Big Deal: Confessions of a Professional Poker Player

Literate sophistication and urbane wit inform this unusual tale of a British newsman and author ( Charles, Prince of Wales ) who spent 1989 as a professional poker player. More than a chronicle of that year, the book presents stories of the legendary heroes of the game, theories of gambling from Dostoyevski through Freud to David Mamet, and memories of Las Vegas (a town set in ``a vast and utter nowhere''), London and Marrakech, where Holden played. He also writes of his friendship with writer A. Alvarez, a fellow poker addict, and the insights he received from a psychiatrist. For the non-obsessed there are many dull passages in which Holden analyzes hands he played, but the enormous amounts of money won or lost are rarely boring. ``Busted out'' by a four-to-one shot at the World Series of Poker in Vegas, he vows never to sit down with the pros again, even though he wound up his year ``financially ahead.'' (Oct.)