Sucker Play

By John Skow

BIG DEAL

by Anthony Holden

Viking; 306 pages; $19.95

The author admits that he was not at his best -- "tired, a little drunk, jetlagged, and light-headed" is his recollection. A prudent man would have gone to bed, and the following morning he would have taken the next plane out of Las Vegas.

Dull stuff, prudence. Anthony Holden never hesitated: he wobbled out into the night. But as Holden, a British literary critic, reached the Golden Nugget's cardroom, he remembered the gambler's formula for chump detection: "If you can't spot the sucker in your first half-hour at the table, it's you."

Whether or not Holden is the sucker is pretty much the plot line of this funny and amiable account of self-delusion at calamity's edge. He is a better- than-average amateur poker player whose demons persuaded him to spend a year trying to beat the world's best professionals at their lovely, wily game. Holden started with some credit cards and a scrawny $20,000 in capital and played mostly in tournaments, in which players buy in for an entry fee and then risk no further money. He knew his cards, and he won some and lost some. But card sense is the lesser part of poker, which is a game of money management at its middle levels, and of character -- an odd sort of frontier monasticism might describe it -- at the very top. The author may have sensed that he was not suited to it when he hesitated to pay a $2,500 tournament buy- in because his children's school fees were due.

In the end he did decently, for an amateur. Though his prose sloshes with pomposity -- "reserved for my lone delectation" is a standard clunker -- his book does well because he sees what is admirable in the splendid anarchism of the great players. He tells the story, among many other good ones, of the late Jack Straus, who, while waiting in federal court to be tried on a tax charge, was touched by the plea of another defendant that a $35,000 judgment would put his family on the sidewalk. "It's okay, Your Honor," said Straus, "just stick it on my tab!" It is only across the table that you would not want to face such fellows. That, as one old female player told Holden, "is a tough way to make an easy living."