Bigger Deal: A Year Inside the Poker Boom - Hardcover

Holden, Anthony

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0743294823 ISBN 13: 9780743294829

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 2007

Synopsis

The author of Big Deal tests his card skills against the changed world of poker in the twenty-first century at a worldwide tournament that pits promising first-timers who have never played except on the Internet with long-standing professionals who are finding themselves outmatched. 35,000 first printing.

About this title

About the Author

An award-winning journalist, Anthony Holden is also the author of several best-selling biographies of such figures as Shakespeare, Tchaikovsky, Laurence Olivier, and the Prince of Wales. His most recent book is the sequel Bigger Deal: A Year Inside the Poker Boom.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Prologue

In 1978, the year I first visited Las Vegas for the World Series of Poker, Bobby "the Owl" Baldwin beat a record field of forty-two players to the title of world champion and a handsome first prize of $270,000. A decade later, in 1988, the first time I played in the main event myself, there were all of 167 starters and the title was worth $700,000. By 2005, when I take part again at the beginning of this book, the field has risen to nearly six thousand. The first prize is $7.5 million and all nine players who reach the final table become dollar millionaires.

By the book's end and the 2006 World Series there are 8,773 starters, myself again included, vying for a first prize of $12 million -- the richest, by some distance, in all sport. The 2006 prize pool of more than $150 million made the thirty-seventh World Series of Poker, staged over seven weeks in July and August, the biggest sporting event in the history of the planet. No fewer than 44,500 players took part in at least one of its forty-five events. Thanks to a combination of television and the Internet, poker was booming as never before since being introduced to the fledgling United States by French sailors landing in Louisiana in the 1820s. And now some interested parties really do call poker a sport, rather than the game most of us have long considered it.

Thirty-six years ago, when the wily Benny Binion hosted the first World Series at his downtown Horseshoe Casino, the field of runners numbered a mere six, the prize purse $30,000. Today, in terms of participants and prizes, the WSOP No Limit Hold 'em Championship is the world's largest single competitive event, growing at an annual rate of more than 200 percent for the three years 2002-2005. The prize money -- $82,512,162 (almost £50 million) in 2006 for the main event alone -- dwarfs that of any other global sporting championship.

The not insignificant difference from all other sports is that this prize purse is paid by the players. The romance of the WSOP's world-title event lies in the fact that ambitious amateurs can take on the top professionals on equal terms. All you need to play is the $10,000 entry fee -- or, these days, not even that. Thanks to the democracy of cyberspace, at least two-thirds of the giant fields of recent years have won their way there via online tournaments for as little as $5. The world championships of 2003 and 2004 were both won by players who had earned their $10,000 seats online for $40 or less, which they proceeded to parlay into millions.

At no other sport is the opportunity for amateurs to compete against professionals so readily available -- at such small prices and for such potentially huge rewards, even without any corporate sponsorship. The 2005 winner, an Australian chiropractor turned mortgage broker named Joe Hachem, put up his $10,000 entry fee himself. But his $7.5 million prize money for a week's work was many more times that of Tiger Woods for winning the Open golf championship the same weekend or Roger Federer's for conquering Wimbledon earlier that month.

This is a radically different world from the one I chronicled almost two decades ago in 1988 and 1989, when I spent a year attempting to earn my living as a professional poker player. It's a long story; but it all really happened by mistake. As a dedicated recreational player in my Tuesday Night Game in London, I had been traveling to Vegas each summer as a journalist, and an envious railbird, for ten years before I surprised myself by winning a seat in the 1988 main event via a $1,000 "satellite" (or heat). When I returned to London with my then girlfriend, the American novelist Cindy Blake, I was so insufferably excited by the experience that she suggested (with some feeling) that I get it all out of my system by hitting the road on the pro poker tour -- and writing an account of my adventures.

So I played in tournaments from Malta and Morocco to Louisiana and the Caribbean, with the objective of trying to improve on my performance in the following year's World Series. Cindy came along for much of the ride, as did my poker-playing writer pal Al Alvarez; they became "the Moll" and "the Crony" in the story of my adventures that I published in 1990 in a book called Big Deal. Having set out with a bankroll of £20,000, I finished the year almost as much in profit -- even after deducting absurd expenses, including sixteen transatlantic flights, one on Concorde. Satisfying, yes -- but not, alas, enough to sustain the extended Holden tribe. So for the rest of the 1990s it was back to writing -- and recreational poker.

