Book Review: Poker Nation

My older brother Andy came to visit during my senior year of college in the midst of my job search. Over dinner with some classmates, who were also hotel-and-restaurant majors, my brother noticed how my friends picked apart every last detail of the restaurant. When Andy pointed this out, my friend Bruno said, "The thing about studying hospitality is that you can never enjoy a meal because you're too busy analyzing it."

"Not you, Greg," my brother said. "You're too busy stuffing your fat face to pay attention."

Rather than charge back with an insult of my own, I thought about Andy's comment. He was right. As my friends were debating the pros and cons of a prix fixe menu, I asked the waiter to add a dozen Buffalo wings to our drink order. Here I was, surrounded by my peers who had hospitality in their blood, and all I cared about was when my food arrived.

My brother's observation alerted me that the hospitality industry wasn't my calling. I abandoned my job search, ended up graduating unemployed, and had my mom muttering, "I wish you would have had this epiphany before I spent eighty grand!"

Fast-forward nine years and I still have no problem enjoying a meal. The same can't always be said for books. As a writer and a literary agent, it's hard for me to get lost in a book anymore. That's how I know I've found my calling. But there's also the rub – the same rub that my hospitality counterparts suffer at restaurants. You love something so much that you can't enjoy it.

When I started reading Poker Nation (HarperCollins) by Andy Bellin, I had the same problem. I struggled through the first 56 pages. I kept asking myself how I would have tackled Bellin's biggest dilemma – explaining poker to the novice without boring the expert.

Then on Page 57, Bellin started telling the story of Benny Binion, and I was hooked. Bellin is at his best when he steps outside of poker to talk about human nature. "I have a friend Eric," Bellin writes, "who always justifies his dalliances with prostitutes by saying how gorgeous the woman was. What's the difference? He's still sleeping with a hooker."

Speaking of women, one of my favorite elements of the book is his discussion of poker and its effect on relationships. "To be more specific," he writes, "it has ruined every relationship I've ever had except one." If you could read only one chapter, it would have to be "Sex, Lies, and a Deck of Cards."

What I liked most about Poker Nation was Bellin's honesty. I didn't see any agenda or promoting of a cause. When I asked him why he wrote the book, he said, "Trying to make something positive out of all of the beats I took over the years." In doing so, he simply tells his own story and the story of others he encounters along the way – mixed in with some great history ranging from Harry Truman and Richard Nixon to Stuey Ungar and Huck Seed.

What makes his chapter on tells so interesting is that he calls out the tells of his brother and his closest poker buddies. In doing so, he not only provides some solid nuggets of information on how to read people, but also weaves in some funny narrative. In a pot-limit hold'em game at Binion's Horseshoe, he described his opponent as "a gentleman who looked exactly like Uncle Fester from the Addams family." In the midst of breaking down how he picked up a tell, he had me laughing out loud with, "Now, I had never met this man in my whole life. I had no thought about him before that hand other than to picture him with a light bulb in his mouth."

His observations on human nature include some gems such as, "Inherent in the act of gambling is the ability of the participant to perpetually omit the notion of natural truth." We all know that poker players lie to themselves, but Bellin excels in describing how and why by examining his own psyche. Rather than discuss tilt, and make some claim that he's immune to it, he walks through a hand in which he tilted. He also created an analogy for tilt that I wish I could claim as my own: "Tilting is analogous to a tennis player losing a game because of a few bad breaks and then suddenly deciding that the rest of the match will be played with the racket in his opposite hand with every swing taken at his maximum strength." Think about that the next time you pick up J-6 suited right after your aces get cracked.

To Bellin's credit, the book is exactly as it is described: "part memoir, part expose, part how-to." Most Card Player readers won't get much out of the how-to element, but if you walk in Bellin's shoes and realize that part of appealing to the masses is explaining the intricacies of poker, you can understand why he did it. Skim through parts of the beginning and you'll likely have trouble putting Poker Nation down. I read all 258 pages in one sitting. And even better, I forgot that I was actually working.

Greg Dinkin is the author of The Poker MBA: Winning in Business No Matter What Cards You're Dealt (www.thepokermba.com); see the ad in this issue. He is also the co-founder of Venture Literary (www.ventureliterary.com), where he works with writers to find publishers for their books and producers for their screenplays.