The Biggest Game in Town

A Review

I recently re-read A. Alvarez's The Biggest Game in Town, and was just as entertained by it as when I originally finished reading it eight months ago. Perhaps the best thing about the book is the quality of the writing itself. Alvarez is an accomplished author, and not just of books on poker.

Alvarez himself seems only to be a minor character in the tale, there more than anything as someone for the bizarre characters which inhabited Las Vegas in 1981 to tell their story to. This is in contrast to Anthony Holden's Big Deal, in which the reader followed his year as a professional poker player with suspense, sort of cheering him along throughout the book. However, this doesn't take anything away from Alvarez's book, as the characters in it are fascinating, especially when it comes to their removal from anything like a "normal" life.

Add in, of course, all of the drama of the World Series of Poker in what was to become a legendary year in the game's history, when Stu Ungar captured his second consecutive World Championship.

There are certainly other books written in a novel-style like this which center on the poker world, but in my mind this is the one that started them. In a way, it does of course owe something to Yardley's Education of a Poker Player, but that text of course was published many years before, in the 1950s, before the existence of the World Series of Poker, and consequently far before the popularization of hold'em. Many other great texts which would come after The Biggest Game in Town, such as both Holden's Big Deal and James McManus's Positively Fifth Street, would never truly have been without Alvarez, and in fact his text is mentioned in both.

It is unfortunate, then, that The Biggest Game in Town is so short a book (about 190 pages). However, that's at least a convincing argument for reading it.