A catchy chronicle primarily geared toward poker and online-gambling fanatics.
A brisk history of Internet poker through the eyes of a group of teens who aced it.
Former professional poker players Grotenstein and Reback (All In: The (Almost) Entirely True Story of the World Series of Poker, 2005) trace eight years in the lives of a group of enterprising teenagers who cashed in on the online-poker phenomenon in the early 2000s. Through online chat rooms at popular poker strategy-sharing sites, Orange County–born medical student “Irieguy” met “Raptor,” a college baseball star turned card shark, who then connected with Canadian 20-something “Apathy” and 19-year-old video game aficionado “Good2cu.” Each of them eventually converted and converged their experiences and endless free time into hard cash with games both online and at casino poker tables. The authors astutely explore the history, intricate gaming strategies and psychologies employed by the successful “Ship It Holla Ballas” crew (“Ship It” is exclaimed after a big win in the poker world). As more young, high-stakes card sharks join the narrative, the authors keep the action moving as the Ballas sweep their enthusiasm and increasing expertise off the computer screen to go live in Las Vegas and beyond, entranced by big bucks, opulent amenities and, eventually, the mainstream media spotlight. The cards eventually folded for the worldwide gaming community and the “still under thirty” millionaire Ballas with an unprecedented governmental crackdown on online gambling in 2011.
A catchy chronicle primarily geared toward poker and online-gambling fanatics.Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-250-00665-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 16, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2012
An extraordinary true tale of torment, retribution, and loyalty that's irresistibly readable in spite of its intrusively melodramatic prose. Starting out with calculated, movie-ready anecdotes about his boyhood gang, Carcaterra's memoir takes a hairpin turn into horror and then changes tack once more to relate grippingly what must be one of the most outrageous confidence schemes ever perpetrated. Growing up in New York's Hell's Kitchen in the 1960s, former New York Daily News reporter Carcaterra (A Safe Place, 1993) had three close friends with whom he played stickball, bedeviled nuns, and ran errands for the neighborhood Mob boss. All this is recalled through a dripping mist of nostalgia; the streetcorner banter is as stilted and coy as a late Bowery Boys film. But a third of the way in, the story suddenly takes off: In 1967 the four friends seriously injured a man when they more or less unintentionally rolled a hot-dog cart down the steps of a subway entrance. The boys, aged 11 to 14, were packed off to an upstate New York reformatory so brutal it makes Sing Sing sound like Sunnybrook Farm. The guards continually raped and beat them, at one point tossing all of them into solitary confinement, where rats gnawed at their wounds and the menu consisted of oatmeal soaked in urine. Two of Carcaterra's friends were dehumanized by their year upstate, eventually becoming prominent gangsters. In 1980, they happened upon the former guard who had been their principal torturer and shot him dead. The book's stunning denouement concerns the successful plot devised by the author and his third friend, now a Manhattan assistant DA, to free the two killers and to exact revenge against the remaining ex-guards who had scarred their lives so irrevocably. Carcaterra has run a moral and emotional gauntlet, and the resulting book, despite its flaws, is disturbing and hard to forget. (Film rights to Propaganda; author tour)
Pub Date: July 10, 1995
ISBN: 0-345-39606-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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