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Book Reviews
by Nick Christenson
Amarillo Slim in a World Full of Fat People
by Amarillo Slim Preston with Greg Dinkin
Harper Entertainment 2003
ISBN 0-06-054235-7, 288pp, $24.95
There are few people, if there’s anyone at all, who is as widely known in gambling circles as Amarillo Slim Preston. A snooker and pool hustler, one-time book maker, proposition bettor, road gambler, and worldclass poker player.
He has won bets by broad jumping on a golf course, white water rafting down an impossible river, winning the main event at the World Series of Poker, and riding a camel through a casino in Marrakech, and by listing these events I’m just scratching the surface of his illustrious career. As Slim himself says, “If there’s anything I’ll argue about, I’ll either bet on it or shut up,” and his win percentage has been impressive by anyone’s standards.
In his autobiography, cowritten by noted gambling author Greg Dinkin, Slim walks the reader through his life, from his birth in smalltown Arkansas, through his upbringing, his service in the US military, his gambling exploits on the road, his celebrity after winning at the WSOP, to his current, “milder” years. Since winning the WSOP, Slim has dodged death numerous times, including a kidnaping by a Colombian drug lord and most recently after being crushed by his horse in a wilderness accident. There’s little that the author hasn’t done in his life, and his exploits are rightly the stuff of legend.
This book is written in a smooth, conversational style that perfectly captures the folksy tone of its subject. Despite his colloquial style, however, Amarillo Slim is nobody’s fool. Beneath the famous Stetson is a razor sharp mind, and while he may be more known for wit than wisdom, there is plenty of both in his book. “Amarillo Slim in a World Full of Fat People” may not provide a great deal of direct gambling advice, but deep down there is an abundance of real experience that should work its way into the heads of attentive readers.
All that is beside the point of the book, of course. More than anything else, Slim’s stories are entertaining, and to his credit, not all of the stories he tells wind up with the protagonist smelling like a rose. Because of this the human aspects of Amarillo Slim make him an even more compelling character than the man of legend. In this book there are just so many amazing stories that there is no way that any but Slim’s closest friends, and perhaps even they, will have heard them all. While some of the stories differ in detail between this volume and other sources, for example, Slim’s first book, the out-of-print “Play Poker to Win”, this is in no way a criticism of the book. I have no doubt that as hard as it might be to believe, every one of these adventures and misadventures did, indeed, happen to our hero, even if every detail may not be perfectly recollected by a well-travelled mind.
The bottom line is that this book is outrageously entertaining, just as much as anyone who knows of its subject could possibly expect. Each story is more amazing than the next, and the only disappointment comes when the final page is turned. I would expect that anyone with even a passing interest in one of the gambling world’s most colorful characters would greatly enjoy this book. Amarillo Slim and Greg Dinkin have done us all a marvelous service by capturing these amazing escapades in print for generations to come.
This article was published in the Aug 11th 2003 edition of Poker Player.
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