The author and critic

Writer and poker player Anthony Holden died this weekend at the age of 76 from brain cancer and complications following a stroke.

The majority of Holden’s professional life was spent as a music critic and biographer. In the latter role, he re-documented the lives of Shakespeare and Tchaikovsky and produced the first definitive biography of King Charles back when he was still just a prince.

He is best recognized in gambling circles, however, because of 1992 book Big Deal: A Year as a Professional Poker Player, considered a classic.

Making a big deal

Holden was part of a poker playing literary-clique that included Martin Amis and Al Alvarez, appearing with them in an early episode of the British TV series “Late Night Poker.”

He also appeared in several poker documentaries on British television.

From this love of poker grew Big Deal in which, with some help from his publisher, Holden took a year off from his regular profession to play poker. Along the way he documented his travels from Las Vegas to Morocco, Malta, and London before returning to Vegas just in time for the book’s finale, his experience playing in the 1988 WSOP Main Event.

Holden followed the book up in 2006 with Bigger Deal: A Year Inside the Poker Boom.

He became the first president of the International Federation of Matched Poker in 2009.

Leaving Las Vegas

There is a line in the first book where Holden describes the feeling of leaving Vegas behind after a long poker trip:

the world will have the nerve to carry on without me, and I will never know who won and who lost”

“The thought of all those card rooms buzzing in my absence, of all those pots I could have been attacking, was like that familiar rage about the prospect of death—that the world will have the nerve to carry on without me, and I will never know who won and who lost.”

Unfortunately, the poker world does get to know—the cancer won and so we lost.