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Cowboys Full: The Story of Poker
From James McManus, author of the bestselling Positively Fifth Street, comes the definitive story of the game that, more than any other, reflects who we are and how we operate.
Cowboys Full is the story of poker, from its roots in China, the Middle East, and Europe to its ascent as a global�but especially an American�phenomenon. It describes how early Americans took a French parlor game and, with a few extra cards and an entrepreneurial spirit, turned it into a national craze by the time of the Civil War. From the kitchen-table games of ordinary citizens to its influence on generals and diplomats, poker has gone hand in hand with our national experience. Presidents from Abraham Lincoln to Barack Obama have deployed poker and its strategies to explain policy, to relax with friends, to negotiate treaties and crises, and as a political networking tool. The ways we all do battle and business are echoed by poker tactics: cheating and thwarting cheaters, leveraging uncertainty, bluffing and sussing out bluffers, managing risk and reward.
Cowboys Full shows how what was once accurately called the cheater’s game has become amostly honest contest of cunning, mathematical precision, and luck. It explains how poker, formerly dominated by cardsharps, is now the most popular card game in Europe, East Asia, Australia, South America, and cyberspace, as well as on television. It combines colorful history with firsthand experience from today’s professional tour. And it examines poker’s remarkable hold on American culture, from paintings by Frederic Remington to countless poker novels, movies, and plays. Braiding the thrill of individual hands with new ways of seeing poker’s relevance to our military, diplomatic, business, and personal affairs, Cowboys Full is sure to become the classic account of America’s favorite pastime.
516 pages, Hardcover
First published October 27, 2009
40 people are currently reading
486 people want to read
About the author
James McManus
28Ìýbooks15ÌýfollowersJames "Jim" McManus is an American poker player, teacher and writer living in Kenilworth, Illinois.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 63 reviews
Shelved as 'abandoned'
September 5, 2010This was a book I won through the GR giveaway, and which I am WAY late in rviewing. The problem is that I found it almost unreadable - tried once or twice, kept putting it aside, hoping that it would be better if I were in a different mood. I finally decided that I had to give it my best shot, and either read it or mark it abandoned.
I got through about 80 pages, and just couldn't find anything to enjoy. It seemed like one big data dump, with the author just spitting out everything he had ever learned about card games and gambling, and not in a particularly interesting or amusing way. If it were a shorter book, I might have kept on - but the thought of reading another 500+ pages was unbearable.
In fairness, I know some of the reviews said that after the first few chapters the book was better, but there's only so much time and effort I'm going to give a book that is just work to read.
On the other hand, my husband said he thought it sounded interesting, so I've passed it along to him.
I got through about 80 pages, and just couldn't find anything to enjoy. It seemed like one big data dump, with the author just spitting out everything he had ever learned about card games and gambling, and not in a particularly interesting or amusing way. If it were a shorter book, I might have kept on - but the thought of reading another 500+ pages was unbearable.
In fairness, I know some of the reviews said that after the first few chapters the book was better, but there's only so much time and effort I'm going to give a book that is just work to read.
On the other hand, my husband said he thought it sounded interesting, so I've passed it along to him.
December 1, 2012
Good book overall for anyone who's interested in the game of poker. The history lessons and how the game is truly America's game that has been exported to many other countries now. The older history was fascinating and well written. However, I felt very bogged down by the end where (at least it seemed this way) every single WSOP in the last decade had the results and anaylsis. The "I can't wait to read this" fell off when I saw individual results and more of a newspaper feel and not a book feel. Maybe biographical sketches of some of the bigger stars and their backgrounds would have been more appropriate for the modern game. There are plenty of interesting characters that could have been sketched with their some of their personas.
December 6, 2013
Had to give this one up about half way through. I play poker every day and totally relate to the poker-as-a-mirror-for-everyday-life premise. Poker has taught me a lot about my own character. I did not realize until trying to read this book that I just don't care about the history of the game, its prominence in influential circles, or the seemingly endless anecdotes and stories that the author theorizes are the bedrock of American culture, politics and society. This overestimation of the game's importance was just too much for me. As far as writing style, it is clear to me that the author is head over heels into poker lore, however insignificant, and stretches every little factoid into half a chapter. Good reading material before a nice sound sleep.
November 4, 2009
The definitive history of Poker. Jimbo himself describes it as more "the story of poker" as he recounts the history of America's Game in stories, folk tales, reportage, and anecdotes. McManus is an accomplished poet, teacher of writing, and previously published "Positively Fifth Street..." the groundbreaking poker memoir.
