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bloodygranuaileOn my managing editor's advice, I decided that the next step in my poker education would be losing a chunk of money to Ricky and Alexis on Friday reading James McManus' Positively Fifth Street: Murderers, Cheetahs, and Binion's World Series of Poker, a journalist's account of playing—and final tabling—the World Series of Poker in 2000, just a few years before the Chris Moneymaker thing happened.
The story in brief: James McManus was assigned by Harper's to cover women players in the 2000 World Series of Poker, and simultaneously to cover the trial for the murder of Ted Binion that was going on at the same time. McManus instead spends a big chunk of his $4,000 advance on satellites for the Main Event, wins one, then plays the Main Event, where he somehow lasts all the way to the final table, ultimately coming in fifth. Then he has to scramble around squeezing all his journalism-ing into a very short period of time when the verdict comes down, before taking his almost $250,000 and going home to the Midwest, where his wife is justifiable pissed off at him for getting a lap dance while he was in Vegas.
Obviously, that is the wildly oversimplified version.
The book is a rich, sprawling 450-page saga, colorful to the point of being lurid, that pulls together a wide variety of topics—the histories of the Binions and the game of poker and McManus's own family; the endless development and redevelopment and reinvention of Las Vegas; the ludicrously colorful people who populate the gambling world, both at the table and in business; advice on poker strategy and the effects of easily available strategy advice on the evolution of the game. He ties poker into just about every aspect of life, the universe and everything that one could plausibly tie poker into, which is quite a lot of them. (Regrettably, this leads him down the tiresome evo psych path more than once, but as far as evo psych explanations for stuff go it could be a lot worse.) The book starts off with a reconstructed account of Ted Binion's murder, which despite being as factual as the author could make it, reads like a scene from a Tarantino movie. I was a little surprised at first because all I knew about the book going into it was that it was about poker and then it was apparently about HEROIN STRIPPER MURDER instead, but it all comes back around by Chapter 2.
The anchor point of all these disparate threads is McManus himself, which works both because he is attempting to do at least four things at once for most of the book, and because he's really not afraid to put his own personality front and center, eschewing the practice of being just a cipher/viewpoint into the action for the reader. McManus uses the slightly goofy conceit of there being two of him, Good Jim and Bad Jim, but overall he is STRONGLY of the Cranky Old Man Journalist character archetype. I generally enjoy this character type (and I do aspire to be Cranky when I am Old—and possibly even a Journalist—but I am not there yet), although since I am at the moment also reading Dan Lyons's Disrupted (the one about working at Hubspot) and Dan Lyons is also a Cranky Old Man Journalist (this is one of the central conceits of Disrupted), I could do with a bit less of it from both of them. Overall, though, I think McManus makes a strong, root-for-able protagonist—driven, flawed but self-aware, and definitely the scrappy underdog, considering he was facing down players like T.J. Cloutier, Daniel Negreanu and Chris Ferguson.
All the stuff surrounding the poker action is pretty good reading, but I think the strongest aspects of the book are the character profiles and the accounts of the actual poker play itself. Bad poker prose can be almost as boring as bad televised poker (and boring televised poker is stultifyingly boring), but good poker writing that properly balances all the important bits of information we do and don't have can be as exciting as a well-choreographed fight scene. In some ways, a hand of poker essentially is a fight scene, so I suppose it's not all that surprising that the practices for doing them well are similar. (I'm pretty sure I still have my notes from that Readercon panel about fight scenes and sex scenes somewhere; I should dig them out and see how well they apply.) The action is used to illuminate character and the characterization is then used to drive the action, which is how poker works anyway when the players are actually good. McManus is apparently pretty good, although the poker scenes often pick up a level of internal conflict to add to the competition at the table when his brain tells him what the correct play is and then he goes and makes the stupid one anyway. (I was glad to read this because I've played all of nine games of poker in my entire life and I've already found that happening to me, so it made me feel a bit better to know it's not just me being uniquely dumb.) (This is also about the only thing I found myself to have in common with the author, since he is different from me in pretty much every material aspect of life, being a middle-aged man with a wife and kids and house and an established career as a teacher and a journalist, whereas I am a single young lady and perpetual renter who decided to become a journalist all of last week.)
One thing that surprised me was that even with my extremely weak understanding of poker strategy, there were times when I couldn't help but feel that some of the plays and strategy advice were kind of dated? I'm watching a lot of current pro poker on Twitch these days and I can tell that it tends to be a looser game than what I'm reading about when I'm reading what are now considered the most "classic" poker books that are still recommended as helpful—meaning Phil Gordon's, mostly—which were still written after 2003. The books McManus is studying from were written, um, before that, obviously. I kind of want to read Super/System now, though, because it sounds pretty interesting from a copy editing perspective, or more precisely from a lack of copy editing perspective. (What is with poker books and under-editing, anyway?)
My biggest issue with the book was that the topic McManus was ostensibly sent out to cover—women in poker—got relatively short shift due to McManus's decision to instead occupy himself with playing the tournament. The women we do meet are pretty interesting, but I'm sorry, it is SUCH AN OLD WHITE DUDE thing to be like "Poker is great because ~all sorts~ of people play it these days!" just because you've gone from like, 100% dudes to 95% dudes. It is possible that this was extra visible to me right now because apparently poker is having a Moment about women and sexism and the like, and it is an infuriatingly low caliber of discussion compared to what's going on in every other geeky space I keep tabs on. Apparently, I'm gonna have to scrounge a trip to Las Vegas out of my employer and go interview all the women in poker myself.
