When James McManus went to Las Vegas to cover the $23 million World Series of Poker, he did what any responsible 49-year-old father of four would do: he bet his advance. He used it to buy into a qualifying match, then won it, and before he knew it, he was swapping $100,000 raises across a few feet of green baize with the high rollers he was supposed to be writing about. Positively Fifth Street (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 422 pages) is his improbable, irresistible account of what happened next.
"God may play dice with the universe," McManus writes, "but serious gamblers...prefer...
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