"Dead Man's Hand" review, part 5

The next story in line is "Poker and Shooter," by Sue DeNymme. This is the tale of a high school hazing gone bad, and it only passingly mentions poker. I found it most unpleasant, primarily because there is not a single likable character in it. They are all pretty despicable, and I don't think any reader could care what happens to them. Waste of space.

"The Monks of the Abbey Victoria," by Rupert Holmes, is a clever and enjoyable piece. Our narrator, the new guy at NBC headquarters in New York, circa 1960, is invited to join the weekly poker game held by some of his new co-workers. But at the first session, there's something strange going on, which our hero can't quite put a finger on. Turns out that the poker game is simply a cover for something more nefarious--and even that may not be quite what it seems. Beyond that I cannot go without spoiler alerts. But the twists are a pleasure to encounter.

We now switch to the first British story in the collection, Peter Robinson's "The Eastvale Ladies' Poker Circle." Sadly, as with a couple of other stories here, poker plays such a marginal role that it's hard to see how they qualify as "Crime Fiction at the Poker Table" (the book's subtitle). Here, a monthly poker game is simply the alibi for one of the suspects in a murder. That's it. The story is a fairly bland whodunit otherwise. Nothing particularly wrong with it, but little that I found particularly enjoyable or memorable.

Eric Van Lustbader wrote "The Uncertainty Principle." It's about an 18-year-old woman who runs an underground poker game in Reno with her father. What she will do with her life apparently comes down to what she will do in one huge hand of poker. But the author leaves us hanging at the end, without resolution. That made the entire reading experience frustrating. Thumbs down.

"Hardly Knew Her" is by Laura Lippman. It centers on the strained relationship between a 16-year-old tomboy and her degenerate gambler father. The children in the family grew up being unable to be sure anything they valued would stay with them, because their father would pawn or sell any valuables in order to get into a weekly poker game, at which he was obviously not very good. Our heroine, Sofia, accepts this unpleasant reality mostly with equanimity, but finally her dad goes too far, and she has to resort to extreme measures to get back what he has taken from her. Once again, poker is just too far in the background for this to be considered a poker story. You could just substitute an addiction to sports betting for poker, and nothing here would change.

OK, just two more stories to go and I'll finally be done with the book!

"Dead Man's Hand" review, part 4

I am more than a little embarrassed. I started this book review well over a year ago, and I'm still not finished with it. Just as embarrassingly, I'm also still not finished with the book.

For those new to the blog, or who happen not to remember every single post I've ever written (and shame on you!), I started this collection of poker-related crime short stories, edited by Otto Penzler, back in January, 2008. You can see the first three parts of the review here. It's not that I'm not enjoying the book. I am--honest. It's just that with a series of unrelated stories, unlike with a novel, I don't build any momentum in the reading. It then becomes easy to put it aside, intending it to be just for a night or two while I read something else. But then the book gets buried under other books and magazines, it gets forgotten, etc.

Now I have incentive to finish it. Back when I first started it, I had intended to finish it quickly, then pass it on to Shamus for his review. He has some actual experience and credibility in evaluating crime fiction. When I didn't finish reading it as fast as I intially planned, I then decided that I would just finish it in time for the 2008 World Series of Poker, and could then hand it to Shamus in person when he was in town. Well, as you can see, that didn't happen, either. I hang my head in shame.

I am now given a chance to redeem myself. Shamus is coming to Vegas again this week, and we have plans to meet up. (Actually, it appears that Shamus, Cardgrrl, F-Train, B.W.O.P. and I are all going to be getting together. Pity the place that gets chosen to host that little shindig.) So I'm on a rush to finish the book. (It might all be for naught. It's entirely possible that Shamus got tired of waiting and long ago bought or borrowed a copy himself, and has been too polite to tell me so.)

So, onward we go.

Next story is "The Stake" by Sam Hill. This is about an over-the-hill pro poker player who has been down on his luck and needs a big score not only for his own personal and financial redemption, but to help his daughter, who is struggling through college. There's not a lot of plot here, and no crime to speak of (raising the question of whether it really belongs in this volume). But it's a good character study, full of nostalgia for the old-school players, and the poker game in which he will either win big or lose it all has some decent drama.

