It’s not often that Magic players get a book seemingly written specifically for them, and particularly not one that is filled with potentially fascinating stories about Magic, Poker, Blackjack, and the man renowned as the greatest Magic player of all time. That’s what David Kushner has provided with Jonny Magic and the Card Shark Kids, but how well does he bring it off? That’s what I attempted to figure out on my flight back from Mexico City.
Let’s start with the good stuff, shall we? To Kushner’s credit, he has a good nose for a story. I saw him when he was at Pro Tour: Seattle chatting with his “card shark kids” and as I recall, his exact topic wasn’t determined at that point. Williams had just won his $3.5 Million, Berkowitz had probably already shredded through $200k under the age of 17, but in the midst of that static he still managed to find Finkel, now an increasingly ephemeral figure in the game but still at the heart of many of its best tales.
Kushner’s storytelling is also solid, if a bit bombastic. He properly sets the stage at Glitter Gulch 2004, where the most non-Magic readers will identify the best. For those not hip to the lingo, that’s where David Williams would later become bona fide, falling to Greg Raymer before the eyes of tens of millions of viewers and making enough money to never have to participate in porn for dollars again. Assuming it happens again (perhaps in “Williams Gone Wild!” or a leaked sex tape with the delectable and very sweet Shannon Elizabeth) it would always be for the sheer pleasure/entertainment of it. Williams wasn’t the only Magic player there that weekend though. Pikula played in the main event, as did Brock Parker, Thomas Keller, and ten to twenty more names you’ve heard of over the years including former fat kid (and our hero), Jon Finkel.
With the future stage set, Kushner regresses to his protagonist’s childhood, back to the days when Jon was a fat, geeky intellectual powerhouse. For most of our community, this is where he sets the hook. How many of you were hyper-smart kids in school who happened to be discriminated against by normals? Were you a disaffected teen? Did you have a hard time finding your passion in life or hell, anybody acceptable to hang out with? Anybody actually ever get peed on? Kushner says Finkel did, thus proving that Jon is smarter, fatter*, and more urinated on than pretty much any of us. You knew the former even if you didn’t know the latter, but by relating the grim details of Jon’s younger years, Kushner’s giving you a pathetic little connection with our hero that’s surprisingly effective. In fact, the portrait painted of Jon’s life at this time is pretty much what you’d expect – he was smarter than his teachers, bored in school, a failure with the ladies, and desperately looking for anything that would give him an outlet of creativity and competition.
Kushner’s next stop is to give a brief background about how and where Magic was developed. Benevolent Godfather Richard Garfield makes an appearance discussing his own history and Magic’s origins, and the framework for Magic as a competitive sport is set by Skaff Elias and co. Enter the Pro Tour, framed as an “olympics of the mind.” Jon’s connection with the game is also firmly established at this point, from his time at Neutral Ground and sleeping in Penn Station, to meeting the OMS brothers, to finding a group of gamers like Happy John Chinook and David Bachmann closer to home, and finally to his appearance at Pro Tour 1 (in the Junior division) – the stage for bigger and better things is set. I won’t bore you further vague details about the Magic years as I assume many of you already know some of them and leaving others unsaid so you can still take joy from learning them anew out of the book is warranted. Regardless, *spoiler alert* Jon goes on to make more friends and win hundreds of thousands of dollars playing Magic.
As odd as it may seem to many of you, Finkel’s life at that point didn’t exactly feel fulfilled. What, you say? He was the best! On top of the world! He was making a living strictly off gaming, what wasn’t to love? Well, there are other games out there, and ones that are considerably more lucrative than Magic. Eventually Finkel got involved in Poker and did reasonably well in that before getting kicked out of a New York club for a month, and being sucked up by some very intelligent folks in one of the New York Black Jack teams. Turns out Jonny Magic was born to count cards.
Now this is where one of my major criticisms of the book comes in. The book itself weighs in at 183 pages with the epilogue, making it a fast read. In fact, it’s a blisteringly fast read, to the point that a lot of material and individuals that I know were around during this point who would make utterly fascinating additions to the story are glossed over or left out entirely. The Dead Guys get play almost exclusively through Dave Price, and Dave only seems to be in the story because he was later involved in the Black Jack teams. Chris Pikula, the other major Dead Guy everyone talks about gets almost no discussion whatsoever except to say he made a final table at the WSOP in 2002 or so. This is despite that fact that he’s been making some very good money at poker for some time, as have Brock and Kyle “Kenneth” Rose, which would seem to further substantiate the fact that not only are the card shark kids really good at this and Magic really does make you better at it, but these folks have been doing it (and getting rich off of it) for a while.
