BiggerDeal.com

Filed in archive Poker Blogs on May 29, 2007

All-star teams are usually brought together during the middle of a season to celebrate a coming together of athletes who performed above and beyond their peers. When names like Al "Biggest Game in Town" Alvarez, Lee "Mr. PokerStars" Jones, and Anthony "Big Deal and Bigger Deal" Holden got together to form a poker blogging all-star team of sorts people within the community took notice.

I recently finished a publisher's copy of the "Bigger Deal" being one of maybe a dozen poker bloggers who never read the original guide to the ups and downs of becoming a poker pro. Holden's "voice" that breezes gently thru that book can now be found on a community poker blog Bigger Deal.com which is sponsored by PokerStars.com (surprise surprise).

For a little taste of the Brit's most recent foray into poker blogging aside from national best sellers and attending his favorite operas, here's a recent post from Holden concerning the recent poker movie "Lucky You":

Robert Duvall, by contrast, sits Eric Bana down for a nickel-and-dime game - just like in the childhood kitchen, aaaah - and proceeds to lose back a few bucks. Yes, this is the climactic scene of the new poker movie Lucky You - all two long hours of which I saw in New York last week on my one afternoon off from plugging Bigger Deal.

I know, I should have spent those rare few leisure-hours at The Lives of Others. Or so my youngest son Ben (who works in L.A. in the movies, so he should know) told me over dinner at my favourite Manhattan restaurant, Les Halles, with his wonderful wife Salome. 'But, son,' I didn't say (well, I'm not - quite - American), 'I just had to catch Lucky You before it disappeared without trace.'

Which it well might - and you won't have missed a thing (which is why I don't feel at all bad about giving away the ending). Almost a year after it was hyped with due Tinseltown vulgarity at last year's World Series in Vegas, the movie has finally snuk out amid trade rumours of rewrites, reshoots, turnaround, development hell, all the rest of it. It was lucky, I am told, to get a distributor at all, rather than going straight to video. And it's really not hard to see why.

Director and co-writer Curtis Hanson ('LA Confidential', 'Wonder Boys', '8 Mile') has concentrated so much on poker authenticity that he seems to have overlooked the love affair between Bana and the grotesquely miscast Drew Barrymore supposedly at the heart of the plot. Not for a moment do we believe that suave, laid-back Bana's Huck Cheever has finally found The One For Him (even though he's a bit of a rover) in clunky, simpering Barrymore's torch-singing Billie Offer. The main relationship in the film is, of course, that between Bana's Huck and his dad, veteran poker pro L. C. Cheever, persuasively played by Duvall despite the most absurd rug in movie history.