James McManus
Literary Fiction
Pages 33-70
Jim the narrator takes a plain to Las Vegas to cover the Ted Binion murder trial and compete in the world series event. Jim's wife thinks that this is entire waste of money and believes that Jim is simply dead money. Dead money is the money that gets added to the winnings, but the people don't make it into the money rounds; therefore, they don't get any of the winnings. 1st place gets 1 million dollars while 2nd gets 600,000 and 27th gets 16,000. His wife allows him to go blow his bonus to compete in the tournament, but packs in his suite case a message reminding him off the dangerous of being addicted to high risks. The note reads, "the longer the addiction goes untreated the greater the probability of arrest and imprisonment. The disease can wreck family, career, and even life." Jim first learned to play poker from his uncle and only played with a couple of his buddies maybe once a month. The risk were never extremely high and they only played for fun. Jim found himself being drawn into the game and began reading every poker book he could get. he read guides from past champions and books with the probabilities and statistics of each hand. He got his main practice preparing for the tournament on online poker tournaments for free. Over the winter he played over 10,00 virtual hands and won 7 tournaments. By the time he got to Las Vegas he felt that he was ready to played, but nothing could've prepared him for the nerves he would face with the risk of losing 10,000 dollars.
If I had the money to enter into the tournament I would. Like Ted I get very excited and intense over taking risk, its an adrenaline rush. I love picking sports teams to win and playing sports to see who is the best, but I would never risk 10,000 dollars unless I was a millionaire. So far this book has talked about how people are drawn to risk and I completely agree with it. Most people enjoy the adrenaline rush of winning and the possibility of losing.
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