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The Biggest Game In Town Review

Rating: 10/10

Cost: $15.95

The Nuts: It’s the book that started modern-day poker literature.

The Muck: Nothing. You can’t improve a classic.

Recommended For: All players

A. Alvarez’s classic, The Biggest Game in Town, is the father of all contemporary poker literature. This book showed that poker, and Vegas, had a story to tell. It’s the kind of book that if you were in it, you had made it, and if you were not in it, nobody needed to know about you.

Alvarez captured the high-stakes Las Vegas poker scene of the late 1970s and early 80s so well that while reading this book you can just about smell the cigarette smoke, taste the bad black coffee and hear the riffle of the cards.

Before televised showdowns, onscreen percentages or 24-hour online card rooms, there were big men and thin men like Doyle Brunson, Jack Binion and Stu Ungar who were nestled in their chairs like a mother goose, just waiting for the next unsuspecting card player to turn into their golden egg.

The true-life characters Alvarez meets and interviews are instantly immortalized, but never outright famous. If anything, Alvarez shows that Vegas makes heroes as quickly as it breaks them.

And speaking of clichés, this book is credited with many of the ones you still hear around the poker tables today, such as “the next best thing to playing and winning is playing and losing.” Most of the memorable sayings come from the poker players that have been around the game the longest: “When I sit down at the poker table, I’m there to win. …Nothing complicated about that.” – Doyle Brunson.

If there is one person who serves as the “backbone” of the book, it’s Doyle Brunson. Alvarez is almost enamored with the 282-pound, 6-foot and 3-inches author of Super/System. Brunson’s famous book had already been published by the time Alvarez came to town, but it wasn’t nearly as popular then as it is now.

In The Biggest Game in Town, Alvarez gives you a detailed account of Brunson’s rich history and battle with cancer, and shows exactly what kind of gambler Brunson really is. Brunson even claims he can beat the most talented golfers at their own game, as long as he can wager each hole, because all he has to do is raise the bet enough to make the player too nervous to make those winning putts. Now we see what makes Brunson the poker star that he is.

This is a book every poker player should read because it captures an image of the game before it turned into an international sensation. Reading it will give you a profound respect for the game and the players who laid the groundwork for high-stakes poker while sitting in the smoke-filled back rooms of the Horseshoe Casino.

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