January 9, 2010
NYT notable book 2009. This book won't tell you how to win at poker but it will explain the rise of poker from it's antecedents in Europe such as pogue to its birth in North America in New Orleans and via the Mississippi River throughout the US. It became america's game of now is a world wide phenom. Poker continues to evolve. The five card draw games of my youth, jacks or better, are now as common as the rotary phone. Seven card stud hi-lo resulted in bugger pots and more action and finally Texas Hold-em with community cards , more players and more action arose in the 70's and 80's and has become the staple of poker by virtue of the World Series of Poker and later the internet.
McManus has gathered the rich history of the game, of cheats, and beat downs, and introduces a colorful cast of characters that have frequented the game. It is an entertaining read.
McManus has gathered the rich history of the game, of cheats, and beat downs, and introduces a colorful cast of characters that have frequented the game. It is an entertaining read.
December 3, 2009
McManus's Cowboys Full makes room for everyone at the table. Lightweights will learn something about the basics of the game and why it appeals to so many people, while those already convinced of poker's importance will find much to enjoy here as well. Reviewers indicated that even those who do not normally enjoy history will appreciate the book's insights into how the game's past informs today's political strategies. A few critics considered some of McManus's arguments somewhat overreaching and some of his anecdotes, well, anecdotal—but what would a book about poker be without a couple of good bluffs? This is an excerpt of a review published in .
November 1, 2010
this book was very disappointing, especially since i very much enjoyed McManus' other poker book, "Positively 5th Street".
perhaps the author was just trying too hard...starting from a very review of games of chance since Neandarthal man, we work
through the origins of poker in Persia through France to the American South during the Conferederacy....and then i just ran
out of patience for rambling anecdotes that were, at best, tangential to the game of poker. perhaps one day i will go back,
skip a couple of hundred pages and read the last quarter of the book or so, to see what the author has to say about the
modern legends of the game. definitely not recommended, unless you have a taste for meaningless trivia.
perhaps the author was just trying too hard...starting from a very review of games of chance since Neandarthal man, we work
through the origins of poker in Persia through France to the American South during the Conferederacy....and then i just ran
out of patience for rambling anecdotes that were, at best, tangential to the game of poker. perhaps one day i will go back,
skip a couple of hundred pages and read the last quarter of the book or so, to see what the author has to say about the
modern legends of the game. definitely not recommended, unless you have a taste for meaningless trivia.
December 20, 2009
Hands down the best book I read in 2009...
If you like poker, McManus' straightforward approach to the history of poker ties in everything from politics, to race in the United States. The book describes so many intriguing anecdotes about how so much of American English has incorporated poker terms and theory.
Even if you don't like poker this book does a great job of presenting a sweeping thesis of how Poker is truly the "American Pastime"; and deny though you might, has in fact played a role in so many historical moments of import (e.g. Cuban Missle Crisis, Cold War, the Reconstruction, etc.)
Great read!
If you like poker, McManus' straightforward approach to the history of poker ties in everything from politics, to race in the United States. The book describes so many intriguing anecdotes about how so much of American English has incorporated poker terms and theory.
Even if you don't like poker this book does a great job of presenting a sweeping thesis of how Poker is truly the "American Pastime"; and deny though you might, has in fact played a role in so many historical moments of import (e.g. Cuban Missle Crisis, Cold War, the Reconstruction, etc.)
Great read!
February 10, 2010
Sadly, the library needed this book back before I was able to finish. I enjoyed the first half a great deal. I've even developed a warmer place in my heart for President Nixon after learning that he financed his early congressional campaign by fleecing his fellow WWII sailors. (Poker played an important role in the early political career of our current president as well...)
April 21, 2010
This is an excellent and well-researched history of poker. When I started I wanted to get to the more current material that is applicable to the poker I know, but then I did get sucked in to the origins of the game. This is an excellent book start to finish.
January 24, 2010
Billed as the story of poker, but that doesn't quite sum it up - it gives an analysis of US history and leaders thru poker-colored glasses, a history of the game's development and a more detailed look at comtemporary play and developments such as tournament and online play.
February 21, 2010
Not to much the history of poker as the history of the world seen through poker analogies - in extruciating detail. This book was easily 100 pages too long. The few bright spots were the few stories actually about poker.
March 22, 2010
abandoned on page 135. Far too dense with random civil war stories. There are a few good bits in the part i read, but too much noise to sort through
April 7, 2010
I was very surprised by this book. It was very readable, full of wonderful history and just plain fun reading ... Sometimes these kinds of books are fairly dry, but this one was very compelling.
