History of Poker Book

What I am looking for here is two things. The first would be a good history of poker book. Not some book bogged down with theory, what should be running through your head at any given time. What I want is someone taking me from the poker games 50 - 75 years ago to the poker games of today.


The second thing I am looking for is something to tell me who the greats are. I don't want to be some guy who plays the game and knows nothing of its history. You see that in professional sports all the time. When a baseball player (black or white) doesn't know who Jackie Robinson is, that is a discrace.


Any help would be appreciated!

I'm not sure that the book you're looking for exists. Total Poker by David Spanier has some historical information. There is a chapter devoted to Puggy Pearson and his victory in the 1973 World Series. It's a good read in any case. The Biggest Game in Town by A. Alvarez has some historical background, and it does have a fascinating look at the poker world of twenty years ago. It does talk at length about the greats of the time--Ungar, Straus, Doyle, Slim, etc. Alvarez has another book out called Poker: Bets, Bluffs, and Bad Beats, with a lot of the same kind of material. That book you can find in bookstores. I can't remember the name of the author, but there's a book called Knights of the Green Cloth which is about various gamblers from the nineteenth century. Basically, most of those guys died in gunfights. I'm glad poker isn't like that now. It's interesting reading.


Howard Cosell was interviewing someone, I think Vince Coleman, about fifteen years ago and blasted him for not knowing who Jackie Robinson was. I happen to think that it's a good thing that society has advanced to a point where black athlete doesn't *have* to know who Jackie was; he can just play ball. Knowing a bit about history enhances my enjoyment of both poker and baseball, but I'm pretty sure that most of the people I play with couldn't tell you who, say, Bill Boyd was, and I don't think that they enjoy poker any less than I do.

Tony Holden's book "Big Deal" contains some good anecdotes about poker history. While this isn't the focus of the book (his forray into pro poker is), they are quite informative. It's how I learned about Nick the Greek and Johnny Moss playing heads up for months straight at the HorseShoe when vegas was "new"...Amarillo Slim, the Binions, and Holden gives brief bios of some of his contemporaries in the late 80s. (Chan,etc).

He even goes a bit into the first Mississippi riverboat games. A fun read altogether. It's a little hard to find, but worth it.