Poker Nation
A High-Stakes, Low-Life Adventure Into the Heart of a Gambling Country
Chapter OneIt's My Deal
If you look around the table and you can't tell who the sucker is, it's you.
-- Paul Scofield,
playing the role of Mark Van Doren in Quiz Show
I am an excellent poker player. If I had to be more specific, my guess would be that I'm in the top .01 percentile in the world. That's a fancy statistic if you're talking about SATs or something like archery, but when it comes to poker, it can create an enormous problem. With somewhere in the neighborhood of 135 million people across the planet who play the game, a little eighth-grade math will tell you that there are about 135,000 people shuffling cards at this very moment who are better than me.
A bigger problem is that three or four of those individuals are usually seated at my card table on any given night. My home club, the Winchester'where I have spent around three thousand hours playing over the past three years'is in the heart of New York City, where poker is technically illegal. That's kind of a sex ... read full excerpt from: Poker Nation ebook
