Anthony Holden's list: poker books

Last week at The Week magazine, Anthony Holden, author of Bigger Deal: A Year Inside the Poker Boom, named "The List."

One of his titles:

The Professor, the Banker, and the Suicide King by Michael Craig

This page-turner by a lawyer turned poker nut chronicles the biggest game ever played, a 2001 showdown in which a Texas banker played a team of pros for tens of millions of dollars.

Read about another poker title that Holden calls "the finest poker novel since Richard Jessup’s The Cincinnati Kid."

James McManus, author of Positively Fifth Street, says Holden's "Bigger Deal will make nonprofessional poker addicts feel personally understood in ways no other book has ever managed to do. It has everything: wide cultural scope, poker table minutiae, success, failure, pain, Mozart operas sharing pages with telling analyses of flop texture, even more intercontinental action than its famous predecessor, and best of all, perspective on the Boom. No, best of all is the writing." And Martin Amis calls "Holden ... the top writer in pokerdom."

Read an excerpt from Bigger Deal.

--Marshal Zeringue