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Alvarez begins by setting the scene. The Glitter Gulch neighborhood in downtown Las Vegas, an air-conditioned nightmare in the middle of the desert, “a city without grace and without shades”, is a poker player’s paradise. A handful of rather seedy casinos with names reminiscent of luck or El Dorado: Binion’s Horseshoe, Golden Nugget, Four Queens. Modest looking hotels, pawnshops, no grocery stores, no kids, no pets. A closed world, where nothing that is foreign to the game finds its place.
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We are far from the splendor of the Strip, this long ribbon of bitumen that stretches for miles, bordered by a double row of palaces with gleaming facades, each with its decor inspired by a Hollywood universe, its casino, its course of golf. These establishments rely on the continuous flow of wealthy customers who come to squander a few tens of thousands of dollars, but do not look favorably upon high rollers, for the simple reason that the money from the poker tables remains in players’ hands without bringing much to the casinos. The biggest games in the world are played at Glitter Gulch. And Binion’s Horseshoe has hosted the World Series of Poker since the tournament’s birth in 1970.
real tough
This establishment is unique in its kind because it is the only casino to authorize games without any limits. It was, in 1949, the scene of a party that entered into legend. For almost five months, she pitted Nick “the Greek” Dandolos against Johnny Moss, “a surly reptile of mythology”. It is said that the second would have reduced the first by about 2 million dollars. The founder, Benjamin Binion, soberly comments on his turbulent past during the years of prohibition, which left him with a nicely loaded criminal record, with the formula: “It is in difficult times that we recognize the real tough guys.” Every day, he oversees everything from his table in the Sombrero Room, the dining room, while his son Jack takes care of day-to-day business.
Caution and attentiveness
Throughout the tournament, Al Alvarez mixes with onlookers who come as spectators, and leads the same life as the players. He meets them in the hallways and the Sombrero Room, collects their analyzes and revels in their anecdotes. He follows them in their rounds of golf during which they bet extravagant sums on each hole. At night, like them, he goes to sit at the gaming tables. Not the same ones, of course. Instead, he joins small games limited to a few dollars, all cautious and wait-and-see in the hope of a good hand. The ones the pros regard with boredom. “A job that just requires discipline”, comments with contempt the champion Jack Straus.
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The professional player, on the contrary, practices an extreme sport, “a game of information, psychology, position, bluff, pressure and counter-attack, which depends much more on the talent and strength of the player than on the chance of cards”, as Johnny Moss sums up about Hold’em, the most prestigious variant of the game. He must know how to show extraordinary aggressiveness and above all have the heart, the courage to push all his chips in the middle of the table. We estimate the qualities of a great player both in his ability to win and to recover from a game that has ruined him.
The romanticism of risk
Most players see themselves as off-system free entrepreneurs, but if there’s one characteristic they all have in common, it’s paradoxically a fundamental disinterest in the value of money itself: the fortune earned in one night can be casually squandered the next day on gambling or sports betting. They prize the romanticism of risk, adrenaline, fever, the amount at stake being only what makes things exciting. As Nick “the Greek” Dandolos says, “The next best thing to winning at gambling is losing at gambling.”
You don’t have to know the game in general, or poker in particular, to love this book. Al Alvarez’s pen is indeed fine and full of humor, the portraits are striking, the descriptions of the course of the tournament breathtaking. And his analysis of the professional poker milieu as the convergence of the Western mythology of the lone gunslinger relying only on his own resources and the most unbridled capitalist free enterprise is particularly relevant.
Al Alvarez, “The Biggest Game. A Dazzling Chronicle of Las Vegas and Its Poker Players,” Métailié. Translated from English by Jérôme Schmidt. 196 pages
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