My friend Matei was solemn-faced as he opened the door of our hotel room. Though the answer seemed obvious, I asked how he’d done. He broke into a smile and threw a thousand dollars into the air. He’d been bluffing.
It was 2012, we were a trio on a road trip across America, and Las Vegas was the grand finale. We’d entered a poker tournament at the MGM Grand. My friend Kapil and I had been knocked out early on. I was nervous, played too cautiously and lasted barely an hour. Matei, fuelled by the never-ending rounds of complimentary beers brought to the table (which more experienced players tend to decline), made himself at home, played without fear and won. He used some of his winnings to treat us to a night out and the rest to pay for the parking and speeding fines that we had accumulated across the Land of the Free.
Just over three decades before us, Al Alvarez had been in Las Vegas. The New Yorker had sent him to cover the 1981 Poker World Series, the game’s most prestigious event. According to Alvarez, its editor William Shawn had no interest in poker but ‘he liked the idea of an English poet writing about professional card players’. The article grew and grew until it became a book, The Biggest Game in Town (1983). Alvarez was lucky in his editor: Shawn believed that ‘each piece has a natural length of its own and takes as long as it takes to write’.
Born in Bloomsbury in 1929, Al (short for Alfred) Alvarez described himself as ‘a Londoner, heart and soul, but not quite an Englishman’. His father worked in the clothing business that his Sephardic Jewish family had been running in England since the seventeenth century, while his mother was from an Ashkenazi family who had been nineteenth-century refugees from eastern European pogroms. The family moved when he was a child t
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Subscribe now or Sign inMy friend Matei was solemn-faced as he opened the door of our hotel room. Though the answer seemed obvious, I asked how he’d done. He broke into a smile and threw a thousand dollars into the air. He’d been bluffing.
It was 2012, we were a trio on a road trip across America, and Las Vegas was the grand finale. We’d entered a poker tournament at the MGM Grand. My friend Kapil and I had been knocked out early on. I was nervous, played too cautiously and lasted barely an hour. Matei, fuelled by the never-ending rounds of complimentary beers brought to the table (which more experienced players tend to decline), made himself at home, played without fear and won. He used some of his winnings to treat us to a night out and the rest to pay for the parking and speeding fines that we had accumulated across the Land of the Free. Just over three decades before us, Al Alvarez had been in Las Vegas. The New Yorker had sent him to cover the 1981 Poker World Series, the game’s most prestigious event. According to Alvarez, its editor William Shawn had no interest in poker but ‘he liked the idea of an English poet writing about professional card players’. The article grew and grew until it became a book, The Biggest Game in Town (1983). Alvarez was lucky in his editor: Shawn believed that ‘each piece has a natural length of its own and takes as long as it takes to write’. Born in Bloomsbury in 1929, Al (short for Alfred) Alvarez described himself as ‘a Londoner, heart and soul, but not quite an Englishman’. His father worked in the clothing business that his Sephardic Jewish family had been running in England since the seventeenth century, while his mother was from an Ashkenazi family who had been nineteenth-century refugees from eastern European pogroms. The family moved when he was a child to a large house in Hampstead and, though he travelled far, Hampstead would always remain home, and Alvarez would be swimming in its ponds in his eighties. He disliked the ‘gentility’ of British poetry and argued that ‘a belief that life is always more or less orderly’ held it back from facing the evil the world had witnessed in the twentieth century. As a writer, he confronted the lows in his own life. The Savage God (1972), his study of suicide, followed the death of his friend Sylvia Plath and his attempt to take his own life. Life After Marriage (1982) told the story of his divorce – his former wife Ursula Barr gave it an unsurprisingly tough review in the London Review of Books. But his writing was also where he chased thrills or, as he called it, ‘fed the rat’. Daredevilry included mountaineering, living on an oil rig, patrolling with the New York police and lots of poker. You can enjoy The Biggest Game in Town without knowing the rules of poker, but a little understanding may add to the pleasure. In Texas Hold ’Em, the most popular variant, each player is dealt a pair of cards, and three others are then placed in stages face up on the table. The player’s cards (which only he or she can see) and the cards on the table (which everyone can see) combine to give each player their ‘hand’. There are rounds of betting in which you try to work out your opponents’ hands while deceiving them about your own. Luck plays a role, but skill wins out eventually. In describing the game Alvarez makes passing references to The Grapes of Wrath, Through the Looking-glass, King Lear, Nietzsche and the Italian Renaissance painter Piero della Francesca. He describes one player as flicking his cards towards the dealer ‘like a fop making a conversational point’, while another has ‘the face of an irritable basilisk’. This is why you send a poet to watch