Freeze-Out

By John Skow

THE BIGGEST GAME IN TOWN

by A. Alvarez

Houghton Mifflin; 186 pages; $13.95

Poker playing is an utterly useless and gratifyingly antisocial activity, frequently mistaken for gambling. It is, of course, a game of skill, but not many people understand the nature of this skill, and fewer have seen it in action at the level of world-class play. High-stakes poker is secretive; it is illegal in most places, and embarrassing both to losers, whose associates tend to fret, and to winners, who dread the taxman. Thus the English writer and poker player A. Alvarez (author of another examination of self-destruction, The Savage God: A Study of Suicide) was beguiled when he heard that there was one card room in the world where an observer could watch no-limit, heavyweight poker without getting into the line of fire.

It was not simply a matter of flying to Las Vegas. In all the Vegas casinos but one, bets are strictly limited. Limit poker requires knowing the odds, playing tightly and chiseling away at whatever optimists wander into the game. In no-limit, as one poker carnivore tells Alvarez, "the target comes alive and shoots back at you." Shooting back, in one legendary five-month game years ago between Johnny Moss and Nick the Greek, came down to a five-card stud hand in which Moss, with a pair of nines, thought he had the Greek locked. Moss figured his opponent for a low pair and discounted his fifth card as no help. He bet everything he had. As Alvarez writes, "In the moments of silence after Moss pushed what remained of his quarter of a million dollars worth of chips into the center, the Greek eyed him, upright and unblinking, and then said softly, 'Mr. Moss, I think I have a jack in the hole.' " He did, and he won half a million dollars. "But that was all right," Moss explained to Alvarez. "I broke him anyway."

Moss was 74 when Alvarez met him in 1981, an old man "secure in his fame and his investments, as remorseless now as he was then, the kind of character that John Wayne was fond of portraying--true grit without forgiveness, to be admired, but from a safe distance." Moss had come to Las Vegas to play in the World Series of Poker, at Binion's Horse shoe Casino. Binion's is the no-limit joint, famous for accepting a $777,000 bet in 1980 from a man who walked in with a suitcase full of cash, rolled the dice once, won and vanished into the desert with two suitcases full of cash. By the time Alvarez caught up with the World Series, it had grown to a knightly joust with 75 entrants for the main event, each of whom put up $10,000 to play. The game (hold 'em, an exotic species of seven-card stud) was a freeze-out, with play continuing until one man held all the chips.

Yet, as Alvarez explains, first prize was a good deal less than was involved in some of the unofficial side games. There players could start with more than a scrawny $10,000 and could raise the stakes as high as they liked. The card sense that poker requires is not especially rarefied; the limit chiselers at the other Vegas casinos know as much about probabilities as the sportsmen at Binion's. What distinguishes the heavyweights is that broke or flush, they can function at financial altitudes that paralyze everyone else. "The money freezes you up, and you become tight-weak," one contestant in formed Alvarez, describing his introduction to the major leagues. His colleagues agree. "If money is your god, you can for get no-limit poker, because it's going to hurt you too much to turn loose of it," said Jack Straus, a high roller who was down to his last $40 a decade or so ago and who bet his way out of privation.

As the author describes such rogues, they live their resolutely unreal lives with a style that touches gallantry. His account is as close to Binion's as a prudent soul will venture, but Alvarez knows both poker and the writing of English, and even if he does call bettors "punters," this field guide is the reader's equivalent of an inside straight. --By John Skow This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.