Positively Fifth Street: Murderers, Cheetahs, and Binion's World Series of Poker
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Rough sex, black magic, murder, and the science—and eros—of gambling meet in the ultimate book about Las VegasJames McManus was sent to Las Vegas by Harper’s to cover the World Series of Poker in 2000, especially the mushrooming progress of women in the $23 million event, and the murder of Ted Binion, the tournament’s prodigal host, purportedly done in by a stripper and her boyfriend with a technique so outré it took a Manhattan pathologist to identify it. Whether a jury would convict the attractive young couple was another story altogether.McManus risks his entire Harper’s advance in a long-shot attempt to play in the tournament himself. Only with actual table experience, he tells his skeptical wife, can he capture the hair-raising brand of poker that determines the world champion. The heart of the book is his deliciously suspenseful account of the tournament itself—the players, the hand-to-hand combat, and his own unlikely progress in it.Written in the tradition of The Gambler and The Biggest Game in Town, Positively Fifth Street is a high-stakes adventure, a penetrating study of America’s card game, and a terrifying but often hilarious account of one man’s effort to understand what Edward O. Wilson has called “Pleistocene exigencies”—the eros and logistics of our primary competitive instincts. The New York Times Sunday Book Review It's a safe wager that professional poker players aren't very good writers, but it's also better than even money that adept writers are, or could be, cunning poker players, for they come to understand motive and risk and instinctively realize that you can't win if you don't bet. James McManus bet big and won. His Positively Fifth Street, an exhilarating chronicle of the 2000 World Series of Poker in Las Vegas, will go on the shelf with the classic that inspired it, The Biggest Game in Town, A. Alvarez's account of the 1981 event. — Robert R. Harris
The End3Dead Money21Family, Career, Even Life35Black Magic69Urge Overkill87The Poker of Science107Nobody Said Anything125Chicks with Decks149Death in the Afternoon185Book-learned207On the Bubble223Song for Two Jims249Tension-discharge269The Last Supper311Either Way337Zombies is Bawth of 'Em355Tons and Tons of Luck369Poker Terminology389Bibliography399Acknowledgments405Index407
