Al Alvarez and The Biggest Game in Town

Twenty-five years ago, an English poet, critic, and avid poker player named Al Alvarez flew across the Atlantic to Las Vegas, checked in at Binion's Horseshoe Casino to watch the World Series of Poker, then sat down and produced the best poker narrative ever written: The Biggest Game in Town. First published as a two-part article in the New Yorker magazine in 1983, the story of the 1981 WSOP and the players who competed in it appeared in book form later that year (published by Houghton Mifflin) and has never been out of print. (The most recent edition is from Chronicle Books [$15.95 in paperback], which also published Alvarez's coffee-table book about the game, Poker: Bets, Bluffs, and Bad Beats [$15.95 in paperback].) In honor of this year's WSOP, we decided to revisit this classic poker book and to talk with Alvarez, now 76 years old, about the book that helped put the WSOP on the map and introduced thousands of readers to the world of high-stakes poker.



"Welcome to Dreamland"

"It was a quarter past nine on a weekday morning, and the boys were settling down for a quiet game of cards," Alvarez writes in his opening chapter, set in late April 1981, just before that year's WSOP begins at Binion's. But this "quiet game of cards" is populated by a who's who of professional poker – including Doyle Brunson, Bobby Baldwin, and Puggy Pearson – and they were playing with what you and I might call "real money." Alvarez sets the scene: "They nonchalantly unloaded their racks of chips … massed towers of black, a couple of towers of gray five-hundred-dollar chips, and then, as an afterthought a lower bastion of green twenty-five-dollar chips … Then they fumbled around in their trouser pockets and pulled out packets of money … packets of hundred-dollar bills, as freshly laundered as the players, and each was belted with a paper band on which was printed '5000 dollars.'" In 1981, those stakes were huge (even today, most of us will only dream of playing for that kind of money). As Alvarez concludes the tableau: "Welcome to Dreamland."



Dreamland, indeed. But Alvarez makes it very real by mapping out the landscape of poker and Las Vegas over the course of his short, beautifully written book. He includes a capsule history of Las Vegas, from its founding in 1905 to the beginning of the "Disneyland for adults" era with the 1945 opening of Bugsy Siegel's Flamingo. And because Alvarez is a great writer, the prose goes beyond the mere recitation of facts to supply insightful analysis of what he encounters in this glitzy desert town: "The casinos lie out there on the baked earth like extravagant toys discarded on a beach."



But his main interest is in the game of poker. He provides an essential account of the first decade of World Series history, from its beginning as a casual publicity stunt dreamed up by Benny Binion in 1970 ("In the first years of the World Series of Poker, everything about the occasion was amateur except the players") to the 1981 event (which seems pitifully small by today's standards: 75 players vying for a first-place purse of $375,000). And the best parts of the book are about the poker players he encountered, the early superstars who helped put poker on the map: Johnny Moss, Jack Straus, Eric Drache, Chip Reese, and Doyle Brunson.



In fact, what really separates Biggest Game from the run-of-the-mill poker book is the extent to which Alvarez gets into the minds of real players. The book includes a great story about Jack Straus that highlights the man's uncanny ability to read players as well as his aggressive style. In the 1981 ace-to-five draw lowball tournament, playing against Mickey Perry, Straus raised the pot to $3,000 and Perry called. Perry took one card; Straus stood pat. When Perry checked, Straus immediately bet $27,000. As he told Alvarez later, "He's made his nine, but it's rough. He's got nine-eight." With great reluctance, Perry calls and shows his 2-3-4-8-9 – and Straus mucks his cards. The TV commentator asked Straus to show his "pat" hand, and Straus reveals Q-Q-J-J-J!



Alvarez also documents a famous Jack Straus bluff that will be familiar to many devotees of poker literature, when he played 7-2, got reraised on a flop of 7-3-3, and realized his opponent had a big pair. But Straus called, and when a deuce came off on the turn, Straus immediately bet $18,000. Then the stroke of genius: Straus offered to let his opponent see either one of his holecards for a single $25 chip. The man gave him a chip and pointed to a card, which happened to be the deuce. "The only logical explanation for Straus's offer was that the cards in front of him were the same, so the flop gave him a full house with three deuces," Alvarez writes. "The other man folded his winning hand."



"The Target … Shoots Back"

That bluff encapsulates the big difference between limit and no-limit hold'em, the difference between playing the cards and playing the player. Or, as the Texan millionaire Crandall Addington puts it in the book, "Limit poker is a science, but no-limit is an art. In limit, you are shooting at a target. In no-limit, the target comes alive and shoots back at you."



Of course, in today's world, hold'em reigns supreme, but it was hardly the game of choice in 1981; few people outside of Las Vegas even played it. But it was the game that determined who was crowned poker's "world champion" because, as Alvarez describes it, hold'em "is a game of wits and psychology and position, of bluffing, thrust, and counterthrust, and it depends more on skill and character than on receiving good cards." And in reading about plays like Straus' or any number of others in the book, it's clear that poker at that level is an utterly different game from what most of us play.