Anyway, if you're at all curious about poker and/or poker history but don't want to sit around reading jargon-laden strategy manuals, Positively Fifth Street is an entertaining, vivid look into poker's awkward transition period into semi-respectability.
The story in brief: James McManus was assigned by Harper's to cover women players in the 2000 World Series of Poker, and simultaneously to cover the trial for the murder of Ted Binion that was going on at the same time. McManus instead spends a big chunk of his $4,000 advance on satellites for the Main Event, wins one, then plays the Main Event, where he somehow lasts all the way to the final table, ultimately coming in fifth. Then he has to scramble around squeezing all his journalism-ing into a very short period of time when the verdict comes down, before taking his almost $250,000 and going home to the Midwest, where his wife is justifiable pissed off at him for getting a lap dance while he was in Vegas.
Obviously, that is the wildly oversimplified version.
The book is a rich, sprawling 450-page saga, colorful to the point of being lurid, that pulls together a wide variety of topics—the histories of the Binions and the game of poker and McManus's own family; the endless development and redevelopment and reinvention of Las Vegas; the ludicrously colorful people who populate the gambling world, both at the table and in business; advice on poker strategy and the effects of easily available strategy advice on the evolution of the game. He ties poker into just about every aspect of life, the universe and everything that one could plausibly tie poker into, which is quite a lot of them. (Regrettably, this leads him down the tiresome evo psych path more than once, but as far as evo psych explanations for stuff go it could be a lot worse.) The book starts off with a reconstructed account of Ted Binion's murder, which despite being as factual as the author could make it, reads like a scene from a Tarantino movie. I was a little surprised at first because all I knew about the book going into it was that it was about poker and then it was apparently about HEROIN STRIPPER MURDER instead, but it all comes back around by Chapter 2.
The anchor point of all these disparate threads is McManus himself, which works both because he is attempting to do at least four things at once for most of the book, and because he's really not afraid to put his own personality front and center, eschewing the practice of being just a cipher/viewpoint into the action for the reader. McManus uses the slightly goofy conceit of there being two of him, Good Jim and Bad Jim, but overall he is STRONGLY of the Cranky Old Man Journalist character archetype. I generally enjoy this character type (and I do aspire to be Cranky when I am Old—and possibly even a Journalist—but I am not there yet), although since I am at the moment also reading Dan Lyons's Disrupted (the one about working at Hubspot) and Dan Lyons is also a Cranky Old Man Journalist (this is one of the central conceits of Disrupted), I could do with a bit less of it from both of them. Overall, though, I think McManus makes a strong, root-for-able protagonist—driven, flawed but self-aware, and definitely the scrappy underdog, considering he was facing down players like T.J. Cloutier, Daniel Negreanu and Chris Ferguson.
All the stuff surrounding the poker action is pretty good reading, but I think the strongest aspects of the book are the character profiles and the accounts of the actual poker play itself. Bad poker prose can be almost as boring as bad televised poker (and boring televised poker is stultifyingly boring), but good poker writing that properly balances all the important bits of information we do and don't have can be as exciting as a well-choreographed fight scene. In some ways, a hand of poker essentially is a fight scene, so I suppose it's not all that surprising that the practices for doing them well are similar. (I'm pretty sure I still have my notes from that Readercon panel about fight scenes and sex scenes somewhere; I should dig them out and see how well they apply.) The action is used to illuminate character and the characterization is then used to drive the action, which is how poker works anyway when the players are actually good. McManus is apparently pretty good, although the poker scenes often pick up a level of internal conflict to add to the competition at the table when his brain tells him what the correct play is and then he goes and makes the stupid one anyway. (I was glad to read this because I've played all of nine games of poker in my entire life and I've already found that happening to me, so it made me feel a bit better to know it's not just me being uniquely dumb.) (This is also about the only thing I found myself to have in common with the author, since he is different from me in pretty much every material aspect of life, being a middle-aged man with a wife and kids and house and an established career as a teacher and a journalist, whereas I am a single young lady and perpetual renter who decided to become a journalist all of last week.)
One thing that surprised me was that even with my extremely weak understanding of poker strategy, there were times when I couldn't help but feel that some of the plays and strategy advice were kind of dated? I'm watching a lot of current pro poker on Twitch these days and I can tell that it tends to be a looser game than what I'm reading about when I'm reading what are now considered the most "classic" poker books that are still recommended as helpful—meaning Phil Gordon's, mostly—which were still written after 2003. The books McManus is studying from were written, um, before that, obviously. I kind of want to read Super/System now, though, because it sounds pretty interesting from a copy editing perspective, or more precisely from a lack of copy editing perspective. (What is with poker books and under-editing, anyway?)
My biggest issue with the book was that the topic McManus was ostensibly sent out to cover—women in poker—got relatively short shift due to McManus's decision to instead occupy himself with playing the tournament. The women we do meet are pretty interesting, but I'm sorry, it is SUCH AN OLD WHITE DUDE thing to be like "Poker is great because ~all sorts~ of people play it these days!" just because you've gone from like, 100% dudes to 95% dudes. It is possible that this was extra visible to me right now because apparently poker is having a Moment about women and sexism and the like, and it is an infuriatingly low caliber of discussion compared to what's going on in every other geeky space I keep tabs on. Apparently, I'm gonna have to scrounge a trip to Las Vegas out of my employer and go interview all the women in poker myself.
Anyway, if you're at all curious about poker and/or poker history but don't want to sit around reading jargon-laden strategy manuals, Positively Fifth Street is an entertaining, vivid look into poker's awkward transition period into semi-respectability.