More Non-Poker Books for Poker Players

I enjoy reading about poker. But not everything that contributes to my outlook on my favorite card game was written specifically about poker. Every now and then, I like to suggest a few books that may have little if any explicit poker content (or at least don't live in the "games" section of the bookstore), but that I think might still appeal to poker players who like to read.

Liar's Poker by Michael Lewis has nothing to do with poker. At least, it has nothing to do with the card game. The game that gives the book its title is played with the serial numbers on dollar bills, not cards. More on that in a minute. What Liar's Poker is really about is the birth of the mortgage bond market, and a cultural shift in the financial community in the 1980s. Normally, when people start talking about financial markets, my eyes start to glaze over and I start scouting out exit routes. But the story Lewis tells is both intrinsically fascinating and relevant to poker on at least two levels. At a basic level, the story Lewis tells is an object lesson on the importance of knowing how much something is worth. Everyone knows that both mortgages and poker hands are worth something. But when someone offers you one for sale – either as a mortgage bond or as a big bet on the river – the importance of putting a number on that value becomes obvious.

Poker players will also enjoy thinking about the game of Liar's Poker, which although tangential to the main events of the book, is interesting in its own right, and obviously of intrinsic interest to people who like to play games for money. Each participant uses a single dollar bill from his wallet (which may or may not be the amount wagered). Players bid in turn based on the digits present in the collective bills held by all the players. If you bid four fives, you're betting that there will be four fives among all the serial numbers. Bids must progressively increase, and the game ends when a bid is challenged by all the other players. A successful bid is paid by the remaining players, while an unsuccessful bid must pay everyone. Is it poker? No. Is it poker-like? Well, let's just say that it's a game of incomplete information that draws on your facility with numbers as well as your ability to read people. It's also safe to say that it wouldn't take much to start a game among a group of poker players.

We all dream about winning the big one. But it takes a bit of a literary bent to dream about losing everything. Or perhaps it just takes a bad run of cards. Writing about the downside of gambling is a literary tradition that goes back at least as far as Dostoevsky's The Gambler. Dostoevsky wrote from firsthand experience, and it could be argued that the combination of gambling addiction and literary talent is tailor-made for dramatic impact. Frederick Barthelme's Bob the Gambler is probably also on the short list of literary takes on gambling that draw on firsthand experience. But one of my favorite treatments of the subject is Paul Auster's The Music of Chance. Auster has made a literary career of examining the effects of chance occurrences, nowhere more explicitly than in this book. In The Music of Chance, Auster takes a nightmarish (but all too familiar) poker session as a point of departure, but the game itself is just the linchpin in a story that follows chance occurrences through to their unforeseeable consequences. Other authors might focus on the obvious potential consequences of poker disaster, things like financial and personal ruin. Auster's take on the subject is at the very least less obvious, although it's hard to say much without spoiling it. I don't know that Auster has any personal experience with the downside of gambling, and if not, perhaps that helped contribute to his unusual perspective. The book was also made into a movie, which is well worth watching.

I recently picked up Marcus du Satoy's The Music of the Primes in an airport bookstore. Mathematics isn't the most accessible subject in the world, and doesn't tend to be well represented in airport bookstores. But I found the first few pages engaging enough to give it a shot, and I'm glad I did. du Satoy's book covers the fascinating history of the attempts by the world's great mathematicians to bring order to the seemingly random patterns of prime numbers. Before I go much farther, I should clarify that although the book is nominally about math, and has the word on its cover, there's almost no math in it; in fact, du Satoy goes out of his way to avoid being even remotely technical. While this may be frustrating to students of mathematics, this treatment is much better suited to those of us who would like to indulge our fascination with certain difficult problems from afar. Admittedly, the connection to poker is more tenuous than the other books I've listed. Even for the analytically minded, poker and prime numbers are vastly different kinds of problems. But I think The Music of the Primes appealed to the same part of my personality that likes to think about difficult poker problems. Judging from some of the online poker discussion I've read, I'm not alone.

Lastly, in honor of the late Hunter S. Thompson, I'd like to recommend Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. I can't claim to be an expert on Thompson's oeuvre, and this may be an excessively obvious pick. But if you haven't read it for a while, now may be a good time to pick up a copy and remind yourself that even in Las Vegas, there's more going on than a simple game of cards.

Daniel Kimberg is the author of Serious Poker and maintains a web site for serious poker players at www.seriouspoker.com.