Monday, January 28, 2008

Johnny Moneymaker???





Last night I started reading Dead Man's Hand: Crime Fiction at the Poker Table. This is a collection of crime-genre short stories all somehow involving poker, all originals by a variety of authors, solicited specifically for this book, edited by Otto Penzler (Harcourt, 2007; see http://www.harcourtbooks.com/bookcatalogs/bookpages/9780151012770.asp).

I've only read the introduction and the first story (which I thought was hard to follow and boring), so I'm not ready to do a full review yet. But I can't resist pointing out the howler in Penzler's "Foreword":

"The great players...used to ply their skills clandestinely, slipping into a town, cleaning out the local hot-shots, and skedaddling before they realized they had been taken by a professional cardsharp. Now they are like rock stars, though they wear clean clothes and take baths. Even occasional televised-poker viewers recognize Johnny Moneymaker, Annie Duke, Howard Lederer, Johnny Chan, Phil Hellmuth, and Amarillo Slim."

Oh, sure--we all recognize Johnny Moneymaker. That's Chris's younger brother, right?

This does not give one great hope that the editor really knows the world of poker all that thoroughly.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

That is horrible! I would scrap the book...