Word: pokerful
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...retired--offer themselves as pundits and commentators. They hint that they're still in close contact with the Pentagon, then proceed to lay out, with troubling specificity, where we'll go next, how quickly and for what purpose. Aren't old soldiers supposed to be tight-lipped and poker-faced? When Lieut. General William Wallace, who leads our ground forces, aired certain strategic and tactical misgivings that wound up on the front page of the New York Times, he became part commander, part commentator--a strange and unsettling new combination...
When James McManus went to Las Vegas to cover the $23 million World Series of Poker, he did what any responsible 49-year-old father of four would do: he bet his advance. He used it to buy into a qualifying match, then won it, and before he knew it, he was swapping $100,000 raises across a few feet of green baize with the high rollers he was supposed to be writing about. Positively Fifth Street (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 422 pages) is his improbable, irresistible account of what happened next...
...play dice with the universe," McManus writes, "but serious gamblers...prefer no-limit Texas hold'em," a particularly hard-boiled poker variant. McManus gives the reader a riveting over-the-shoulder view of the hand-by-hand action as he scours his opponents' poker faces for "tells"--nervous tics that betray their true emotions--while betting his next mortgage payment on the turn of a little cardboard rectangle...
...prose is flashy, funny and unexpectedly erudite, but McManus hardly even needs it--with material this rich, he's holding the writer's equivalent of a royal flush. Between deals he weaves in an anecdotal history that makes the case for poker as America's real national game--baseball's seedier older brother--and the story of a local Vegas gambling prince whose murder is a cautionary tale about the price of forbidden pleasures. Positively Fifth Street--the title is poker slang for the last, and often crucial, card in a hand of Texas hold'em--takes us into...
George W. Bush abandoned his studied air of mild sedation only once during his prime-time press conference last week. His eyes lighted up when he was asked if he would call for another U.N. vote on Iraq. A poker metaphor escaped from his Inner Cowboy. "It's time for people to show their cards," he said, as if he actually enjoyed the prospect of a confrontation with France, Russia and the others. The tactic was unexpected; the belligerence, revealing. The President is ticked off, but he is confident, and he is calling France's bluff. Win or lose...