Books in Brief: The Biggest Game in Town

The Biggest Game in Town, by A. Alvarez (Houghton Mifflin, 185 pp., $13.95)

Limit poker is a science,” says Texas gambler Crandall Addington, “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.” Like most well-known practitioners of this particular art form, Mr. Addington spends as much time as possible at Binion’s Horseshoe Casino, the only place in Las Vegas where none of the standard limit rules apply. (In 1980, a man walked into Binion’s with a suitcase containing $777,000 in hundred-dollar bills and bet it all on a single throw of the dice at a craps table.) Binion’s Horseshoe Casino is the scene of the World Series of Poker, an annual event that attracts a wildly diverse clientele with only one common denominator: an ability to risk appalling sums of money without batting an eye. A. Alvarez, an English poet and critic, best known in this country for his book The Savage God: A Study of Suicide, covered the 1981 World Series of Poker for The New Yorker in a series of articles that have now been brought out as a short book called The Biggest Game in Town. Mr. Alvarez, who claims to play a “respectable” hand of poker, writes elegantly and vividly of the World Series and its highly unusual participants; between hands, he offers the reader a memorable portrait of Las Vegas itself, “a town without grace and without nuance, where the only useful virtues are experience, survival, and money.” The Biggest Game in Town joins a long line of superior New Yorker articles preserved between hard covers; this one is worthy of A. J. Liebling at his very best.

SG

About the Author

Saul Goodwin

Featured Tags

The Biggest Game in Town, by A. Alvarez (Houghton Mifflin, 185 pp., $13.95)

Limit poker is a science,” says Texas gambler Crandall Addington, “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.” Like most well-known practitioners of this particular art form, Mr. Addington spends as much time as possible at Binion’s Horseshoe Casino, the only place in Las Vegas where none of the standard limit rules apply. (In 1980, a man walked into Binion’s with a suitcase containing $777,000 in hundred-dollar bills and bet it all on a single throw of the dice at a craps table.) Binion’s Horseshoe Casino is the scene of the World Series of Poker, an annual event that attracts a wildly diverse clientele with only one common denominator: an ability to risk appalling sums of money without batting an eye. A. Alvarez, an English poet and critic, best known in this country for his book The Savage God: A Study of Suicide, covered the 1981 World Series of Poker for The New Yorker in a series of articles that have now been brought out as a short book called The Biggest Game in Town. Mr. Alvarez, who claims to play a “respectable” hand of poker, writes elegantly and vividly of the World Series and its highly unusual participants; between hands, he offers the reader a memorable portrait of Las Vegas itself, “a town without grace and without nuance, where the only useful virtues are experience, survival, and money.” The Biggest Game in Town joins a long line of superior New Yorker articles preserved between hard covers; this one is worthy of A. J. Liebling at his very best.