Renowned poker player and writer James McManus recommends Huntington Press’ The Moneymaker Effect: The Inside Story of the Tournament that Forever Changed Poker.
While the poker player on your list might not be pushy enough to mention it, the gift she or he almost certainly covets most is the $10,000 buy-in to the World Series of Poker Main Event next July, with maybe a little something extra thrown in for airfare and expenses at the Rio casino in Las Vegas.
Of more recent vintage is Eric Raskin’s “The Moneymaker Effect: The Inside Story of the Tournament that Forever Changed Poker,” a vivid history of the epoch-making 2003 championship. Raskin weaves together the perspectives of Chris Moneymaker, the accountant from Tennessee who parlayed a $39 online win into the $1.5 million first prize in the Main Event; Sammy Farha, the Bogart-esque Vegas pro who was outplayed heads-up; Holocaust survivor Henry Orenstein, who invented the hole-card camera technology that allowed ESPN to show its vast audience how much skill was involved; as well as a dozen top professionals (Daniel Negreanu, Barry Greenstein, Erik Seidel).
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