The Beginning:

It’s late.
I should be in bed.
My wife is in bed. My daughter is in bed. It’s a school day tomorrow. We’ll be getting up at 6:30 a.m. and doing the breakfast thing, the school run thing. I should be in bed.
I’m not in bed.
I’m downstairs, at my computer, gambling online.
Only it’s not really gambling of course, oh no no.
It’s a game of skill.
Poker. Where psychology, and money-management, and people-reading skills, and odds-knowledge and card-knowledge separate the winners from the losers. The king of card games, where those who know what they’re doing get rich, and those who don’t get broke.

Will someone please tell that to the moron who just blew me off the table?!

- Chapter One, "Chips in the Night"

The Goal:

I know my destination.
Las Vegas. I don’t know exactly how I am going to get there, but I know it will be by the scenic route, as always. The long way round - in this case, via the Internet, and satellites, and tournaments.
At one of which I will win a seat in the Big One: the Main Event of the World Series of Poker.
Which starts in under nine weeks.

- Chapter Two, "The W.S.O.P."

The Game:

When I think of sport, I think of running, jumping, skiing, swimming; kicking balls or throwing them, hitting them with bats or racquets or mallets. Sport involves physical exertion; and okay, we have televised pool and televised darts, and if they’re not actual, traditional sports, in the grunt-and-sweat sense, at least they demand a certain amount of hand-eye co-ordination. But - correct me if I’m wrong - don’t people play poker sitting down?
And as for getting up a sweat - half the people at any poker table you care to pick can barely walk, let alone run. An excellent pastime, an excellent game, an excellent challenge of your wits and courage.
But sport?
Well, perhaps it is. Perhaps it is, indeed, the perfect television sport; in that in poker, at last, we have a sport that is played in exactly the same position as the viewer adopts while watching it. In front of the screen the couch-potatoes slump, and gape, while beyond it the gladiators - some of them, no doubt reassuringly, even more wretched physical specimens than themselves - shift in their seats, and fight it out with the bare minimum of actual bodily exertion.

- Chapter Twenty, "The Walking Dead"

The Play:

It has often been observed that gambling has more than a little in common with masturbation. Both are solitary forms of giving oneself pleasure. Cards are dealt with small, quick, repetitive, rhythmic hand movements. Poker-players toy obsessively with their phallic stacks of chips, clicking and rattling away, halving them, and drawing them in together again, and caressing them, and cosseting them, and smoothing them sleekly upright once more into splendid little towers... And there we all sit, fiddling with our swelling and subsiding stacks. The foreplay is, often, interminable: but, when the time is right, we come into the action, pulling them apart, tossing them in, spraying them around, seeding the pot. And we watch them dwindle, and shrink, never to rise again; while, across the table, some unsavory character draws them in towards him, and teases them upwards again into a proud erection not all that far above his lap.

And he has twelve of them.

- Chapter Nine, "Abuse and Self-Abuse"

The Magic:

Away from the tables, in our real lives, we live in a world of rules. There are Acceptable Standards of Behavior. There are Good Manners. There is decorum, convention, the pressure to conform. There are cops with radar guns and traffic tickets, and maitre d’s with noses in the air. There are bosses to brown-nose, and bouncers behind the velvet ropes to cajole, and teachers to placate, and kids to teach the whole complicated rigmarole to. We are bound in by form, and constricted and confined until it is second nature to us never to put our feet in the salad, or to skateboard naked to church. Where else but at the poker-table, in our ordered and regulated lives, can you lie and deceive, trap and steal, harass and bully your fellow citizens, and still be considered a fine, upstanding - indeed, admirable - human being? We love poker not just because of the thrill of it, and the intensity of it, and the puzzle of it that is as complicated as the most fiendish crossword ever devised: we love it because, at the table, we are free. It’s just you, out there in the forest, hunter-gathering, a world away from the trappings and trammels of civilization.

- Chapter Ten, "Hardly Cricket"

The Voices:

"People think it’s glamorous, but it’s very difficult. I’m glad to be off all that. It’s a very tough life. It’s just so frustrating, and so draining. You play your heart out, and you play perfect, and you get your money in with the best hand and you still get beat. You have no control over it... You have to have the right mindset to do this, because if you don’t - you will crack mentally. It’s that way, and if you can’t accept that, if you can’t accept the fact that you may be going home with less than you started with, you cannot be in this profession.

- Mike Sexton, former top professional turned TV Star

"Using existing gaming laws to deal with internet gaming is a bit like performing brain surgery with stone tools. It might work, but it will be very messy."

- Professor I. Nelson Rose, www.gamblingandthelaw.com

"One guy once paid me a thousand dollars an hour to shut up. At the Bellagio, in the big Pot Limit Omaha Game. I sat there for five hours with masking-tape over my mouth. Five thousand dollars he paid me!

"Mind you, it worked. I was a net loser in those five hours."

- Sam Farha, WSOP title winner and top professional

"When you meet a poker person, it doesn’t matter about your background, you have something to talk about. Whoever you’re sitting next to, he’s going to be interesting - big or small, attorneys, bigshots, valet parkers, cleaners - it’s just an assortment of characters who love the game. And that’s why this is a true World Championship. As long as you’ve got ten grand, and you’re twenty-one, you can come on in and take a shot. There’s no other tournament like that. You can’t go into the PGA, Major League Baseball. They’re all restrictive, this is the only thing I can think of that really isn’t. It’s not exclusive, it’s inclusive. It’s - come on in, the water’s lovely.

"Okay, so it’s full of sharks, but come on in anyway..."

- Larry Grossman, host of Las Vegas Sports Radio's "You Can Bet On It"

"Whooh! This is out of sight, isn’t? I’ve been here every year since the beginning. And this is unbelievable, there’ll be five thousand players in it next year. There will be!"

- "Amarillo Slim" Preston, World Champion of Poker, 1972

"I can’t get used to it. You know? It’s kinda confusing. You don’t know anybody at the table. I got knocked outta the Big One the last level of the foyst day. At one o’clock in the morning. I had forty thousand, that’s very good for Day One. But something happened to me, I don’t know what happened, but I went broke."
I suggest that poker happened.
And I get that great laugh again.

"That’s right! That’s exactly right. Poker happened!"

- John Bonetti, WSOP title winner and multiple major tournament champion