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| Anthony Holden swaps his pen for a deck of cards | |||||
| In May 1988, when I
found myself representing Britain in the world poker championships in Las
Vegas, I had no idea that I would wind up turning pro and writing a book about
it - or that the book would change lives, not all for the better. For a decade I had been travelling to the World Series of poker as a smalltime player, watching enviously from the rails as the big boys stumped up an entry fee of $10,000 - way beyond my means - to do battle over four days and nights for the title of world champion. That year saw the introduction of "satellites" or heats, in which 10 aspirants put up $1,000 each and played until one of them had won the lot, thus entering the $10,000 tournament for a mere thou. Jet-lagged, well-wined and bored witless in a low-stakes side-game, I was finally trying to persuade myself to go upstairs and pass out when the tannoy announced one empty seat in the last satellite. No one was more surprised than I when I put up my hand - and a grand - to grab it. Well, I'd just won that much at blackjack, and figured I might as well find a more interesting way to lose it. The following few hours passed in a blur, which later had to be reconstructed by tracking down the other players. Suffice it to say: Reader, I won. And so it came to pass that the next day I found myself sitting down amid some 200 starters, including such titans of the game as Amarillo "Slim" Preston and Johnny "The Man" Moss, with a shot at the $1m first prize. To say I was "representing Britain" is only slightly stretching the truth, as I was the sole Brit to make the final that year. These days, since poker has taken off here, even earning its own late-night TV slot, whole planeloads make the pilgrimage to Vegas each summer. Back then, on my own heady debut, I achieved my first target by surviving into the second day, but all too soon ran into a fatal flush. Ninetieth in the world didn't sound that great until someone pointed out that it was then a higher ranking than any UK tennis player - as I proceeded to boast all year. And, of course, I could call myself the British No 1. Back home, I embarked on a book tour for my biography of Laurence Olivier, the kind of ego trip I should normally have enjoyed, but found myself restless and grumpy. All I wanted to do was play poker. It was my American wife - the "Moll" of the resulting book - who had the idea. Why not turn pro, with the aim of building a bankroll for next year's world championship, and write a chronicle of my adventures? What a woman. Like golf or tennis, poker has a tournament circuit, on which I proceeded to spend the happiest year of my life. From the European championships in Malta, to the Moroccan Open, to an illegal tournament in Lousiana where we were run out of town, I had found a way of earning a living that was easier - and far more fun - than writing. At the end of it all, after deducting five-star expenses, I had made a profit of $12,300 - not to be sniffed at, but not enough to live on. Back to the word processor. In the process, I had learnt a lot about myself, which has since served me well at the green-baize of life. Evidently I had infected others, too, as I began to meet people who had read the book and given up their own jobs to turn poker pro, some more successfully than others. The thought that my book could alter people's lives, perhaps ruin them, was not one I had anticipated, nor one I live with comfortably to this day. But Big Deal is my own favourite of my books, by far the most personal, and certainly the only one to enjoy four reissues. When people come up to me now and say "I've read your book", I no longer need to ask which one. I just pray it hasn't landed them on Skid Row. Link to Big Deal in the Poker Books Page |
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