Weak hand: journalists can make today's geeky poker players seem interesting. They just can't make them heroes.

• Author: Peters, Justin
• Position: On Political Books - Jonny Magic and the Card Shar Kids: How A Gang of Geeks Beat the Odds and Stormed Las Vegas - Book Review

Jonny Magic and the Card Shar Kids: How A Gang of Geeks Beat the Odds and Stormed Las Vegas By David Kushner Random House, $24.95

If there was any lingering doubt about the cultural ascendancy of Texas Hold-Em poker, it was erased in June when The New York Times announced the debut of its very own regular poker column. Although the Gray Lady is decidedly less popular than racing forms and Playboys in the card rooms of Vegas, Reno, and Tunica, Miss, she will still take notice of burgeoning popular pastimes if the plebeians make enough noise--and apparently she has heard the thunderous kshhhh of a million decks being shuffled. "Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn poker," wrote columnist James McManus, channeling Jacques Barzun, in the first edition of his column. "[P]oker is now our most popular card game--maybe our favorite game, period."

Poker has arrived, again, after a long period of dormancy, and it's not just for riverboat gamblers anymore. Indeed, players from all fields are finding success on the felt--teenagers, movie stars, recent immigrants. But arguably the most successful newcomers are the alumni of an obscure strategy card game called Magic: The Gathering. Magic alumni claimed two of the 10 spots at the final table of the 2004 World Series of Poker, culled from an original field of 2,576. One of these players, 23-year-old David Williams, took second place and a prize of $35 million. For two former players of an obscure fantasy card game to command one-fifth of the final table at the world's premiere poker tournament is an astounding feat, and one that cannot be attributed solely to luck. If you're prone to flights of rhetoric, you might call it a phenomenon. If you're rhetoric-prone and an opportunistic writer, you might even write a book about it.

And so we have David Kushner's newest book, Jonny Magic and the Card Shark Kids, which tells the story of these scruffy wunderkinds and the game that spawned them. The eminently readable book mainly concerns the computational adventures of young savant Jon Finkel, aka Stinkel, aka Finkeltron, aka Jonny Magic, whose odyssey from nerdy outcast to smooth, successful card pro can be read as a metaphor for the rise of the entire gaming craze. Kushner, a contributing editor at Spin, is an experienced explicator of subcultures, and Jonny Magic is useful in helping one understand exactly why poker has gotten as big as it has, although perhaps not in the way...