April 21, 2010
Excellent history of poker. Very heavy on historical figures who played poker and how it affected their major decisions.
July 3, 2012
Was really interested in this but it was very boring
March 25, 2013
The end is more about the World Poker tour than I needed, but the rest is a sharp history of gambling and gamblers, with lots of historical tidbits -- where the suits came from, to cards themselves.
August 2, 2016
Aight, buckle in, because this is going to be a long one.
I , so I picked up his more recent nonfiction book, . This one is basically just what it says on the tin, a nonfiction history of poker, with no memoir/personal essay bits. It was published in 2009, two years before Black Friday although after the passage of the UIGEA. This was also the year before I graduated college, and, though I managed to completely miss the poker boom while it was going on, it also really brought me back to that era, and not in a good way.
It's a very good book about the history of poker. But it has several flaws that all boil down to basically one major flaw that I have a lot of FEELINGS about, and that is: It hits every single shitty ubiquitous journalistic trope of that era, especially all the ones that drove me away from ever taking a single journalism course.
My specialization within my English major was something called "discourse studies," which consisted of additional genre studies (beyond the regular English requirement), some linguistics, some communications theory, some general media studies/media literacy stuff, and a bunch of creative writing courses. I took four creative writing courses because you needed to take four creative-writing-or-journalism courses, and my goal was to learn to write. Journalism, I figured, was clearly where you went to learn how to not write, at least if literally anything I was seeing in published newspapers or magazines was any indication.
In fact, the Death of Journalism was something I was (and am) enormously and morbidly fascinated by, the abysmal state of science journalism doubly so. The issues with the economics of news media and the collapse of advertising revenue were certainly fascinating, because I'm always interested in follow-the-money type stuff, but I'm also interested in the specific questionable themes and storylines we see over and over again in supposedly nonfiction works. The more I dug around finding criticisms of the bite-size, easily palatable oversimplifications and shallow framing I was seeing so frequently, the more I thought that the mainstream media functioned at least as much as a form of cultural mythmaking as it did a source of information -- it did the same work as fairy tales and Bible stories do for children and religious people, but for the adult, secular chattering classes. (I still think this, only more so.)
While some of this is slowly getting better and much of it is not, my college years were the absolute height of the neuro-nonsense/neuro-babble craze, which finally started seeing some well-deserved backlash around 2013 or so, although Slate puts . Suspiciously neat'n'tidy evolutionary narratives are, unfortunately, still going strong, although they're less omnipresent than they used to be (I have not had a dude try to hit on me using one in several years, at least, thank Jesus), and some of the recurring myths are starting to see some more pushback when they do crop up than they used to (). I think this has less to do with the lazy allure of "we're just like that, nothing to be done lalala" wearing off or people becoming more informed than it does with the implications of the world economy imploding and society fraying at the seams -- much of the mainstream media's sciencey pep rallying has gone the full self-help route, promising that your brain and body has infinite power to change and adapt to anything at all so there can never be any sorts of real problems on the outside, like in society or with the economy or anything, it's ALL YOU, you have the POWER to CHANGE and just WILL yourself out of any sort of human limits or reactions to things by DOING YOGA AND EATING MORE KALE, etc. etc. The endless adaptability narrative (individual adaptability, of course) is what better enables cultural inertia right now, and so is getting more page space.
But around 2009? Dubious evo-psych wasn't just being used for its always-in-demand purpose of excusing men's shitty behavior. It was being used for literally fucking everything about every goddamn topic imaginable. There was shitty evo-psych about . There was shitty evo-psych about . There was shitty evo-psych about . There was even some or something, in 's book .
And, apparently, unbeknownst to me at the time, there was shitty evo-psych about poker. And about some other things that somehow managed to co-opt into being about poker.
Unfortunately, the worst stuff is front-loaded right at the beginning, which is why it took me so long to get into this damn book. He's determined to tell the whole story, not only all the way through chronologically right from the beginning, but all the way through chronologically from several millennia before the beginning. Playing cards don't get invented until Chapter 3.
Chapter 1 is mostly American mythmaking, with some anecdotes about various Presidents mashed up with some very sciencey-sounding stuff about the traits of immigrants being passed along in Americans' DNA, as if it were an either scientific or historical fact that Americans are all descended from voluntary immigrants and that's why we're so ~special~. While the erasure of the Native American population is pretty par for the course in most treatments of American history, it's slightly more surprising in publications about American gambling; in addition, the country's substantial black population came here almost entirely involuntarily; in further addition, quite a lot of the white people who came over when we were still colonies were shipped over as prisoners. McManus cites a figure of 2% (doesn't cite it from any study that I can find) for emigrating populations; this surprised me, since McManus is Irish and the Irish have, rather famously, been forced to emigrate in numbers up to ten times that -- and even in those cases, emigration was often "assisted." This whole section seems to come from a single book that's supposedly largely a cultural analysis, but which I will apparently now have to go read and dig into the sources used in order to figure out if it manages to square any of these circles.
