The cult of poker has sparked plenty of literary offerings (although many of them could not be described as literate) in recent years but, almost without exception, they focus on the American poker scene.



This is not necessarily a bad thing – the United States is after all the home of poker – but there is a limit to the number of times the same stories about Phil Hellmuth, Daniel Negreanu and Chris Moneymaker can be recited before the reader stifles a yawn and logs onto a poker site to make their own action.



Des Wilson’s Swimming With The Devilfish brings us a host of new stories about the top players and some of the grinders of the European poker scene. Most of the stories are about British players but the stories cover tournaments and events around the world so there is no danger of this volume having too insular a feel.



Wilson started this book with the intention of writing a biography of Dave ‘Devilfish’ Ulliott. Somewhere along the way it appears he discovered either that there was a limited amount he could say about Ulliott or he got fed up with working with his subject. He is too polite to say which it was but there is a slightly disjointed feel to this book as he starts off with 65 pages on the life and times of the Devilfish before veering off to the frankly more interesting lives of the current generation of top players in Britain.



Much of what we learn about Ulliott is fascinating. We discover how a tearaway boy in the hardscrabble world of Hull (a port on the east coast of England that is famed for its grittiness) became a juvenile delinquent engaged in a life of petty crime before graduating to an advanced criminal life of safecracking and housebreaking. Unsurprisingly the long arm of the law soon caught up with him and Ulliott spend time detained ‘at Her Majesty’s Pleasure’.



As well as criminal convictions, Ulliott also developed a love of gambling. We learn how he won and lost thousands on the horses and greyhounds before he took up poker in 1990. Ulliott clearly had a natural talent for the game and, at a time where most games were largely weak-passive, his natural aggression allowed him to dominate many of the games he played. In 1997 he went to Vegas for the first time and comes back with $742,000 in cash and a gold World Series bracelet.



Wilson’s portrait of Ulliott is carefully neutral, with Devilfish’s entourage providing most of the evidence for his success at poker. The reader is asked to draw their own conclusions about Ulliott; not everyone will be convinced that they would like to meet this English ‘geezer’ either at the poker table or away from it.



There are plenty of characters in this book you would like to meet. The cast includes most of the top British players – Willie Tann, Lucy Rokach, Dave Colclough, Neil Channing, John Shipley, Paul ‘Action Jack’ Jackson, the Hendon Mob and so on – and has a good history of how these players got into poker. Most of them are sympathetic characters, not least because they are reassuringly honest about how poker has left them penniless on many occasions. Very few American players will admit in print that they have spent months, if not years, scrabbling around for their stake money (and in some cases still are) yet here are some of the household names of British poker talking about how much debt they have been in thanks to their gambling.



In fact, the more you learn about all these players, the more you realize how hard it is to win at poker. Until the last couple of years most of the games in the UK were played in private spielers (private card clubs) that were usually based around two or three ‘mug’ players whose wealth kept the game going. It is clear that not all of these games were played at casino standards and that a winning poker player not only had to be the master of the game but also to be good at spotting cheating.



Wilson writes briefly and modestly about his own poker play and attempts to improve his play to the level of his subjects; he nicely contrasts the mistakes most amateurs make versus how the professionals play and I think he does a great job of explaining why so many of the top players are so aggressive and how their play is different in cash games versus tournaments.



In all, Wilson has done an excellent job of describing the current British poker scene and has got pretty deep into the background of the leading players. One small irritant is that he seems to have forgotten the past tense. Every story – whether it is 10 years old or 10 weeks old – seems to be told in the present tense. Call me picky but stylistically this was hard to bear. That quibble aside, this is an excellent addition to any poker library and one that any player – American or European – can use to improve their game by learning from those who make their living from the wonderful game of poker



Swimming with the Devilfish by Des Wilson is published by Pan Macmillan