Bloggers On The Rail – Guest Post: Tuscaloosa Johnny

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Welcome to the new look here at Poker From the Rail. We’ve moved platforms and hope the new format will improve your experience floating around our different writers and posts. I will resume bringing you the words from the best sources in poker blogging starting with a new post from Tuscaloosa John and his poker reading recommendations.

As always, if you have a post you would like to submit for Blogger On The Rail you can contact me at BattleoftheBloggers@fulltiltpoker.com.

A little poker bedtime reading

By Johnny Kampis

If you’re like me, you’ve got a shelf full of poker books. (In my house they are juxtaposed with my wife’s Christian books, which certainly make for an interesting juxtaposition.) Although the brunt of poker books on my shelf deal with game strategy, there are still quite a few narratives. While poker strategy books certainly are useful – I know they’ve helped my game greatly over the years – I’d much rather lie in bed before sleep and curl up with a good poker narrative. Over the years there have been quite a few great non-strategic books. Here is a list of the best:

The Biggest Game in Town by A. Alvarez
British author and poker player Alvarez traveled to Las Vegas in 1981 to watch and report on the World Series of Poker. What he found was a game he barely could comprehend, where true gamblers risked their fortunes on the turn of a card, where the “next best thing to playing and winning is playing and losing.” Widely considered the best narrative on the game, Alvarez provides an account of the early days of the WSOP, when barely a hundred people gathered inside the Horseshoe for the event, practically all of them aged, hardened poker pros.

Big Deal by Anthony Holden
A contemporary of Alvarez (they even played in the same London poker club), Holden traveled the world in the mid 1980s, following the tournament trail as far as Malta and Morocco, to test his luck and mettle against the game’s best. Holden, who fared well, provides a sharp witted commentary on the world of professional poker. Some people consider this a better book than “The Biggest Game in Town.” Either is a great read. Holden released a sequel in 2006, not-so-creatively titled “Bigger Deal,” but I can’t recommend this one. In the second book, Holden recalls the recent poker boom (something that has been discussed repeatedly elsewhere) with a few mildly boring anecdotes thrown in. It’s called cashing a paycheck.

Positively Fifth Street by James McManus
The mild-mannered Chicagoan got an assignment from Harper’s magazine to travel to the WSOP in 1999 to write about women in the event and cover the murder trial of the duo charged with killing Ted Binion, son of the founder or the Horseshoe where the WSOP was then held. McManus decided to use his $4,000 advance to enter some satellites to try and win a seat in the main event. He not only succeeded in winning his seat, but made the final table against top pros like Chris Ferguson and T.J. Cloutier. His book recounts what it’s like for a tournament novice to compete on the game’s greatest stage.

All In: The (Almost) Entirely True Story of the World Series of Poker by Jonathan Grotenstein and Storms Reback
Grotenstein and Reback exhaustively researched all accounts and interviewed as many participants as they could to compile this history of the WSOP, from its beginnings as a Texas road gamblers reunion in Reno to Greg Raymer’s $5 million payday in 2004. This book charts poker’s grandest tournament’s growth from a handful of degenerate poker players to thousands of wannabe amateurs and whiz kids of today. This is probably the best book on the game’s history ever published even though it only details the WSOP. That’s because the WSOP is so intertwined with the game’s growth through the years.

Read ‘em and Weep edited by John Stravinsky
This isn’t a narrative. Instead, it’s a collection of both fictional and non-fictional short stories through the years that I9 9m including because it is such a great bedtime read. In this tome, Stravinsky collects about 40 stories with varying degrees of poker-related content from such famed authors and poker writers as Mark Twain, W. Somerset Maugham, James Thurber, Jesse May, David Hayano and many more. The best part? This book is easy to find for less than a buck.

Reach Johnny Kampis at jkampis@hotmail.com

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