A good fisking of Chapter 2 could provide the basis for a semester-long course on everything wrong with modern journalism. In my review of , I said parenthetically that "Regrettably, this leads him down the tiresome evo psych path more than once, but as far as evo psych explanations for stuff go it could be a lot worse." Well, this book is the lot worse that it could be. I will spare you the full deconstruction, especially since I'd want to irrefutably source everything, and I didn't hold on to as many of the social science textbooks I worked on at Pearson as I should have. But suffice to say that this chapter contains a lot of stuff about the behaviors of prehistoric man (just man) that bears very little resemblance to anything I read in any of the anthropology, archaeology, psychology, history, biology, communications, or child development textbooks I edited at Pearson, or any of the scientific journal articles and studies I had to pore through when research-assistanting a university-level psych class on "Evolution, Culture, and the Mind." Behaviors of prehistoric women in this chapter were limited to a claim suggesting that women wore makeup and jewelry while men didn't -- findings straight out of the Flintstones Academy of Prehistoric Anthropology. I laughed so hard I dropped the book, and I didn't pick it up again for two weeks. I also recommend skipping this chapter if you're not in the mood to hear about how the entirety of human existence depends solely on unchecked male aggression, rather than it being a major threat to everyone's existence when not carefully controlled and mitigated by actual fucking prosocial behavior. (I think I got to this part on the same day that story broke about a dude stabbing a lady on the train in Chicago for turning him down, so I had approximately negative patience for "men are aggressive to attract the ladies" type bullshit. Maybe it's badass that you can kick the shit out of a woolly mammoth or whatever, but only if I'm ENTIRELY CERTAIN THAT YOU WILL ONLY EVER KICK THE SHIT OUT OF THE MAMMOTH AND NOT ME.) Like... for fuck's sake, dude. Poker requires aggression in betting, sure, but behaviorally it requires sitting at a table with a bunch of fellow humans for several hours. And the sooner poker players realize this and make acting like it as much of a requirement for being considered "good at" poker as knowing how to size their raises properly, the sooner they can stop whining about how hard it is to attract new players to sit at tables with them for several hours.
The book starts to get better once we move into actual history and there's actual on-topic material to address, such as the invention of playing cards and the development of early gambling games. This stuff is much more interesting, although the previous two chapters have certainly done quite a bit to damage McManus' credibility for anything where he doesn't show all his work. Many of the times and places discussed are areas of history where I have much less of grounding in than I do in problems with mainstream science journalism and the methodological weaknesses of self-serving evolutionary narratives, so I'm not armed with much in the way of how to determine if it's right or wrong.
The actual poker stuff -- which, to be fair, is like 80% of the book, and certainly the most important 80% -- I tended to find credible. McManus's approach to poker history/mythology is basically the opposite of his approach to all the tangential subjects he tries to tie it to: When it comes to old poker anecdotes, biographical information of legendary gamblers, famous poker hands of history, etc., he goes out of his way to demythologize it, often interviewing multiple subjects or visiting multiple primary sources, carefully examining the trustworthiness of each of them and putting them in context of the journalistic standards and reliability at the tame, making sure the audience knows when and where something could have been exaggerated for effect and what factors make it how likely that a given account is total bollocks or not -- you know, proper history study stuff. It's exhaustively researched and sourced. Names, dates, prizes, buy-in amounts -- all the poker data is there and accounted for. He clearly loves the subject of poker and wants to do as right by it as humanly possible, even if it means up giving up believing in some really fun tall tales. We're given some very detailed looks into the minutiae of what seems like every bracelet event ever played at the World Series. Careful attention is given to not forgetting the respected, talented players who came in second, third, and otherwise not-first in major events, who tend to be forgotten about in the usual poker lore of big winners. The demythologizing of actual, nuts-and-bolts poker history is so thorough and careful that it occasionally borders on dry.
