Poker Tales (Paperback)

Texas Hold 'Em is one on the most popular card games being played in the world today. But author William Heise thought it odd that there was not a lot of literary fiction being written on poker. As he writes in his introduction: "Golf and baseball have given us hoards of books in the 20th century on the life lessons to be learned from their respective games.... But when it came to poker, I found that most recent literature on the subject was confined to the rough-and-tumble world of poker written by those who had experienced the up-and-down lifestyle for themselves." Noting that poker relies on bluffing as much or more than on the cards themselves, Heise has written a series of short stories which trade on this unique aspect of the game. In his frame narrative, a kid (known only as 'the Kid') breezes into Las Vegas the day after his 21st birthday and sits down at a table with an old-timer (known only as 'the Old-Timer'). The Old-Timer proceeds to tell the Kid a series of short stories on seemingly unrelated matters: * Tales of actors and directors * Tales of riverboat gamblers and chess masters * Tales of mobsters and Texas cheats * Even a tale of the Devil himself Each poker tale is worth reading on its own, but the question that arises in the frame narrative becomes whether the Old-Timer is simply the kindly old man that the Kid takes him to be, or whether he has a more devious purpose in mind when he invites the Kid to sit down and play this simple game with him.