"Pitch Black," by Christopher Coake, is the longest piece in the book. It doesn't deserve that much space. I found it self-indulgent and dull. Poker is only a small piece of it, too. It's far more about adolescent angst and rock music than poker. The author's attempts at a distinctive writing style, I thought, were just intrusive and annoying.

Parnell Hall's tale, "Deal Me In," is perhaps the most pure crime-genre story in the book so far. It's a classic whodunit, with our narrator the private detective called in to assist the police in solving an apparent murder at a home poker game. I loved the first paragraph:

Seth Beckman sat facedown at the poker table. His eyes were wide and
unblinking. His mouth was open, his nostrils were flared, yet no breath was
coming through. Mr. Beckman was done playing poker for the evening. His cards
were on the table in front of him. As were the stacks of chips on which he lay.
Due to which, the man presented at least a linguistic paradox. Mr. Beckman had
not cashed in his chips because he had cashed in his chips.

There's a lot of smart writing like that here. The author also understands poker in a way that is more evident than with any other writer so far. For example, there's a detail about why the players in this game play short-handed--because they don't want to have to shuffle the discards in draw games. That's not a factoid likely to have been casually picked up by somebody watching the World Poker Tour. Poker terms and observations and quips are all used in very natural ways, bespeaking a deep familiarity with the game and culture.

Hall also understands poker players' mentality. As detectives are working the crime scene, what is the players' main concern? How to get the game going again. Precisely! All the players are suspects, of course. The one who had a lock on the hand in progress when Beckman keeled over sardonically tells the suspicious investigators, "Believe me, if I was gonna kill him, I'd have waited until after the hand."

To top it off, it is the psychology of poker players that leads to the solving of the case, and our PI narrator solves it by means of a poker hand and a bluff--but I can't tell you any more than that. Overall, it's a cracking fun read.

OK, that's it for this installment. Seven more stories to go. Will I finish it in time? That's the real mystery here. If I don't, it will be a, um, crime.

"Dead Man's Hand" review, part 3

I'll admit it: I'm a lot better at starting books than finishing them. My formal higher education (at least that's what they call it) lasted a sickening 11 years, and when it was over, I vowed that I would never again read a book I didn't want to read (because I was so tired of reading things that were required), and if I wasn't enjoying a book, I would feel no obligation to finish it. I've stuck by that, and it has meant abandoning a lot of them part-way through.

Back in January, I started reading Dead Man's Hand, a collection of poker-related, crime-genre short stories edited by Otto Penzler. You can access the first two things I wrote about the book with this tag. Then other reading priorities came along, and Penzler et al kind of got lost in the shuffle. This wasn't deliberately deciding not to finish it because it wasn't enjoyable--just slipped in priorities for a few weeks, and then basically got forgotten.

Well, the other day it popped up again, and I'm making another run at it. This afternoon I had a few hours to kill in the waiting room of Precision Tune while my car had some work done, and I took the book along.

So here's the next installment in my serial review.

The next story in the collection is "In the Eyes of Children," by Alexander McCall Smith. This is a stupid, forgettable story with one of those damnably ambiguous endings. It barely even involves poker. Some kids' schoolteacher gets humiliated in a poker game, no details of which are described, and that's their motivation for what they decide to do. That's the only poker connection there is. The whole thing is a waste of space.

Next up is Michael Connelly's "One-Dollar Jackpot." This is not a bad crime story. It involves the murder of a female poker player after she has left the casino with a lot of cash. Looks like a robbery-murder, but the detective quickly suspects the woman's husband is the real killer, having made it look like a robbery gone bad. The story boils down to a battle of wits between the detective and the suspect. A key point in this contest is a game of Liar's Poker.

I enjoyed the story just fine. But as with the story I wrote about in the previous part of this review back in January, there's a critical flaw in the poker part. (I realize that it's a stretch to include Liar's Poker as "poker," but let's give them that much.) A basic safeguard in playing Liar's Poker is that you have to use dollar bills that you know haven't been pre-selected by your opponent. For example, you might request them from the bartender's till. If you don't, it's like agreeing to play regular poker with a deck that your opponent has either stacked or marked.