I'll still take it over the re-mythologizing of everything else in order to create neat and simple buttresses for the central thesis of the book, which is that poker explains basically everything about American and world history and humanity and life itself. (There's even an additional cringeworthy chapter specifically about poker and sex, buried deep in the final third of the book, just when I'd managed to forget about all the shitty evo psych from earlier.) Poker is indeed incredibly multifaceted, so it's really weirdly easy to tie it to quite a large number of things, and as I've started studying it more I've also found myself conceptualizing of more and more regular, everyday stuff in poker terms. (I'll be interested to see if any of the things I learn from playing poker will noticeably affect my behavior or thinking in other areas of life -- if it'll improve my short-term memory, my long-atrophied mental math skills, my comfort with making decisions quickly, my assertiveness, all that stuff the strategy books say are transferable skills.) But because poker genuinely is so tie-in-with-able for so many things, it's somehow just extra annoying when someone seems to be overdoing it. And while it's a hallmark of nearly every nonfiction book published in the 21st century to dedicate at least the concluding chapter to expanding the reach of the subject until it encompasses the entirety of the human experiment (I'm , ), this book actually lacks a Theory of Everything last chapter, because the Theory of Everything bit is visited and revisited so many times throughout the text. In a unique twist, the book ends on a fairly limited, concrete call to action to do something about the UIGEA because it's terrible, and the simple observation that poker is very popular and will probably keep existing.
Anyway, 80% of this review has been about the 20% of the book I had a problem with, so here are some really fun things from the 80% of the book I liked:
--A long and colorful accounting of all the popular ways of CHEATING AT CARDS ON STEAMBOATS, which is just as delightful as it sounds
--Many many presidential anecdotes for many many presidents
--A history of poker strategy literature, starting all the way back at the "how to cheat" primers with grossly long names that were popular long before the ones about non-cheating strategy
--Dr. Jerome Cardplayer
--A meticulous accounting of some absurdly rich dude's quest to bust a crew of the best limit Hold'em players in the world through sheer variance by basically hammering them with his bankroll
--Entirely too much stuff about the WSOP, considering he wrote a whole other book about it
--A decent amount of content about women poker players, although obviously not as much as I would have liked because there have not historically been as many women in poker as I would have liked, and there still aren't, but the ones who are there are totally badass and awesome
--Some funky stuff about AI and game theory, most of which involves interviewing actual scientists about actual scientific research!
--BATTLE STORIES about the Civil War, told using the word "bluff" a lot and therefore totally definitely actually about poker
--Adorable misspelled epigraphs culled from online poker forums/poker room chatboxes, complete with emojis and lots of all caps
All in all, this is a truly wonderful 300-page book, plus some crap that inflates it to a 425-page book. I would have gotten through the 300-page book in less than a week if that was all that was there to read. It's still a very valuable resource in my poker education, though, and it was indeed high time I read it.
I , so I picked up his more recent nonfiction book, . This one is basically just what it says on the tin, a nonfiction history of poker, with no memoir/personal essay bits. It was published in 2009, two years before Black Friday although after the passage of the UIGEA. This was also the year before I graduated college, and, though I managed to completely miss the poker boom while it was going on, it also really brought me back to that era, and not in a good way.
It's a very good book about the history of poker. But it has several flaws that all boil down to basically one major flaw that I have a lot of FEELINGS about, and that is: It hits every single shitty ubiquitous journalistic trope of that era, especially all the ones that drove me away from ever taking a single journalism course.
My specialization within my English major was something called "discourse studies," which consisted of additional genre studies (beyond the regular English requirement), some linguistics, some communications theory, some general media studies/media literacy stuff, and a bunch of creative writing courses. I took four creative writing courses because you needed to take four creative-writing-or-journalism courses, and my goal was to learn to write. Journalism, I figured, was clearly where you went to learn how to not write, at least if literally anything I was seeing in published newspapers or magazines was any indication.
In fact, the Death of Journalism was something I was (and am) enormously and morbidly fascinated by, the abysmal state of science journalism doubly so. The issues with the economics of news media and the collapse of advertising revenue were certainly fascinating, because I'm always interested in follow-the-money type stuff, but I'm also interested in the specific questionable themes and storylines we see over and over again in supposedly nonfiction works. The more I dug around finding criticisms of the bite-size, easily palatable oversimplifications and shallow framing I was seeing so frequently, the more I thought that the mainstream media functioned at least as much as a form of cultural mythmaking as it did a source of information -- it did the same work as fairy tales and Bible stories do for children and religious people, but for the adult, secular chattering classes. (I still think this, only more so.)
