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

by James McManus

• ISBN13: 9780374965303
• ISBN10: 0374965307
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Summary

In the spring of 2000. Harper's Magazine sent James McManus to Las Vegas to cover the World Series of Poker -- in particular, the mush-rooming progress of women in the $23 million event, and the murder of Ted Binion, the tournament's prodigal host, purportedly done in by a stripper and her boyfriend with a technique so outre it took a Manhattan pathologist to identify it. Whether a jury would convict the attractive young couple was another story altogether. But when McManus sets foot in town, the lure of the tables is too strong: he proceeds to risk his entire Harper's advance in a long-shot attempt to play in the tournament himself. Only with actual experience at the table (he tells his skeptical wife) can he capture the hair-raising subtleties of the kind of poker that determines the world champion. The heart of the book is his deliciously suspenseful account of the tournament itself -- the players, the hands, and his own unlikely progress in it. Written in the tradition of The Gambler and The Biggest Game in Town. Positively Fifth Street is a high-stakes adventure, and a terrifying but often hilarious account of one man's effort to understand what Edward O. Wilson has called "Pleistocene exigencies" -- the eros and logistics of our primary competitive instincts. Book jacket.

Author Biography

James McManus is the author of four novels, including Going to the Sun, which won the Carl Sandburg Award in 1996, and two books of poetry, most recently Great America. His writing has been featured in Harper's and The New York Times and on This American Life, In 2001 McManus received the Peter Lisagor Award for sports journalism. He teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, including a course on the literature and science of poker

Table of Contents

The End	p. 3
Dead Money	p. 21
Family, Career, Even Life	p. 35
Black Magic	p. 69
Urge Overkill	p. 87
The Poker of Science	p. 107
Nobody Said Anything	p. 125
Chicks with Decks	p. 149
Death in the Afternoon	p. 185
Book-Learned	p. 207
On the Bubble	p. 223
Song for Two Jims	p. 249
Tension-Discharge	p. 269
The Last Supper	p. 311
Either Way	p. 337
Zombies is Bawth of 'Em	p. 355
Tons and Tons of Luck	p. 369
Poker Terminology	p. 389
Bibliography	p. 399
Acknowledgments	p. 405
Index	p. 407
Table of Contents provided by Rittenhouse. All Rights Reserved.