The suspect here, a professional poker player, does not take this fundamental precaution, which is virtually unthinkable. For me it broke the spell of realism that the story otherwise had.

Next up is Joyce Carol Oates, with "Strip Poker." By no stretch of the imagination does this fit under the crime genre, but it is a first-rate piece of writing, as one would expect from Oates. It's a first-person recollection of a 14-year-old girl's harrowing encounter with some older, seedy men, alone in an isolated cabin in the back woods. Oates employs a nontraditional, sort of free-form writing style, with stream-of-consciousness sentences. Ingeniously, this effect gets more pronounced as the tension hightens, and the girl's head is increasingly swimming with fear and her first experience with the beer with which the men are plying her. The reader thus gets a vivid sense of the terror and confusion and panic she is experiencing. It's scary, scary stuff. As she finally gets a grip on herself and starts to reassert control over the situation, the writing gradually normalizes, and we see her smart, rational self emerge to worm her way out of danger.

Poker, which the men first teach the girl, then turn into a game of strip poker, is at the heart of the story:

But the cards don't come now. Or anyway, I can't make sense of them. Like adding
up a column of numbers in math class, you lose your way and have to begin again.
Like multiplying numbers, you can do it without thinking, but if you stop to
think, you can't. Staring at these new cards, nine of hearts, nine of clubs,
king of spades, queen of spades, four of diamonds. I get rid of the four of
diamonds and I'm excited, my replacement card is a jack of spades, but my eyes
are playing tricks on me, what looks like spades is actually clubs, after
raising my bet I see that it's clubs and I've made a mistake staring and
blinking at the cards in my hands that are kind of shaky like I have never seen
a poker hand before. Around the table the guys are playing like before, loud,
funny-rude, maybe there's some tension among them, I can't figure because I am
too distracted by the cards and how I am losing now, nothing I do is right now,
but why? When Croke wins the hand, Deek mutters, "Shi-it, you goddamn fuckin'
asshole," but smiling like this is a joke, a kindly intended remark like between
brothers. I'm trying to make sense of the hand: why'd Croke win? why's this a
"winning" hand? what's a "full house"? wondering if the guys are cheating on me,
how'd I know? The guys are laughing at me, saying, "Hey, babe, be a good sport,
this is poker."

I don't know how much of a poker player Oates is, but she certainly understands the core essence of the game, in a way that many players don't:

Doesn't it matter what your actual cards are, I ask Deek, if they are high
or low? Deek says sort of scornfully like this is a damn dumb question he will
answer because he likes me, "sure it matters, but not so much's how you play
what you're dealt. What you do with the fuckin' cards you are dealt, that's
poker."

At some level the narrator takes this message to heart, and it is the essence of how she turns her situation around. We learn a lot about her--she's been dealt a whole bunch of bad cards in her life, and this mess she has gotten herself into is only the latest of them. But she ends up playing what she has been dealt brilliantly. It's a masterful, chilling ending that I won't ruin by even hinting at it here.

Good, good stuff. Easily the best in the book so far, and darn near worth the cost all by itself.

More later.

"Dead Man's Hand" review, part 2

What, you don't remember reading a part 1 of this series? Well, I didn't exactly call it that, but see http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2008/01/johnny-moneymaker.html. I read the second story in the collection last night, and it became apparent to me that I can't wait until I finish the book to write a review, or it will be way too long for anybody to bother reading. Furthermore, I'll forget the details that I need to grouse about.

I don't know whether I'll review each story separately, or maybe two or three at a time. It all depends on what I find. So this serial review may end up with three parts or thirty. We'll see. However it works out, you'll be able to get them all on your screen at once by clicking on the "Penzler" label at the end of the post, or in the lower left-hand corner of the page layout.

But for now, I've got to tell you about the story "Bump," by Jeffrey Deaver. One of my complaints about this book is that there is no introduction to the authors. I've read very little crime fiction, and I only recognize two names here: Michael Connelly and Joyce Carol Oates. As far as I know, Jeffrey Deaver may be a god in the crime genre, but he's an unknown to me. I trust that, sooner or later, Short-Stacked Shamus over at Hard-Boiled Poker (http://hardboiledpoker.blogspot.com/) will post his own review, and he's as well-situated as anybody to describe how this book fits into the larger world of crime writing. I can't do that. But I can tell you about the poker in the stories.