While some of this is slowly getting better and much of it is not, my college years were the absolute height of the neuro-nonsense/neuro-babble craze, which finally started seeing some well-deserved backlash around 2013 or so, although Slate puts . Suspiciously neat'n'tidy evolutionary narratives are, unfortunately, still going strong, although they're less omnipresent than they used to be (I have not had a dude try to hit on me using one in several years, at least, thank Jesus), and some of the recurring myths are starting to see some more pushback when they do crop up than they used to (). I think this has less to do with the lazy allure of "we're just like that, nothing to be done lalala" wearing off or people becoming more informed than it does with the implications of the world economy imploding and society fraying at the seams -- much of the mainstream media's sciencey pep rallying has gone the full self-help route, promising that your brain and body has infinite power to change and adapt to anything at all so there can never be any sorts of real problems on the outside, like in society or with the economy or anything, it's ALL YOU, you have the POWER to CHANGE and just WILL yourself out of any sort of human limits or reactions to things by DOING YOGA AND EATING MORE KALE, etc. etc. The endless adaptability narrative (individual adaptability, of course) is what better enables cultural inertia right now, and so is getting more page space.
But around 2009? Dubious evo-psych wasn't just being used for its always-in-demand purpose of excusing men's shitty behavior. It was being used for literally fucking everything about every goddamn topic imaginable. There was shitty evo-psych about . There was shitty evo-psych about . There was shitty evo-psych about . There was even some or something, in 's book .
And, apparently, unbeknownst to me at the time, there was shitty evo-psych about poker. And about some other things that somehow managed to co-opt into being about poker.
Unfortunately, the worst stuff is front-loaded right at the beginning, which is why it took me so long to get into this damn book. He's determined to tell the whole story, not only all the way through chronologically right from the beginning, but all the way through chronologically from several millennia before the beginning. Playing cards don't get invented until Chapter 3.
Chapter 1 is mostly American mythmaking, with some anecdotes about various Presidents mashed up with some very sciencey-sounding stuff about the traits of immigrants being passed along in Americans' DNA, as if it were an either scientific or historical fact that Americans are all descended from voluntary immigrants and that's why we're so ~special~. While the erasure of the Native American population is pretty par for the course in most treatments of American history, it's slightly more surprising in publications about American gambling; in addition, the country's substantial black population came here almost entirely involuntarily; in further addition, quite a lot of the white people who came over when we were still colonies were shipped over as prisoners. McManus cites a figure of 2% (doesn't cite it from any study that I can find) for emigrating populations; this surprised me, since McManus is Irish and the Irish have, rather famously, been forced to emigrate in numbers up to ten times that -- and even in those cases, emigration was often "assisted." This whole section seems to come from a single book that's supposedly largely a cultural analysis, but which I will apparently now have to go read and dig into the sources used in order to figure out if it manages to square any of these circles.
A good fisking of Chapter 2 could provide the basis for a semester-long course on everything wrong with modern journalism. In my review of , I said parenthetically that "Regrettably, this leads him down the tiresome evo psych path more than once, but as far as evo psych explanations for stuff go it could be a lot worse." Well, this book is the lot worse that it could be. I will spare you the full deconstruction, especially since I'd want to irrefutably source everything, and I didn't hold on to as many of the social science textbooks I worked on at Pearson as I should have. But suffice to say that this chapter contains a lot of stuff about the behaviors of prehistoric man (just man) that bears very little resemblance to anything I read in any of the anthropology, archaeology, psychology, history, biology, communications, or child development textbooks I edited at Pearson, or any of the scientific journal articles and studies I had to pore through when research-assistanting a university-level psych class on "Evolution, Culture, and the Mind." Behaviors of prehistoric women in this chapter were limited to a claim suggesting that women wore makeup and jewelry while men didn't -- findings straight out of the Flintstones Academy of Prehistoric Anthropology. I laughed so hard I dropped the book, and I didn't pick it up again for two weeks. I also recommend skipping this chapter if you're not in the mood to hear about how the entirety of human existence depends solely on unchecked male aggression, rather than it being a major threat to everyone's existence when not carefully controlled and mitigated by actual fucking prosocial behavior. (I think I got to this part on the same day that story broke about a dude stabbing a lady on the train in Chicago for turning him down, so I had approximately negative patience for "men are aggressive to attract the ladies" type bullshit. Maybe it's badass that you can kick the shit out of a woolly mammoth or whatever, but only if I'm ENTIRELY CERTAIN THAT YOU WILL ONLY EVER KICK THE SHIT OUT OF THE MAMMOTH AND NOT ME.) Like... for fuck's sake, dude. Poker requires aggression in betting, sure, but behaviorally it requires sitting at a table with a bunch of fellow humans for several hours. And the sooner poker players realize this and make acting like it as much of a requirement for being considered "good at" poker as knowing how to size their raises properly, the sooner they can stop whining about how hard it is to attract new players to sit at tables with them for several hours.
