Bigger Deal

Anthony Holden’s book Big Deal: One Year as a Professional Poker Player has become a cult classic, enjoying no fewer than six editions since its first publication in 1990, with worldwide sales now well into six figures. His long-awaited sequel, Bigger Deal: A Year on the New Poker Circuit, published in May 2007, also launched this website.

A veteran of the legendary Tuesday Night game, Holden was introduced to poker by his lifelong friend Al Alvarez, whom he first met while a student in 1968. A Vegas regular since the late 1970s, Holden won the first Celebrity Late Night Poker in 2000 – and last year won his WSOP ‘main event’ entry by beating three world champions (Joe Hachem, Greg Raymer and Chris Moneymaker) in a London tournament organized by PokerStars.com. He has since been a PokerStars-sponsored player on the European Poker Tour while writing his next book, Holden on Hold'em, due in 2008.

A prolific writer with a wide range of interests and enthusiasms, Holden is also well-known for his biographies of such disparate figures as Shakespeare and Tchaikovsky, Laurence Olivier and the Prince of Wales. He has written a a history of Hollywood’s Oscars, and the true-crime book The Saint Albans Poisoner, filmed as The Young Poisoner's Handbook. His most recent books are biographies of the Romantic poet-critic Leigh Hunt, The Wit in the Dungeon, and Mozart’s librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte, The Man Who Wrote Mozart. Holden has also translated operas for English National Opera and Greek pastoral poetry for Penguin Classics.

Born in Lancashire and educated at Oxford, Holden enjoyed an award-winning career in journalism before becoming a freelance writer and broadcaster after a public row with Rupert Murdoch while assistant editor of The Times in 1982. Columnist of the Year at the Sunday Times, also honoured in the British Press Awards for his reporting from Northern Ireland, Holden has also been US editor of The Observer, based in Washington DC, and was founder-editor of Eddy Shah’s Today newspaper in 1985-6. He is now (in between poker games) classical music critic of The Observer.

Holden’s three sons – Sam, Joe and Ben – are all classy poker players whom you might well run into in BiggerDeal.com tourneys. Like their father, they are all passionate supporters of Arsenal FC.

Holden’s poker slogan ? "Always expect the worst…"

Anthony's Blogs

• 06 Aug 2008 - THE TUESDAY NIGHT GAME IS BACK! Sign up for Tues 19 Aug
  Pulchritudinous, poker-savvy Victoria Coren will turn thirty-something (we’re too polite to ask) on Tuesday 19 August. So we have decided to celebrate her birthday in the name of our monthly tournament. As you can see from the panel at the top of our home page, VCoren is the (case-sensitive) password for the first in a new […]
• 15 Jul 2008 - 2008 WSOP – Day 7
  One Dane, one Russian, two Canadians and five Americans. We have our ‘November Nine’. It took until 3.30 a.m. on the 11th gruelling day of the tournament for Dean Hamrick of Minnesota to be eliminated in tenth place after some 15 hours of play, which had started at noon with the last 27 of the 6,844 […]
• 14 Jul 2008 - 2008 WSOP – Day 6
  So much for the effect on poker of America’s anti-gaming legislation! After last year’s dip, the 2008 World Series of Poker has proved the largest and richest in its 39-year history, its 55 events drawing a record total of 58,720 entrants. Event No. 2, the $1,500 NLHE, boasted 3,929 runners - the largest field ever […]
• 13 Jul 2008 - 2008 WSOP – Day 5
  Rivered again. Or maybe, this time, I should say canaled. Two weeks ago today, I was in the real Venice, Italy, Europe, Civilisation. This morning I took a cab via Dean Martin Way and Frank Sinatra Drive to the replica Rialto, San Marco and Grand Canal of the vast Venetian, Las Vegas. I’d kept hearing about its daily […]
• 12 Jul 2008 - 2008 WSOP – Day 4
  Seen one Cirque du Soleil, they say (at the more discriminating, i.e. less Vegas, end of the market), seen ’em all. Well, last night I saw my first – the Beatles extravaganza, ‘Love’, at the Mirage – and I, yes, lurved it. OK, it’s been on for three summers, but I haven’t had time to get to […]
• 11 Jul 2008 - 2008 WSOP – Day 3
  A terrific dinner last night at the Wynn’s superb SW Steakhouse with Vicky Coren and our generous host, EPT boss John Duthie. Our wide-ranging conversation was, of course, way off the record, but I think it’s safe to reveal that we broke all usual Vegas rules with an in-depth discussion of current US politics – specifically, […]
• 10 Jul 2008 - 2008 WSOP – Day 2b
  In the official programme for the 2008 World Series of Poker, there’s a list of the Top Ten WSOP ‘pioneers’, i.e. those who shaped and/or changed the history of what is now the biggest (and richest) ‘sporting’ event on the planet. At No 1 is the man who started it all, Benny Binion, followed (quite […]
• 09 Jul 2008 - 2008 WSOP – Day 2a
  At the (first, more select) PokerStars party last night, Daniel Negreanu told me that he’d first read Big Deal when he still really was ‘Kid Poker’, still in high school in Toronto. He even wrote an essay about it. His 16-year-old self was already, he said, playing poker – the book had nothing to teach […]
• 08 Jul 2008 - 2008 WSOP – ‘Rest’ Day
  There’s no such thing as a rest day for writers. Today’s sole Day Off for main-event players was still a Day On for bloggers, with the WSOP”s annual news conference, a free lunch (yes, there does turn out to be such a thing), the annual media tournament (with an especially memorable moment for Yours Truly, […]
• 07 Jul 2008 - 2008 WSOP – Day 1d
  It’s nowhere near the pre-UIGEA record entry of 8,772 in 2006, when Jamie Gold won that staggering $12 million first prize. But this year’s world-title field of 6,844 is cheerfully ignoring US economic conditions by ranking as the second biggest in WSOP history. After the Spanish victory in Euro 2008, and now Nadal’s at Wimbledon, you […]