least when they can bring social engineering into play.
It also points out however that even the greatest player can occasionally be beaten by dumb luck. Smart movie.
I did not design this game/I did not name the stakes/I just happen to like apples/And I am not afraid of snakes-AniD
But isn't it only an emotional component when you're playing against those with emotions? In a 2 player human-computer Texas Holdem game, if the computer never folded, the odds of winning any hand would end up being even. The only control the human player would have would be varying his stake in the game by choosing to raise or not, or to fold. So the trick is to have a betting algorithm for the computer that doesn't reveal the contents of its hand, yet still allows it to bet high on good hands & fold or drop on bad ones.
Random betting would hide the computer's hand but not allow it to gain financial advantage. But consider a random betting range that was based on the mathematically "ideal" bet. On any given hand, the human wouldn't be able to tell whether the hand was good or not (since the min & max range of the random function would always go from 0 to max bet, only the shape of the distribution curve would change). The computer could also keep track of how much it had won/lost on past hands and adjust the curve dynamically to try to account for a losing streak, but this may not be necessary.
The result would be that in the long run, the computer would gain the advantages of statistically perfect betting, without the disadvange of tells. Is there a problem with this scheme I don't see?
-BbT
I once read a book (The Eudaemonic Pie, now unfortunately out of print) about a group of nerds who tried to come up with a way to beat the house at roulette.
It involved using small computers to predict where on the wheel the ball would most likely land. The computers were actually hidden in their shoes, and controlled using switches by their toes. One of them would click one of the buttons whenever the ball passed a certain point on the wheel, allowing the computer to predict (after having spent some time 'learning' the physics of that particular wheel) where the ball would eventually end up. It would then transmit that infomation to a device in a second player's shoe, who would then place the bets. It was actually quite a remarkable feat, considering this was back in the seventies. (And it would probably be illegal now)