The importance of the ability to read players and situations comes through loud and clear in Biggest Game, but Alvarez explores another attribute that sets the very best poker players apart: "the professional gamblers' indifference to money." They've long stopped thinking of chips as money, and this makes them utterly fearless at the table. As Chip Reese notes in the book, "Money means nothing. If you really cared about it, you wouldn't be able to sit down at a poker table and bluff off fifty thousand dollars." Or as Brunson says, "In order to play high-stakes poker, you need to have a total disregard for money. It is just an instrument, and the only time you notice it is when you run out." They almost gleefully recount how many times they've gone broke, which says a great deal about their confidence in getting the money back – and provides yet another reason most of us will never be high-stakes players (the idea of going broke, even with my poker bankroll, is too horrible to contemplate).

While it's tempting to think of the book's title as referring to the WSOP, Alvarez is really referring more to high-stakes poker than the actual tournament itself. But he brings his considerable skills as a reporter and a writer to the coverage of the main event in the last two chapters of the book. Stu Ungar won it that year, for the second time in a row, beating the 40-1 odds that bookmakers were giving for him to repeat (Alvarez reports that Ungar himself had bet heavily on Brunson!). Ungar's brilliance at the felt does not extend to articulate speech; after he won, "someone stuck a microphone in front of Ungar, but all he could manage was 'Great!'"



But what stays with the reader is not the drama of that event as much as the actors within that drama, the people who play the game at the highest level with their uniquely powerful combination of insight and aggression – "that intangible quality we call heart," in the words of Bobby Baldwin. It's the profiles of these great players and their larger-than-life personalities that make the book so compelling. The world had poker books before The Biggest Game in Town appeared in 1983, but Alvarez was the first to really delve into the poker mind – and no author has really come close since.



On Assignment for the New Yorker

I spoke with Alvarez by phone from his home in London, and asked him about the genesis of the book; I was intensely curious about how a man known as a poet and a critic, the author of a famous book on suicide (The Savage God), came to write a book about poker players and an event that, in the early 1980s, was barely on anyone's radar screen? The answer was his deep love for the game, which he began playing in his 20s after a few trips to the States, where he "fell in love with America."



"I started playing at the end of the 1950s," he told me, "originally because it was just such an American game. It was one of those things that make you feel you were kind of tough, kind of macho, even though every other indication showed me I wasn't either of those things. But I was no good at first. I had no idea what I was doing until someone gave me a copy of [Herbert] Yardley's Education of a Poker Player, and I started to understand about odds and probabilities and about discipline. I really kind of took to the game, and I've played it very, very consistently ever since."

Alvarez writes at length about his own evolution as a player in the beautifully illustrated coffee-table book, Poker: Bets, Bluffs, and Bad Beats. He was part of the famous "Tuesday night game" in London, chronicled by his friend Anthony Holden in the book, Big Deal: Confessions of a Professional Poker Player, a fine account of a year spent trying to play for a living (Abacus, $15.70 in paperback). But his desire to write about the game came after his first trip to poker mecca – Las Vegas – in 1980; "I thought, this is heaven – poker twenty-four hours a day," he recalled. "When I heard about the World Series, I put it to my American agent and she went to the great William Shawn, who was the editor of the New Yorker. She told him, 'Look, I've got this crazy British poet who wants to go to Vegas and write about some cockeyed poker tournament.' And that was exactly the kind of zany, off-the-wall idea that Shawn adored."



So, he got what would now be a plum assignment, covering the World Series of Poker for the rarefied pages of the New Yorker, and the two-part article that resulted was a huge success for the magazine. I remember reading the piece when it came out, years before I had ever played poker or even considered playing poker, and consumed it voraciously, drawn into it by both the power of the narrative and the insightful precision of the writing. After I learned something about poker, I reread the piece in book form, and found it even more compelling.



The portrait Alvarez paints of Las Vegas, circa 1981, is often a grim one. "It is a town without grace and nuance, where the only useful virtues are experience, survival, and money," he writes. But in the interview, he told me he adores the town: "What I love about Vegas is that it's a truly, purely cynical joint." And he says the experience of covering the event, interviewing the players, and writing the book was great fun. He admits the players were somewhat skeptical at first when "they heard this little guy talking with a funny accent, writing for a magazine they'd never heard of," but his humor and passionate interest in what they were doing broke the ice. "They couldn't have been nicer," he said. "I'm one of those guys people talk to; I'm a good listener, and they realized I wasn't wasting their time. I guess they took to me."



Alvarez, who still plays a lot of poker, online and at London's Grosvenor Victoria casino, told me he was amazed by the poker explosion. "Poker is absolutely mainstream today," he said. "The numbers [at the WSOP] are ridiculous." But he also said that the level of play is much, much higher than when he covered the event back in 1981: "People know what to do now."



The unimaginably large fields and the large number of people who know how to play poker at a very high level are a testament to just how far the game has come since Alvarez went to Vegas a quarter of a century ago. But he deserves some of the credit for putting poker on the map with his wonderful book. Biggest Game isn't a treatise on strategy, and it probably won't help you play any better. In fact, it may well scare you from trying to move up in limits, because his profiles of the players he encountered show just how much "gamble" they possess. But if you care about the game, if you're fascinated by its history – even if you're just a fan of superb writing – Biggest Game is a must-read.