In the first few years of the twenty-first century poker began to boom, as television and the Internet brought the game out of the shadows of smoke-filled back rooms into the mainstream of what passes for everyday life. If Big Deal bore witness to the "old" poker -- the pioneers who built Vegas into the game's world capital, the roller-coaster ride of personal triumph and disaster endured by the handful of "rounders" then making a living from the game -- how about revisiting that world, I thought, to see just how much it has all changed, to examine the pros and cons of the "new" poker?

Modest bankroll in hand, I took myself off to the 2005 World Series of Poker in Las Vegas to check out the new poker scene. I managed to qualify for the main event -- as you will see in the ensuing pages -- and refreshed my appetite for a town I had not visited in almost a decade. While renewing old friendships, and making new ones, I swiftly saw that the poker world I had chronicled in Big Deal had changed beyond even the wildest rumors, facts, anecdotes, or statistics I had heard. After years of resisting the idea, I felt a sequel coming on. The impulse to write Bigger Deal became irresistible.

By the early years of the twenty-first century the marvels of modern science have revolutionized a game that used to be the romantic, often shady preserve of a few, of high drama in low dives. Online poker has also changed the way people play the game, and lowered the average age of its leading exponents. Does this count as an improvement? That was among the questions I was intent on exploring as I set off on a twelve-month journey reliving the one I took nearly twenty years before.

This time, as then, I would play poker in as many different locations as possible, from Vegas to the Caribbean, Connecticut to Monte Carlo, London to Walsall, on board ship and online, in rinky-dink home games and the biggest tournament ever staged. Last time around I was a hopeful unknown; this time, thanks to Big Deal, my anonymity would be largely blown -- and for some events, to my own surprise, I would even receive sponsorship. Such are the rewards, for a player more experienced than inspired, of writing one of the first of the handful of poker narratives (as opposed to the growing shelf-loads of manuals) -- somewhat ahead of its time, perhaps, but never out of print and still selling merrily to each new generation of players.

Big Deal has led to numerous encounters with total strangers who have credited it with inspiring them to take up the game, move to Vegas, even give up their jobs and turn professional -- many of whom, I admit through gritted teeth, have made out far better than me. Over the years since the book first appeared, the most unlikely people have approached me in bars or restaurants, on trains and planes or merely on the street, and told me, Yes, this was what they had always wanted to do: to give up their jobs and turn poker pro.

People tell me that Big Deal helped to make poker respectable in Britain, where the game had hitherto been regarded almost exclusively as a seedy offshoot of East End, sub-Kray gangsterdom. The book earned me the world's first regular poker column in a mainstream publication, Esquire, and the first-ever poker documentary on, of all places, BBC Television. In vain had I spent years attempting to persuade British TV executives that poker could be big; this was the nearest I got -- a clunky pilot for a series that never happened -- to what would become a multimillion-dollar TV phenomenon. Big Deal was also hawked around Hollywood as a potential vehicle for some of the more rugged stars -- with one of whom, James Woods, I enjoyed a genial conversation in the queue for a modest satellite into the 2005 World Series, by which time the movie was actually being scripted.

Nick Leeson, the rogue trader who brought down Barings Bank, read Big Deal while serving his time in Changi jail, Singapore; now he is a regular player and poker columnist. My copy of Death Plus Ten Years, by Roger Cooper, falsely accused of espionage and imprisoned in the ayatollahs' 1980s Iran, is inscribed: "To Tony, Remembering Big Deal, which meant a lot to me at the time, and in daydreams still does..."

One of the most startling surprises came when I received a late-night call in London from Erik Seidel in Las Vegas. Runner-up to Johnny Chan in the 1988 World Series (as immortalized in the film Rounders) and still a highly respected professional, Erik was then working with Annie Duke, sister of his friend and fellow poker pro Howard Lederer, on a new (but short-lived) poker magazine called Poker World. Seidel had just seen Microsoft's founder Bill Gates, he told me breathlessly, playing poker in the cardroom of the Mirage Hotel. So he had gone over to him and said, "Excuse me, Mr. Gates, I didn't know you played poker."

"I don't," said Gates. "I play bridge. But I've just read this new book about poker and I thought I'd give it a try."

"That wouldn't be Big Deal, by Anthony Holden?" asked Erik.

"Yeah," said Gates, "that's it."

"Well, Tony is a friend of mine," ventured Erik.

"Sounds like a nice guy," said Gates.

"If I could get him out here from London, would you play a game of poker with him for Poker World?"

"Sure," said Gates, which is why Erik was calling me in the middle of the night. Nothing ever came of it, of course; but I have since deriv...

About this edition

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0743294823
• ISBN 13: 9780743294829
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 337