title: The Professor, the Banker, and the Suicide King: Inside the Richest Poker Game of All Time
author:  Michael Craig 
description: The "professor" is Howard Lederer, a professional poker player whose rigorous analytical approach to the game earned him his nickname. The banker is Andy Beal, a multimillionaire obsessed with beating the world's best poker players at their game, limit Texas hold 'em, played for stratospheric stakes. The suicide king, a symbol of the aleatory nature of the endeavor, is the king of hearts, who holds his broadsword behind his head. It's a great mix, and Craig (<i>The 5 Minute Investor</i>) offers a knowledgeable and observant chronicle of the high-stakes games between Beal and the syndicate of professional players organized by the "Babe Ruth of poker," Doyle Brunson. The syndicate put up $10,000,000 to sit opposite Beal, trading $100,000 bets. Beal, for his part, took a mathematical approach, at one point running millions of computer simulations of various poker problems, in search of an edge against the pros, who rely on an uncanny intuition honed by thousands of hands. Craig includes enough details about the professionals to allow readers insight into their gambler personalities. Having interviewed many of the participants in this legendary poker battle, he describes it with an appropriate sense of awe, and readers will be awed as well. <br />Copyright  Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
zlib_text: Liar's Poker
  
  By Michael Lewis
  
  Preface
  
  I WAS A BOND salesman, on Wall Street and in London. Working beside traders at
  Salomon Brothers put me, I believe, at the epicenter of one of those events
  that help to define an age. Traders are masters of the quick killing, and a
  lot of the killings in the past ten years or so have been quick. And Salomon
  Brothers was indisputably the king of traders. What I have tried to do here,
  without, as it were, leaving my seat on the Salomon trading floor, is to
  describe and explain the events and the attitudes that characterized the era;
  the story occasionally tails away from me, but it is nonetheless my story
  throughout.
  
  The money I did not make and the lies I did not tell I still understood in a
  personal way because of my position.
  
  That was somewhere near the center of a modern gold rush. Never before have so
  many unskilled twenty-four-year-olds made so much money in so little time as
  we did this decade in New York and London. There has never before