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TIME: Almanac 1995
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TIME Almanac 1995.iso
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111990
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1119472.000
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<text id=90TT3114>
<title>
Nov. 19, 1990: Sucker Play
</title>
<history>
TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1990
Nov. 19, 1990 The Untouchables
</history>
<article>
<source>Time Magazine</source>
<hdr>
BOOKS, Page 110
Sucker Play
</hdr>
<body>
<qt>
<l>BIG DEAL </l>
<l>by Anthony Holden </l>
<l>Viking; 306 pages; $19.95</l>
</qt>
<p> The author admits that he was not at his best--"tired, a
little drunk, jetlagged, and light-headed" is his recollection. A
prudent man would have gone to bed, and the following morning he
would have taken the next plane out of Las Vegas.
</p>
<p> Dull stuff, prudence. Anthony Holden never hesitated: he
wobbled out into the night. But as Holden, a British literary
critic, reached the Golden Nugget's cardroom, he remembered the
gambler's formula for chump detection: "If you can't spot the
sucker in your first half-hour at the table, it's you."
</p>
<p> Whether or not Holden is the sucker is pretty much the plot
line of this funny and amiable account of self-delusion at
calamity's edge. He is a better-than-average amateur poker
player whose demons persuaded him to spend a year trying to beat
the world's best professionals at their lovely, wily game.
Holden started with some credit cards and a scrawny $20,000 in
capital and played mostly in tournaments, in which players buy
in for an entry fee and then risk no further money. He knew his
cards, and he won some and lost some. But card sense is the
lesser part of poker, which is a game of money management at its
middle levels, and of character--an odd sort of frontier
monasticism might describe it--at the very top. The author may
have sensed that he was not suited to it when he hesitated to
pay a $2,500 tournament buy-in because his children's school
fees were due.
</p>
<p> In the end he did decently, for an amateur. Though his
prose sloshes with pomposity--"reserved for my lone
delectation" is a standard clunker--his book does well because
he sees what is admirable in the splendid anarchism of the
great players. He tells the story, among many other good ones,
of the late Jack Straus, who, while waiting in federal court to
be tried on a tax charge, was touched by the plea of another
defendant that a $35,000 judgment would put his family on the
sidewalk. "It's okay, Your Honor," said Straus, "just stick it
on my tab!" It is only across the table that you would not want
to face such fellows. That, as one old female player told
Holden, "is a tough way to make an easy living."
</p>
<p>By John Skow.
</p>
</body>
</article>
</text>