As part of our sporadic review feature, I'd like to present Positively Fifth Street: Murderers, Cheetahs, and Binion's World Series of Poker by James McManus (paperback available next month, I think).

McManus was a writer and amateur poker player when, in 2000, he scored a gig with Harper's magazine to cover the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas (specifically, to cover the women who were now competing with the best of the male poker players), and the murder trial arising out of the death of Ted Binion, black sheep of the family whose casino hosts the poker event, Binion's Horseshoe. In a bizarre congruence, the trial of Binion's ex-stripper ex-girlfriend and her new lover took place at the same time as the 2000 WSOP. McManus, struggling in his conscience between "Good Jim" the family fan and "Bad Jim" the gambler, uses his advance from Harper's and a future mortgage payment or two and joins the tournament.

And while McManus might have merely thought it would make for a better story to go Gonzo and try to bluff some of his subjects, he ends up outplaying almost all of the 500+ entrants that year (there were over 800 this year) to wind up at the final table. In the midst of this phenomenal run for an amateur (hell, for anybody), he tracks down the sordid story of Ted Binion and his killers. The book begins with McManus's reconstruction of the murder, and the reader is immediately drawn into the alternate universe that Vegas seems to be. People just go there and lose their minds, or, for the unlucky ones like Ted Binion, their lives. And despite the family-friendly image the Vegas tourism folks have been painting recently, it becomes quite clear that parts of that town are still squarely in the Wild West.

Over the course of the book, McManus (as "Bad Jim") starts to identify more and more with Binion, and he realizes how easy it would be to let the demons of the psyche loose for a night on the town. Of course, success in poker is all about not "going on tilt" and keeping oneself calm when one is in the midst of a euphoric victory or a crushing defeat. There's a lot of interesting stuff in the book about the psychology of playing high-stakes poker, and the psycho-sexual-sadism that's a little bit necessary for the game, or at least accompanies big successes and big failures much of the time.

I'm not much of a gambler; I'm a pretty risk-averse person. I spent a day in Vegas once and quit after losing six dollars. I've played a little poker, and understand the basics, but not the many nuances one must master to win even one hand against the pros. But Positively Fifth Street is still enjoyable for the novice or (I think) even the non-player. McManus explains the basics of Texas No-Limit Hold'em, the biggest game in the WSOP, with multi-million dollar purses. The book includes a glossary of poker terminology if you get lost, and there's an extensive bibilography if you're looking for more about the game.

But even without following all the details, anyone can understand when a player gets lucky after raising when he shouldn't have, or gets unlucky when he had the best hand until the last card fell. You understand when Bad Jim takes over and raises with nothing against poker legend T.J. Cloutier, and gets the card he needs, prompting the even-more legendary Amarillo Slim Preston to declare that McManus "has the heart of a cliff-diver."

Well, I won't say that Positively Fifth Street takes you to the top of the cliff with him, but it's a very enjoyable read. A book that would have worked pretty well either as a tale of a poker tournament or as the story of a love gone bad leading to murder works very well exploring the confluence of the two. And its publication was timed perfectly to ride the wave of popularity that big-money poker is on now. (Although, given that there was a skit tonight on Saturday Night Live parodying Bravo's celebrity poker tv show, perhaps it has jumped the shark....)

A quick word about the play on words in the title, in case you didn't get it. "Fifth Street" is the colloquial name for the final card played in a hand of Texas Hold'em. Positively Fourth Street is a Bob Dylan song, and I wonder if McManus was thinking about this lyric when he coined his pun:

You got a lotta nerve
To say you are my friend.
When I was down
You just stood there grinning.

You got a lotta nerve
To say you got a helping hand to lend.
You just want to be on
The side that's winning.

The players get friendly, and there is certainly a great deal of respect for each other's ability. But the smart poker player knows a smile can hide a bluff, and the most popular guy at the table is the one who just lost.

Look, this book has money, cowboys, murder, lap dances, and a Sicilian judge presiding over a trial in the desert. What more could you want? I had so much fun reading it, I'm going to give it our highest rating, a full six-pack.