There are at least four other
books I can find online with “education of a poker player” as part of their
title:
·
John Billingham’s
The Education of a Modern Poker Player LINK
·
Richard Sparks’ Getting
Lucky: The Education of a Mad Poker Player LINK
·
Robert Jameson’s The
Education of a Poker Player (self-published) LINK
·
Herbert O.
Yardley’s Education of a Poker Player LINK
All of them are what you
might expect from their titles – stories about how the authors came to the game
of poker and some sort of treatise on how they learned the game along with
advice and strategies for the readers to emulate should they choose to embark
on the same journey.
The first hint that
McManus’ 2015 published work is not going to be typical is the fact that it is
not “fact.” It is a collection of stories, a few previously published
elsewhere, that are billed as fiction but smack of autobiographical or
semi-autobiographical vignettes from a boy’s life. I say “from a boy’s life”
because the narrator barely makes it out of his teens before the close of the
final story in the collection.
There are seven stories in
all with only “Kings Up” and “Romeoville” giving poker more than a passing
mention. I’ll come back to those two.
James McManus is more than
a good writer. He is a thorough, professional, recognized chronicler of the
kind the poker community has not seen since A. Alvarez and The Biggest Game
in Town LINK. McManus’ Positively Fifth Street LINK is a major cog in the
machine that brought poker to pop culture-like popularity in the early part of
the current century. Along with the atmospheric rise of online poker sites, and
the astounding World Series of Poker victory of Chris Moneymaker in 2003,
McManus is credited by many as a founding father of the modern poker boom.
In Positively Fifth
Street and the later Cowboys Full: The Story of Poker (2009) LINK, James
McManus is at his journalistic best – a keen observer of the human condition
and a thorough, relentless researcher of times past. Non-fiction is his milieu
and, although I am reasonably sure that every non-fiction writer has a burning
desire deep inside to create a stunning piece of fiction that will blow
everyone away, that’s not always as easy as it seems. McManus has written
fiction before and has been rewarded for his efforts – he was awarded a Carl
Sandburg Award for Fiction. Nevertheless, he is at his best in the real world
of non-fiction.
The Education of a
Poker Player, throughout all seven
stories, follows Vincent Killeen, an Irish-born, Bronx transplant living in the
Chicago suburbs with his mother and father, a gaggle of siblings, and his uber
Catholic grandmother who also works in the parish rectory. In addition to the
standard Catholic trappings of going to church, saying prayers, and attending parochial
school, Vince is treated to doses of intense religious propaganda promulgated mostly
by his grandmother but also by the clerics involved. The propaganda includes
where babies come from, a series of untruths that are not sorted out until he
is middle school age, the wisdom of joining the clergy - the prospect of
becoming a priest so that his entire family’s time in Purgatory will be
eliminated - and the ubiquitous aura that sex, and anything remotely sexual,
will land you in the fires of hell for eternity where your skin will be
painfully seared from your body only to grow back and be seared off again and
again.
To Vince’s credit he
eventually sees through most of the hype, like virtually all Catholic school
children eventually do. Like all normal prepubescent boys he soon gives in to
the temptation and relieves the stubborn “doozers” that he so often gets
whenever he is around a good looking female lay teacher or a distaff classmate
that he fantasizes about. Guilt, shame, and other pre-programmed feelings of
inadequacy soon fade with age.
The members of Vince’s
nuclear family are not big fans of gambling or carousing although on his mother’s
side that’s not the case at all. The Madden’s introduce Vince to poker and a
few other borderline vices when he spends a summer with them in Mahopac, NY.
When he receives “a pair of Bicycle decks” and a copy of Yardley’s The
Education of a Poker Player for his thirteenth birthday from his maternal
grandmother and grandfather and their randy son, Uncle Thomas, the scandal is
great enough that his father confiscates the gift for a while with the
admonishment to never play poker for anything but “matchsticks” or “pennies.”
You can guess that Vince
pays no mind to his father’s advice leaving room for the only real “poker”
story of the book, “Kings Up.” The setting for the poker game is a caddy shack at
the local country club where Vince is a B caddie. The regulars, A caddies, consist
of a variety of unsavory characters who have chosen caddying as their life’s
work. Actually what they prefer doing is spending drizzly afternoons separating
the local teenagers from their meager earnings. Vince has a knack for poker and
usually can hold his own against the toughs, Swede and Tennessee. The final
encounter in this game of draw poker to which the title refers has Vince pitted
against Swede in a mega pot. Both players think they have a read on their
opponent and they do since the ultimate showdown reveals both have kings over sevens.
Vince scrapes up the pot though and the lesson learned is “kicker, kicker,
kicker” – his Ace kicking Swede’s Jack! But that wasn’t the end. Like many junk
yard card games, this one, too, ended in a brawl with coins and bills strewn
all over the dirty floor.
It’s a good story but not
a great story,
The other mostly poker
story is the final “Romeoville” wherein a losing player at a home game Vince is
involved in crashes his car and dies on the way home for no apparent reason.
Guilt, questions, and soul searching follow and thankfully the story does not
yield to the Catholic pressure of bad things (dying) follow bad things (playing
poker).
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