Re: Getting to the bottom of CARDS
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Other poker books are poker players writing. I classify Maxwell as a writer that used to play poker.
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Completely disagree, and here's why. I defy you to find a single non-poker player who could read this book from start to finish. A good writer would find ways to make his subject compelling to a lay audience, but the amount of hand-detail trivia makes the book solely of interest to poker geeks.
A little of the poker non-fiction achieves this: Big Deal, Biggest Game in Town and Positively Fifth Street, but of the recent poker fiction I can't think of one that could sustain a lay reader for long.
King of a Small World probably succeeds best in this regard, but that pales alongside a real classic like The Cincinatti Kid.
While we're still at the poker fiction table, can I commend the novels of Pete Hautman and James Swain? Hautman's crime fiction featuring cocaine addicted ex-cop Joe Crow generally has strong poker themes (ie, Drawing Dead, Short Money, Ring Game, etc.) and he has a very good children's novel called No Limit, which is something of a cautionary tale in which a teenager called Doyle takes up the game.
Swain doesn't really write poker books, but it's some of the best genre fiction I've read in a very long time. The protagonist is Tony Valentine, an ex Atlantic City cop who now runs a consultancy service called 'Grift Sense' which specializes in catching casino cheats.
Unlike Maxwell, both of these guys really have mastered their craft and know how to tell a story.
Maxwell might make a writer if he keeps at it, but he's still learning his chops at the moment.
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