To start with, I'll venture this guess about Jeffrey Deaver: He's never played a hand of poker in his life.

But first let me tell you that Deaver had a great idea for a poker/crime genre mashup. Imagine that GSN's "High Stakes Poker" were played on live TV, rather than being taped and edited. Then imagine that somebody decided to try to rob it. How would it go down? That's the premise here, and it's a dandy. The story is well told--except for the poker.

Alarm about the author's grasp of the game is first raised with this description of how Texas Hold'em works: "[P]layers use their two hole cards plus any three of the five faceup board cards to make the best hand they can." Hmmm. Well, not quite, but I was willing to dismiss this as an oversimplification, rather than an outright misunderstanding. But then later Deaver shows that he really does think this is how it works. Our protagonist gets dealt the proverbial worst starting hand in hold'em, deuce-seven offsuit. He bemoans the bad cards, because "You can't make a straight--you're allowed only three cards from the board--and there was no chance of a flush."

Uh, no, that's not how it works.

But wait, it gets worse.

In one big hand, we are told that the final "community cards were the jack of spades, king of diamonds, three of clubs, seven of clubs, six of hearts." One player moves all in, another calls. We are then told that one has made a full house with a jack and ten in the hole, while the other loses with a spade flush.

Huh????? With that board, it's obviously impossible for any player to have either a flush or a full house.

This is so far off that I think it can't be attributed just to the author's ignorance of the game. Rather, I suspect that it's a mistake introduced in editing. I think that initially there were two different hands being described, and then, perhaps for reasons of space, they sort of got combined into one, without anybody noticing that the board described is not consistent with the outcome.

Deaver also doesn't understand how the blinds work. At one point, we're told that the player in the small blind "chose" $25,000 as the amount to put in--as if one can select any arbitrary quantity.

There are peculiar betting patterns in evidence. In one hand, our hero is dealt the A-J of spades in three-handed play. Here's how Deaver describes the pre-flop action: "The betting began. O'Connor played it cautious, though, checking at first, then matching the other bets or raising slightly." (The next sentence describes the flop and subsequent betting.)

Again, huh???? The only way he would be able to check is if he were in the big blind, with no raise having been put in before him. But if that were the case, then his check would end the pre-flop betting, and he wouldn't be able to call or raise the "other bets." Just how many times did they go around, calling and raising, in this hand? The description makes no sense. You might think that the "matching the other bets or raising slightly" might be describing, in advance, the entire hand, but it isn't--he details every post-flop bet as the hand unfolds.

Deaver also can't add. Each of six players buys in for $250,000. But at the end of the first session of play, three have been eliminated, and we're informed that the remaining three have, respectively, $490,000, $505,000, and $515,000. An extra $10,000 came out of nowhere. It then disappears again the next time we get an updated tally.

The last poker detail that Deaver screws up is referring to the discard pile as the "mush," rather than the "muck."

This author just plain doesn't know poker. And, apparently, neither does the editor. I cannot imagine why they didn't hire somebody who understands how poker works to read through the manuscript and highlight technical problems with the game play. How much could it possibly have cost the publisher to do that? By not doing so, they basically ruin the reading experience for poker players, who presumably constitute their target audience! It's crazy. And it's very disappointing.

Howard Lederer wrote an introduction to the volume. I wonder if he read the stories before submitting his piece. (He makes no mention of any of them, so maybe all he knew was the general idea for the collection.) It would be strange indeed if he did read them and either didn't notice or didn't point out to the editor the kinds of problems I spotted. I didn't go looking for them; they jumped out at me, as they would to anybody who plays the game even recreationally.

Maybe the Deaver contribution will be the exception, and the other authors either know poker or on their own had somebody knowledgeable check their work for problems before submitting it. I sure hope so, because, much as I enjoy complaining about things, I'd really prefer to be able to sit back and enjoy the tales, rather than being constantly distracted by problems caused by writers not knowing their subject matter.

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.