poker. The Biggest Game in Town is about the players. Many writers would be content just to interview them, but Alvarez has whole conversations with them. In his autobiography Where Did It All Go Right? (1999) he suggests that players recognized he was a good listener and was genuinely interested in them. He also made them laugh. Some were even willing to talk to him in the painful moments after they had been knocked out of the World Series. Alvarez played twenty-three nights of poker on this trip, but he gives up the spotlight to these masters of the poker universe. The Texan Crandall Addington is famed for once having played for five consecutive days and nights ‘without loosening his Dior tie’, and he chooses a mink Stetson for the 1981 event. Amarillo Slim’s suit is ‘bilious yellow with brown suede shoulders and trimming; on the sides of his lizard skin boots were the letters SLIM in white leather’. Ken Smith wears ‘a frock coat and a decrepit top hat, which he claims was found in the Ford Theatre the night Lincoln was assassinated’. After every winning hand, he doffs the hat to the crowd and calls out ‘What a Player!’ These entertainers are creating a spectacle and having fun, which is not something that comes easily to all players. They let off steam with Alvarez, describing the grind of life as a professional. Eric Drache, the first tournament director of the World Series as well as a player himself, despairs at the repetition:How long is a poker game? If you play for a living, there is no end to it. Just because it breaks up doesn’t mean it ends. The players may go away, but they are still thinking about it, replaying hands, working out their strategy. And they’ll be there again the next day.
It’s hard to sympathize too much, for Drache is describing what many might recognize as a job. It does, however, show how a game can change when it is your means of earning a living. New Yorker Micky Appleman says success relies on being ‘non-emotional’, but he worries that ‘when a gambler is non-emotional . . . he becomes detached from the person he really is’. While Appleman worries about such coldness, others admire it: 27-year-old wonder boy Stu Ungar is described by one of his fellow pros as having ‘alligator blood in his veins’. One of my many limitations as a poker player is that I’ve always found my blood to be all too human. Alvarez is intrigued by one aspect of being ‘non-emotional’ that all the very best seem to share:The casualness and imperturbability with which that elite handles huge sums of money is beyond ordinary understanding. It is a question not just of a different level of skill but of a different ordering of reality.
Composure when betting a lot of money shouldn’t be mistaken for indifference. Californian Jack Straus tells Alvarez about the time he played with a decorator and won a month’s salary off him and an IOU for a hundred dollars. Straus drove the decorator home to collect the hundred dollars. The man’s wife was crying and asked ‘How’re we going to feed the kids?’ While the couple talked, Straus noticed the wife’s purse with eleven dollars in it. He took the money and let him ‘slide for the rest’. Straus’s story shows what can happen when poker meets the rest of the world. He seems shockingly immoral but he’s playing by a different code. If you lose money at the table, you pay. Without that, poker falls apart and you lose that very American liberty to risk whatever you want. For Straus, failing to go to the man’s house would have been to show him a lack of respect as a fellow player. Despite the players’ control of their emotions, Alvarez knows that poker hurts. I’m always surprised how shaken I am by the brutal suddenness of defeat. You can be doing well, with a decent pile of chips, make an all-in bet that seems like the right move and then the cards go against you. You’re left in a daze, weakly smiling, mumbling something gracious while struggling to come to terms with what has just happened. Alvarez captures this shock when he describes a just-defeated player as looking ‘like someone who has been dealt a mortal blow yet is still, in a confused way, ambulatory’. I liked Las Vegas. I enjoyed wandering the Strip and marvelling at the brash, neon-blasted buildings that Alvarez describes as ‘outlandish gesture after outlandish gesture’. A Sphinx, a Camelot, an Eiffel Tower, Venetian canals, all are indeed like ‘extravagant toys discarded on a beach’. But then toys are fun. I do, however, sympathize with Alvarez when he likens four weeks there to a prison sentence. I remember sitting at the airport after just three days feeling utterly burnt out, the result of a city that is relentlessly trying to entertain you. I’m not sure I could survive a month. Thirteen years after The Biggest Game in Town was published, the New Yorker sent Alvarez back to the World Series but this time as a player. It didn’t go well, with Alvarez blaming the need to take notes and play at the same time. I haven’t been back. When I do, I plan to play again at the MGM Grand. I won’t win but I hope I’ll survive long enough for a few good stories. I won’t have alligator blood in my veins, but I’ll have Alvarez in my thoughts and in my suitcase.Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 90 © Andrew Ryan 2026
About the contributor
Andrew Ryan is a civil servant. At the poker table, he knows the odds but is still hoping he’ll hit his gutshot draw. The illustrations in this article are by Ella Balaam.
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