Positively Fifth Street: Murderers, Cheetahs, and Binion's World Series of Poker

James McManus: $12.57 / Save $5.38 (30%)

 

Review
This is fantastic journalistic-style fiction that has all the elements of a great book: gambling, Vegas, murder, sex, and the potential for personal ruin.

This book is ostensibly about the murder of Ted Binion and the sex/money scandal surrounding that. This storyline is what sucks the reader in, but McManus quickly abandons that story for a much, much more fascinating one about playing in the World Series of Poker, held at Binion's Horseshoe and founded by the Binion family. McManus was sent by Harper's magazine to cover the Binion story, but he's a cocky poker player himself, so he puts his welfare and relationship with his wife on the line by taking his entire advance and playing into the World Series.

Knowing that McManus has his own money on the line, and he's not funded by the magazine to make a good story, makes this journey absolutely amazing.
McManus teaches the reader how to play poker and gives the basics of the poker masters' strategies, so that the reader is able to play along with the highs and lows of the game. McManus even finds himself playing against people whose poker books he has read, so he knows what they taught him and the rest of the world about poker, which makes for interesting mind games at the table.

I would love to give this book 5 stars, but there is some material in here which really should have been edited out. McManus goes off for pages about how he knows David Sedaris or the illustrator of Me Talk Pretty One Day, or some other fact that is unrelated to the book and serves only to prove how cosmopolitan the author is. He also gives not only his childhood story, but that of his father and grandfather, and I found those to be very trying chapters that distracted from the high paced action of the book without adding any real meat to the story.

This is a great intro to poker, and McManus gives the reader enough info to get them intersted in the game, and to know what books and software to check out if they want to start playing. I highly recommend this book to any non-fiction lover.

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