The book starts to get better once we move into actual history and there's actual on-topic material to address, such as the invention of playing cards and the development of early gambling games. This stuff is much more interesting, although the previous two chapters have certainly done quite a bit to damage McManus' credibility for anything where he doesn't show all his work. Many of the times and places discussed are areas of history where I have much less of grounding in than I do in problems with mainstream science journalism and the methodological weaknesses of self-serving evolutionary narratives, so I'm not armed with much in the way of how to determine if it's right or wrong.
The actual poker stuff -- which, to be fair, is like 80% of the book, and certainly the most important 80% -- I tended to find credible. McManus's approach to poker history/mythology is basically the opposite of his approach to all the tangential subjects he tries to tie it to: When it comes to old poker anecdotes, biographical information of legendary gamblers, famous poker hands of history, etc., he goes out of his way to demythologize it, often interviewing multiple subjects or visiting multiple primary sources, carefully examining the trustworthiness of each of them and putting them in context of the journalistic standards and reliability at the tame, making sure the audience knows when and where something could have been exaggerated for effect and what factors make it how likely that a given account is total bollocks or not -- you know, proper history study stuff. It's exhaustively researched and sourced. Names, dates, prizes, buy-in amounts -- all the poker data is there and accounted for. He clearly loves the subject of poker and wants to do as right by it as humanly possible, even if it means up giving up believing in some really fun tall tales. We're given some very detailed looks into the minutiae of what seems like every bracelet event ever played at the World Series. Careful attention is given to not forgetting the respected, talented players who came in second, third, and otherwise not-first in major events, who tend to be forgotten about in the usual poker lore of big winners. The demythologizing of actual, nuts-and-bolts poker history is so thorough and careful that it occasionally borders on dry.
I'll still take it over the re-mythologizing of everything else in order to create neat and simple buttresses for the central thesis of the book, which is that poker explains basically everything about American and world history and humanity and life itself. (There's even an additional cringeworthy chapter specifically about poker and sex, buried deep in the final third of the book, just when I'd managed to forget about all the shitty evo psych from earlier.) Poker is indeed incredibly multifaceted, so it's really weirdly easy to tie it to quite a large number of things, and as I've started studying it more I've also found myself conceptualizing of more and more regular, everyday stuff in poker terms. (I'll be interested to see if any of the things I learn from playing poker will noticeably affect my behavior or thinking in other areas of life -- if it'll improve my short-term memory, my long-atrophied mental math skills, my comfort with making decisions quickly, my assertiveness, all that stuff the strategy books say are transferable skills.) But because poker genuinely is so tie-in-with-able for so many things, it's somehow just extra annoying when someone seems to be overdoing it. And while it's a hallmark of nearly every nonfiction book published in the 21st century to dedicate at least the concluding chapter to expanding the reach of the subject until it encompasses the entirety of the human experiment (I'm , ), this book actually lacks a Theory of Everything last chapter, because the Theory of Everything bit is visited and revisited so many times throughout the text. In a unique twist, the book ends on a fairly limited, concrete call to action to do something about the UIGEA because it's terrible, and the simple observation that poker is very popular and will probably keep existing.
Anyway, 80% of this review has been about the 20% of the book I had a problem with, so here are some really fun things from the 80% of the book I liked:
--A long and colorful accounting of all the popular ways of CHEATING AT CARDS ON STEAMBOATS, which is just as delightful as it sounds
--Many many presidential anecdotes for many many presidents
--A history of poker strategy literature, starting all the way back at the "how to cheat" primers with grossly long names that were popular long before the ones about non-cheating strategy
--Dr. Jerome Cardplayer
--A meticulous accounting of some absurdly rich dude's quest to bust a crew of the best limit Hold'em players in the world through sheer variance by basically hammering them with his bankroll
--Entirely too much stuff about the WSOP, considering he wrote a whole other book about it
--A decent amount of content about women poker players, although obviously not as much as I would have liked because there have not historically been as many women in poker as I would have liked, and there still aren't, but the ones who are there are totally badass and awesome
--Some funky stuff about AI and game theory, most of which involves interviewing actual scientists about actual scientific research!
--BATTLE STORIES about the Civil War, told using the word "bluff" a lot and therefore totally definitely actually about poker
--Adorable misspelled epigraphs culled from online poker forums/poker room chatboxes, complete with emojis and lots of all caps
All in all, this is a truly wonderful 300-page book, plus some crap that inflates it to a 425-page book. I would have gotten through the 300-page book in less than a week if that was all that was there to read. It's still a very valuable resource in my poker education, though, and it was indeed high time I read it.
