In the spring of 1981 the British poet and critic Al Alvarez, a serious amateur poker player, flew to Las Vegas to watch the World Series of Poker at Binion's Horseshoe casino, and this slim book is the result: the first sustained account of the tournament and a close portrait of the people who played no-limit Texas hold 'em for a living at a time when the game was still a subculture of road gamblers rather than a televised sport. Alvarez structures the book around a single tournament, moving between the final table and the side games where professionals routinely won and lost sums that would ruin ordinary people. He sketches the founding figures of modern poker, including Jack Binion, who ran the Horseshoe, and players such as Doyle Brunson, Puggy Pearson, Amarillo Slim and Stu Ungar, the young prodigy who won the main event that year. Alvarez is interested less in strategy than in temperament. He asks what kind of person can treat money purely as a way of keeping score, how professional gamblers manage fear, discipline and boredom, and why a game of incomplete information and controlled aggression exerts such a hold on mathematically gifted, restless minds. Las Vegas itself becomes a character, a sealed, clockless world of air conditioning and neon in the desert. Alvarez, who had earlier written The Savage God, a study of suicide, brings a literary sensibility and a certain melancholy to the material. The result is part reportage, part psychological study, and part elegy for a rough, improvised America of hustlers, and it remains a touchstone for later writers on poker and risk.