Take Me to the River: A Wayward and Perilous Journey to the World Series of Poker - Softcover

Alson, Peter

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0743288378 ISBN 13: 9780743288378

Publisher: Atria, 2007

Synopsis

An overeducated underachiever, Peter Alson spent his post-college decades doing his best not to grow up. But having just turned fifty, this rambling-gambling bachelor decides it's time to settle down. So he pops the question to his longtime girlfriend, then hatches a plan to pay for their wedding -- involving poker and a trip to Las Vegas. Boarding a plane bound for the neon desert and the biggest game in town -- the 2005 World Series of Poker -- this inveterate gambler and bad boy stares down his past and his future while competing for over $56 million in prize money.

Take Me to the River is a hilarious, wrenching, full-tilt Vegas exploration of one man's obsession with poker and the lessons it has to offer -- about probability and luck, good fortune and bad, patience, perseverance, and -- most fitting for a man with marriage in his near future -- commitment.

About this title

About the Author:

Peter Alson is the author of the highly acclaimed memoir Confessions of an Ivy League Bookie and coauthor of One of a Kind, a biography of the poker champion Stuey Ungar, and Atlas: From the Street to the Ring: A Son's Struggle to Become a Man. Alson's articles have appeared in many national magazines, including Esquire, Playboy, and The New York Times Magazine. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife, Alice, and their daughter Eden.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

1

Vegas from the Air

At Kennedy, with time to kill, I head into the Brookstone store and plop myself into a souped-up massage chair that not only begins kneading my back but wraps itself around my calves and goes to work on them as well. I'm a little bit more tense than I realized, and this Barcalounger version of the old Magic Fingers really hits the spot. As I sit in it, with my eyes closed, I think of Alice, the way she looked through the tinted back window of the black Lincoln Town Car that whisked me away down our quiet Brooklyn block a little while earlier: slender and blond; unbelievably pretty; wearing a green T-shirt, short skirt, and gray Reef flip-flops; waving good-bye in the dappled light of Second Place.

It's no wonder I'm tense. The wedding. The World Series. My bruised, fickle, and wayward heart. Impending obligations. Responsibilities. Money. I make up my mind that if I win the World Series, I'll buy one of these fabulous massage chairs for the living room of the fabulous West Village apartment that Alice and I will undoubtedly purchase. Check that. If I win the WSOP, I'll hire two strong Swedish women and keep them on call 24-7 (one for each of us, of course!).

Make no mistake, I'm excited to be going. The World Series of Poker! Six weeks in Vegas! But I'm scared, too. The World Series of Poker! Six weeks in Vegas! A week in Vegas can seem like an eternity. In six weeks I could lose a lot more than my bankroll. Six weeks alone in a room at the semi-seedy Gold Coast hotel, the same place that was the last real residence of the poker legend Stuey Ungar before he died, his body worn out by too many late nights and too much crack -- there's no telling what could happen. Thank God I have a book to write, a purpose beyond playing poker. At the same time, I feel the weight, the oppressiveness of having to do a book. I think of all my friends who are going to the Series simply to play poker. These are my friends who play for a living, who don't have a care in the world beyond the felt. I was like them once. Why do I need all this weight now after all those years without it? Maybe I'm not ready to get married.

Half an hour later, I extricate myself from the chair, a little wobbly-kneed, and browse the array of other cool gadgets that I have absolutely no need for but want anyway. One thing I find amazing is that Brookstone, Sharper Image, Hammacher Schlemmer, and all the other high-end gadget stores now sell the kind of quality poker chips in briefcase-style cases that used to be available only at gaming and casino equipment stores. It's all part of the insane poker mania of the moment. Everybody loves Texas Hold'em. For years only a subculture of mostly hard-core poker players and gamblers even knew about the game. Back in the old days -- and hell, we're going back an eternity in this insta-culture, like almost two years ago -- whenever it would come up at dinner parties that I played hold'em and went to Vegas, it gave me a kind of Rat Packy hipster cred. Now everyone's doing it. It's like yoga. My married friends tell me their preteen kids can't get enough of the game. "Jamie and Henry watch it on TV constantly," my pal David told me recently. "I bought them poker chips for Christmas and that's all they play with their friends now."

"Your seven-year-old kid is playing poker for money?"

"No, no, just for fun," he said. "Although," he added, as if the thought had just occurred to him, and a bit uncomfortably at that, "I have noticed a few toys around the house that I don't remember buying for them."

Apparently, the only thing left I have going for me in the cool department is that I've actually played in the World Series of Poker. I've sat at a table with Negreanu, Seidel, Hellmuth, and the rest of them. But even that is conferring less glamour on me than it once did. When I played in the World Series, the one and only time, in May 2001, there were 613 players in the main event. This year, if registration goes as expected, over 5,000 people will be able to say that they took part. You're playing in the World Series? That's funny, so is my dry cleaner. He won his seat on Party Poker.