June 11, 2021
This is a thorough history of poker from prepoker history (rolling bones for interpretation) through about 2009 (the Internet poker boom following the Moneymaker miracle and the subsequent UIGEA). McManus achieves his stated goal of relating America's game (he estimates that 80,000,000 Americans play poker) to the larger culture.
There are plenty of facts, stories and characters that will be of interest to the general reader. (Richard Nixon financed his first campaign for Congress entirely with his winnings from poker. Poker was so plagued by cheating in the 19th Century that it was commonly called The Cheating Game. Poker Alice was a diminutive beauty born in Devonshire in the early 19th, moved to the US, learned poker from her first husband. When he died, she had no immediate prospects for income other than poker, so ....) Still, I'm not sure about recommending this book to the general reader. If it were 200 pages shorter, I would. I think any poker player will find it well worth the time.
McManus is the author of a deservedly popular memoir entitled Positively Fifth Street, which recounts a trip to Las Vegas where he researched a murder and made the final table in the WSOP. He is also the author of several novels (I liked Chin Music) and poetry collections.
There are plenty of facts, stories and characters that will be of interest to the general reader. (Richard Nixon financed his first campaign for Congress entirely with his winnings from poker. Poker was so plagued by cheating in the 19th Century that it was commonly called The Cheating Game. Poker Alice was a diminutive beauty born in Devonshire in the early 19th, moved to the US, learned poker from her first husband. When he died, she had no immediate prospects for income other than poker, so ....) Still, I'm not sure about recommending this book to the general reader. If it were 200 pages shorter, I would. I think any poker player will find it well worth the time.
McManus is the author of a deservedly popular memoir entitled Positively Fifth Street, which recounts a trip to Las Vegas where he researched a murder and made the final table in the WSOP. He is also the author of several novels (I liked Chin Music) and poetry collections.
September 30, 2017
After slogging through the first half, I gave up and skimmed the last half in about 20 minutes. It’s isn’t a history of poker as much as history with poker. The first half took us through the civil war and other political worlds with scant relevance for poker except that historical players enjoyed the game. The book probably got better when it entered the modern era with tales of the rise of the WSOP, Stu Unger, and the rise of AI attacks on the game. Unfortunately for me, I was so burnt out on the book by that time I basically gave up so I can read something else.
October 24, 2018
A really outstanding book and not just one of interest to poker aficionados (I may have played two hands ever before picking up this book). The writing is good and the author does a superb job of explaining even the most technical of game details without reducing the reading to a slog. The use of poker as a metaphor throughout American history is an amazing leitmotif throughout the text, and I particularly enjoyed its application to the Cold War and the contrast drawn between the national games of the USSR and the USA (being chess and poker, respectively).
August 5, 2019
McManus wanders deep into European and American history here to sustain his thesis, and the book drags in those parts, even for someone interested in those topics. The poker of the book is good, just buried in other stuff for the first 280 pages or so. Positively Fifth Street -- and if you can find it McManus's original WSOP piece in Harper's -- were stronger.
August 25, 2022
I really enjoyed this, but I can see why some didn’t. This is a great overview of the history of poker, and it’s very broad. The author involved several other histories to add context and some of them go pretty deep. I really liked that aspect, but I do think the book could have been a bit longer, particularly the last section.
September 13, 2023
I'm a lover of good poker insights and good writing, and this book has neither. I got it as a gift, so I gave it a trt. However, I find this "writer" unable to put together a single reasonable sentence in the English language without falling into bathos, navel-gazing, and even grammatical errors. Junk.
November 30, 2021
Outlines the intricate detail behind the very beginnings of card playing all the way to modern times. Very well researched. Quite dense. Excellent for history buffs. Overall a thorough deep dive into poker's appearance throughout important historical periods.
September 20, 2018
Fun to read as I've gotten into my neighborhood poker game. I have a lot to learn! I especially enjoyed hearing how poker has interwoven with politics.
June 10, 2019
Even if you're not a poker player, read this if you're interested in Wild West history, politics or even some of the seedier stories of the underworld of America. Great read.
August 2, 2019
Fascinating book
March 6, 2020
Lively, very fun and interesting to start, does gets into the weeds detailing hands and play in the last third. Great stories especially in the first half.
June 20, 2024
Somewhat dated history of poker. Informative for those who don't know much about the game, but I don't think I was exposed to much new information.
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