Book Review: Katy Lederer's Poker Face

If you want to learn how to improve your poker face, don't read Poker Face. If you want to figure out how the author's brother, Howard Lederer, won two tournaments in the World Poker Tour's inaugural season, don't read Poker Face. If you want to learn some poker tips for live games from the author's sister, Annie Duke, don't read Poker Face. And if you want some insight into how to play a medium pair in a raised pot, you'd be better off reading Faces of Death. If, however, you want to read a beautifully written memoir about an incredibly complex family that looms large in the poker world, Katy Lederer's new book is the stone-cold nuts.

Poker Face: A Girlhood Among Gamblers (Crown, August 2003) has already been honored with a prestigious starred review in Publisher's Weekly, which wrote: "Centered on dead-on perceptions of the swirling needs, poses and cruelties of her family, Lederer's debut memoir is less Positively Fifth Street than an alienated New England version of The Liar's Club, and ends up with some of the best of both." As Amarillo Slim would say, that's stronger than Nellie's breath!

While I don't know Howard Lederer and Annie Duke well, like most poker players, I know enough about them to want to know more. Aside from playing at the highest limits in cash games and having impressive tournament results, their very nature makes them compelling characters. Howard's erudite style, critiquing hands and writing voluminous essays on RGP, has brought his poker intellect to the masses. Readers will be fascinated to learn about Howard as a youngster, including his fiercely competitive chess matches with his dad, his futile but thoughtful efforts to curb his mother's drinking, and his time in New York as a homeless late teen. Annie's character as a child isn't as well developed in the book as her older brother's, but you still get a glimpse of how the middle child in the Lederer family evolved into an aggressive poker player who never had any problem blending in with the boys – and taking their money.

Ultimately, this is a book about family. The author's father, Richard Lederer, spend most of his adult life teaching English at an old-money prep school in New Hampshire called St. Paul's. The middle-class family lived on campus, which raised issues for the kids of blending in with their more snobbish peers. When Katy started high school and began to live in the school's student dorms, she got a taste of New England old money. From debutante balls at the Waldorf-Astoria to chronic anorexia and bulimia, she does an amazing job of taking the reader inside the living quarters at St. Paul's and showing how it isn't always easy for young women who seemingly have all the advantages in life.

And while this book is about family, because of her mom's chronic drinking, it's also about what it's like to grow up with an alcoholic mother. The Lederer family found its salvation in games. At the beginning of Chapter Three, Katy describes what it was like to be sitting at a sticky pine table in the kitchen, playing cards with her family:

"This was as close as the family ever got, and so, even though the lot of us were violently competitive (if Annie lost a game, she'd throw cards; and if Howard lost, he'd glare as if you'd insulted his deepest, most delicate part, then slink around the kitchen table like a very proud cat), the atmosphere would seem to me incomparably congenial. Somewhere along the line I'd gotten it into my head that the playing of games was the same thing as civility and that friendly competition was the closest thing to love we'd ever know."

Since Katy never quite fit in with the aristocratic St. Paul's crowd, she longed for her trips to New York to visit her brother, Howard, who is nine years older. As a 13-year-old, she even got to tag along to the Mayfair Club with him, where she met Erik Seidel and a "rabbi" who even she could identify as the live one in the game.

The story, of course, goes where only a gambling story can go, to Las Vegas, where Katy learns poker from her siblings and ultimately decides that writing and poetry are the hands she'd rather play. But regardless of the venue, the writing is always terrific, and it's a safe bet you'll read all 209 pages in one sitting.

George Plimpton, who is now writing his own memoirs, said, "The intricacies of family and the complexities of the games they play mingle wonderfully here in a memoir quite unlike any other."

Greg Dinkin is the co-author of Amarillo Slim's memoir, The Poker MBA (www.thepokermba.com), and The Finance Doctor. He is also the co-founder of Venture Literary (www.ventureliterary.com), where he works with writers to find publishers for their books and studios for their screenplays.