Authors: James McManus
ISBN-13: 9780312422523, ISBN-10: 0312422520
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Picador
Date Published: March 2004
Edition: Reprint
James McManus is a novelist and poet, most recently winner of the Peter Lisagor Award for sports journalism. He teaches writing and comparative literature at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, including a course on the literature and science of poker.
Rough sex, black magic, murder, and the science—and eros—of gambling meet in the ultimate book about Las Vegas
James McManus was sent to Las Vegas by Harper’s to cover the World Series of Poker in 2000, especially the mushrooming progress of women in the $23 million event, and the murder of Ted Binion, the tournament’s prodigal host, purportedly done in by a stripper and her boyfriend with a technique so outré it took a Manhattan pathologist to identify it. Whether a jury would convict the attractive young couple was another story altogether.
McManus risks his entire Harper’s advance in a long-shot attempt to play in the tournament himself. Only with actual table experience, he tells his skeptical wife, can he capture the hair-raising brand of poker that determines the world champion. The heart of the book is his deliciously suspenseful account of the tournament itself—the players, the hand-to-hand combat, and his own unlikely progress in it.
Written in the tradition of The Gambler and The Biggest Game in Town, Positively Fifth Street is a high-stakes adventure, a penetrating study of America’s card game, and a terrifying but often hilarious account of one man’s effort to understand what Edward O. Wilson has called “Pleistocene exigencies”—the eros and logistics of our primary competitive instincts.
It's a safe wager that professional poker players aren't very good writers, but it's also better than even money that adept writers are, or could be, cunning poker players, for they come to understand motive and risk and instinctively realize that you can't win if you don't bet. James McManus bet big and won. His Positively Fifth Street, an exhilarating chronicle of the 2000 World Series of Poker in Las Vegas, will go on the shelf with the classic that inspired it, The Biggest Game in Town, A. Alvarez's account of the 1981 event. — Robert R. Harris
The End | 3 | |
Dead Money | 21 | |
Family, Career, Even Life | 35 | |
Black Magic | 69 | |
Urge Overkill | 87 | |
The Poker of Science | 107 | |
Nobody Said Anything | 125 | |
Chicks with Decks | 149 | |
Death in the Afternoon | 185 | |
Book-learned | 207 | |
On the Bubble | 223 | |
Song for Two Jims | 249 | |
Tension-discharge | 269 | |
The Last Supper | 311 | |
Either Way | 337 | |
Zombies is Bawth of 'Em | 355 | |
Tons and Tons of Luck | 369 | |
Poker Terminology | 389 | |
Bibliography | 399 | |
Acknowledgments | 405 | |
Index | 407 |