Somehow I cannot manage to leave the Brookstone store without purchasing something. I have gotten it in my head that what I am really going to need when I get to the Vegas tables is a pair of Bose noise-canceling headphones. My friend Nicky Dileo, an artist-turned-poker pro, has told me that it will be the best $300 I've ever spent. "Dude, believe me," he said in his thick Boston accent, "you need to shut out all the moronic chattah. It's the only way to maintain your sanity." Another guy I know, Wes, says that in his opinion the Bose headphones and the iPod are the two greatest inventions of the past twenty years. "And the really great thing," he says, "is that they work together." Since my sister already gave me an iPod Shuffle for my birthday, I'm halfway home. What better time to purchase the crucial complement than before a long flight, where the headphones will pay the added dividend of dampening the obnoxious roar of the jet engines?

On the other hand, it's not as if I don't have a conscience; I am aware that I am living in a culture of pathological, materialistic narcissists, that there are people in this country without enough to eat or warm clothes to wear in winter. I wonder what my mother, a child of the Depression, would say about her son spending 300 clams on friggin' headphones when he already has the perfectly serviceable white Earbuds that the Shuffle comes with? On the other hand, why sweat $300 when I am about to invest $10,000 and possibly a lot more in a poker tournament?

In the end, I reach a compromise with my conscience and purchase a pair of Sennheiser noise-canceling headphones for a much more prudent $150.

Several hours later, I'm somewhere over the Midwest, buckled into seat 31F, my head enveloped by the sound of the Ohio Player's "Love Rollercoaster" (part of a mix that Alice put together for me). I gape out the porthole window at the green and brown patchwork quilt of Middle America slipping by below. I have been jotting down my thoughts in one of the five spiral notebooks I've brought along with me. It seems not at all coincidental that my two favorite books about the World Series of Poker, A. Alvarez's The Biggest Game in Town and James McManus's Positively Fifth Street both start out with the narrator/hero flying into Vegas, trying to make sense of the world he left behind -- in Alvarez's case, England; in McManus's, Chicago -- each of which is in the grip of cold weather and a very different reality. Alvarez, when he disembarks from his plane, and learns that in this new world $1,000 is called a dime, can only utter the words, "Welcome to Dreamland." McManus finds himself comparing the new experience with the virtual unreality of the Masque video game that he has been playing at home in Chicago all winter.

The truth is that there may be no other way to tell the story of a trip to Vegas and the World Series of Poker than by using the Joseph Campbell template of the classic adventure in which the hero leaves the known world behind and heads out into the unknown, there to do battle with a host of memorable pirates and scalawags while at the same time fighting the forces of good and evil within himself.

Although Alvarez did not actually participate in the action, his account of the 1981 WSOP makes extensive use of the first person, and for a reader aware of Alvarez's history (particularly an unsuccessful suicide attempt that was chronicled in his fine book The Savage God), his romantic take on the larger-than-life gamblers he encountered in Vegas can be seen almost as an antidote to the dark urges in himself. Poker exhilarates him in an uncomplicated way: so when the gambler Mickey Appleman tells him that poker proved to be a more successful cure for his own depression than psychoanalysis, Alvarez never for a moment doubts the notion's validity.

Unlike Alvarez, McManus, during his trip to the 2000 WSOP, which he recounts in his book Positively Fifth Street, does not stand on the sidelines observing but actually plays in the $10,000 buy-in main event. While he isn't the first writer to do so -- Tony Holden took on the pros and described his experiences in his fine book Big Deal, ten years earlier, and Michael Konik wrote of his numerous WSOP experiences in the novella-length title piece from his collection Telling Lies and Getting Paid -- McManus is without question the first literary man to make it to the final table of the Big One (where he finishes fifth and collects a healthy $247,000). His gripping account of the action, played off against his internal conflict, the battle between the two sides of himself (characterized as "Good Jim" and "Bad Jim"), shows poker to be a territory for explorations that go far beyond a deck of cards and some chips.

Interestingly, during an extended contemplation of Alvarez's book in the pages of his own, McManus gently chides the trailblazing master for devoting less attention than he might have to the kamikaze wunderkind Stuey "the Kid" Ungar, who wound up winning the 1981 WSOP. Since I myself found Ungar so compelling that I wound up writing a biography of him (in collaboration with Nolan Dalla), I'm inclined to agree. At the same time, I can see why a self-destructive soul like Stuey, who could not readily articulate or divine the nature of his psychic pain, might be less appealing to Alvarez than a self-reflective intellectual misfit like Mickey Appleman.

I might as well get something off my chest right at the outset of this adventure. It irks me that I am following in such well-traveled footsteps. Every writer wants to be the Magellan or Columbus of his subject. At the same time, it is also true that terrain can change -- as the poker world most certainly has in the past couple of years -- and that even in the familiar we can discover the new. Thus it was that before leaving New York, I decided that it would be a good idea, from a financial ...

About this edition

• Publisher: Atria
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0743288378
• ISBN 13: 9780743288378
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 304