Anthony Holden's "Bigger Deal"

Anthony Holden’s book Big Deal: One Year as a Professional Poker Player has become a cult classic, enjoying no fewer than six editions since its first publication in 1990, with worldwide sales now well into six figures.

Holden applied the "Page 99 Test" to Big Deal's long-awaited sequel, Bigger Deal: A Year on the New Poker Circuit, and reported the following:

As a huge fan of Ford Madox Ford – The Good Soldier is, for me, one of the great novels of the 20th Century – I was delighted to discover that my new book Bigger Deal survived his page 99 test pretty well. It’s not ideally representative, of course, but it does touch on all the book’s main themes: poker facts and figures, the personalities of the modern game, the fact that I have a part-time job back in the UK (as a music critic) which keeps me jetting back and forth between London and Las Vegas.

Also, it carries the conclusion of a trip I made to Yale University, for a lecture on poker given by an American writer-friend of mine. This is another perfect example of the new respectability of poker, which is one of the themes of the book.

Did I prefer poker in the old pre-internet, pre-TV days, when it was less respectable, more shady, played by dubious figures in smoke-filled rooms? Well, you’ll just have to read the rest of the book to find that out.

This, of course, applies only to page 99 of the US edition of Bigger Deal. In the UK edition, it’s a completely different matter…

Read an excerpt from Bigger Deal and learn more about the book, the author, and poker, at Holden's website.

--Marshal Zeringue