Al Alvarez, Author of 'The Biggest Game in Town,' Passes Away at Age 90
Acclaimed poet, novelist, and essayist Al Alvarez (August 5, 1929 – September 23, 2019), best known to the poker world for his game-changing The Biggest Game in Town, has passed away of viral pneumonia at the age of 90.
For poker players, Alvarez’s 1983 book is credited with helping grow the game. The text documented the 1981 World Series of Poker and as one critic wrote was “the origin of contemporary poker literature.” Indeed, the book helped introduce the masses to the clandestine world of high-stakes poker and to characters like Doyle Brunson, Mickey Appleman, and that year’s winner, Stu Ungar.
"They didn't quite know what to make of me," Alvarez wrote. "I was the little Brit with the funny accent who could make them laugh.”
He added: "Quite simply, poker taught me qualities I lacked - patience and cool-headedness - that steadied me when I most needed them."
Alvarez wrote more than two dozen books in his career, but the only other one about poker was 2001’s Poker: Bets, Bluffs, and Bad Beats. Other books he penned centered on rock climbing (one of his other passions), oil exploration, and suicide. It was in The Savage God that he championed his close friend Sylvia Plath and recounts her suicide.
A detailed obituary on The Guardian states: “According to Matthew Norman, who played with him, he was a good poker player – but not world-class. Connoisseurship was Alvarez’s line, not performance.”
Fellow Poker Authors Weigh In
Jim McManus (pictured above with Alvarez in 2011), the author of poker books Positively Fifth Street and Cowboys Full, offered the following on Alvarez’s passing:
“Al Alvarez was a bona fide renaissance man: writer, mountain climber, poker player, swimmer. He was a significant poet, critic, and anthologist who introduced the world to Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, John Berryman, and others. He was also the last person, besides her two children, to see Plath alive, and The Savage God, the book he wrote about her and other suicides, including his own close calls and temptations, changed the way we think about depression and those who take their own life.”
"He certainly changed my own poker and writing lives. I'm grateful to have known him and read him.”
McManus continued: “Americans mostly know him from that book or The Biggest Game in Town (1983), about the 1981 WSOP Main Event. It inspired many thousands of amateurs to try to play in that tournament, and quite a few journalists, from his friend Tony Holden on, to write about and/or cover it. He certainly changed my own poker and writing lives. I'm grateful to have known him and read him.”
Peter Alson, author of Take Me to the River: A Wayward and Perilous Journey to the World Series of Poker, told PokerNews: "A. Alvarez—those of us lucky enough to have known him knew him as Al—was the towering bard of the green felt jungle. He wrote about the game of poker in such gorgeous prose that it still boggles my mind every time I delve into his great masterwork, The Biggest Game in Town. He was a poet, a thinker, a risk-taker, a literary man through and through. His loss is immense, but we can be grateful for not only The Biggest Game but for his many others books, including The Savage God, a stunning meditation on suicide. From a personal standpoint, I can say that he was my inspiration, my muse, the writer who made me see that writing about poker could actually constitute a literary pursuit."
Alvarez, who played poker for the better part of 50 years, once said of the game: "It's going to finish when I fold my hand and go up to the big poker game in the sky.” Unfortunately for the poker world, that day has come.
Alvarez is survived by his wife of more than 50 years, Anne Adams, along with children, Luke and Kate. His son Adam from his first marriage to Ursula Barr preceded him in death.
Image by Natalie Galustian, Sept. 22, 2011 at Goldfish, a Chinese restaurant in Hampstead, London.
