Poker Tales

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.