Bigger Deal by Anthony Holden: My Thoughts

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Tomorrow, I’m giving away three copies of Bigger Deal: A Year Inside the Poker Boom by Anthony Holden. If you want one, check out this post.

At first Bigger Deal by Anthony Holden rubbed me the wrong way. I had a few gripes. It struck me as a self-indulgent work; at times it reads like one elaborate bad beat story, and at times just the opposite as we revel in Holden’s minor triumphs. It also seemed somewhat amateurish, as the text is riddled with minor technical and mathematical errors.

And then there was Holden’s tendency to slap a shiny, happy face on the poker world, a personal pet peeve. Poker is a terrific game that features a varied cast of warts-and-all characters. As poker has been sold to a mass audience, however, the warts have been skillfully airbrushed away by an array of PR firms. Public images of many players no longer align well with their real character. This sort of deception is precisely what PR firms do, but in my opinion too many of today’s poker writers and journalists have been too eager to swallow and regurgitate spin than paint a more realistic picture.

For a while I felt Holden was guilty of this too. I remember, about halfway through the book, I was reading a cheery story about a rather unpleasant character, and I thought to myself, “This guy would probably describe Attila the Hun as ‘plucky’ or ‘driven’.”

But now that I’ve finished the book and had a little time to think about it, my feelings have changed. I rather like the book, and I’ll tell you why.

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