Posts Tagged ‘michael craig’

Michael Craig’s The Professor, the Banker, and the Suicide King takes readers on a behind-the-scenes tour of (at the time) the highest stakes poker game ever played. In search of a new challenge, banking prodigy Andy Beal challenges the best poker players in the world to play for stakes so high that millions of dollars change hands in a session and even these seasoned veterans can barely handle the swings.

As a poker player, I found PBSK fascinating for a number of reasons. For one thing, there were a lot of little details about Bobby’s Room (the high-stakes section of the Bellagio poker room, named for Bobby Baldwin) and the people who play there that I didn’t know. Craig writes for a broad audience, but even as someone who is relatively in-the-know about the poker world, I came away with a much better sense of the culture and traditions of that game. There were even a few regulars I hadn’t heard of, which I suppose is in itself a statement about the nature of the game.

Title notwithstanding, the book’s truly central characters are Beal and Doyle Brunson, not Beal and Howard Lederer. Craig chronicles the two men’s parallel struggles, Brunson’s to herd a team of notoriously stubborn and independent poker players into a functioning team with a 10-figure bankroll, and Beal’s to find an edge against the game’s greatest.  Read the complete post...