Ante Hero

By Lev Grossman

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.

"God may 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.

His 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 a mesmerizing mirror world peopled by lost souls for whom a game has become more important than real life. It's a fascinating place to visit, but you wouldn't want to die there. --By Lev Grossman