That brings me to perhaps my biggest complaint about the book. Kushner’s penchant for bombast aside, he also sets forth this ridiculously rigid framework right from the start and does his damndest to cram everything inside of it. Somehow Kushner got it in his head that he had to tie Dave and Jon together at various points in the story to make everything work, and then he had to tie everything else into this “card shark kids” theme. What this makes for are some connections that just didn’t work for me – apparently Jon and Williams did have a connection as far back as ’98 or so, but I don’t need to be hammered over the head every two years with the fact that they still know each other. This made the flow feel unnecessarily forced, when if Kushner could have gotten out of the way for a while and just told the stories instead of trying to stuff things into his predetermined box it all had to fit in, everything would have been fine.
There are also frequent moments in the story where Kushner whisks past whole periods of Finkel’s life which contain tremendous other odysseys, simply because it seems like Kushner has some place he needs to go and can be bothered to dally with further gems. It’s as if he had some mantra running through his head while writing that kept blaring, “I still have to get to the part with Williams at the end.” What elements of Kushner’s research were left on the sidelines, what great stories were related and then never transcribed? I know for a fact many of these exist because I’ve casually asked for them myself just when hanging out with the New York crew, and it would be great to have a more permanent record for any of them in such a public work. Hell, there are great David Williams stories that go untold here as well (like Dave’s brief early film career, or his post-World Series dating habits, or his finals tables on the World Poker Tour or his appearance on Tilt or…), making the book seem as much a missed opportunity to me as a boon to the community as a whole. Alas, I guess that will have to wait as the rest of the world tries to determine if there’s any money in delving further into this realm of niche geekdom.
The last problem is one that many of you will find grating, but the public at large won’t notice. Kushner’s writing about actual mechanics of Magic: the Gathering caused me physical pain. To be honest, it’s exactly what I expected to happen and couldn’t be avoided unless he’d had someone edit those sections to make sense, but in this case prior warning did not allow me to avoid frequent gnashing of teeth. Using my handy thesaurus, I suppose I should have felt it was “enlightening” to learn that “when tapped, [Grave Pact] requires the other player to discard powerful creatures when you relinquish one of your own.” Would it have been too much extra money out of the budget to find some monkey with a clue to edit this sections? Doubtful… we monkeys tend to work pretty cheap.
Not content with my own opinion, I sought out those of some people around the community who had already read the book for their viewpoint on things. Fan favorite, candy striper, and good zygote Gadiel Szleifer felt Kushner was a bit of a hack, but said he enjoyed the book anyway. Fountain of snark Noah Weil felt similarly to me in stating, “Good material, badly presented. The End.” Nameless suits at Wizards of the Coast were pretty happy with the way the book turned out, saying, “He didn’t lie about anything that happened and his portrayal of the game looked excellent, so that was good.” Last night serendipity struck when I was chatting with completely unmentioned Dead Guy and Wizards R&D member Worth Wollpert and he had this to say:
Worthless: Jon is pissed most about the binary f*ckup I think.
Worthless: I messaged him the other day
Worthless: and said
Worthless: “whats 4 in binary?”
Worthless: and his reply was
Worthless: “who do you think f*cked that up, me or him?”
The factual errors in the book are annoying, but pretty much what you’d expect from something like this as there is a lot of information to take in and keep track of. For the record, I would like to point out that any buffoon who watched the final episode of the 2004 World Series of Poker happens to know it was 3rd place finisher Josh Arieh who said, “Please beat this fat motherf*cker,” and not “the quiet voice of another staffer.” With Norm Chad practically apoplectic about Arieh and his behavior, you’d think that detail would have stuck, but alas it was not to be.
Final Recommendation
So what’s the final verdict? I liked the book and many of the problems that I had with it will not be problems you or nearly any other reader will run into unless you know a lot about the people involved. Kushner has at least a modicum of writing talent and the subject itself is compelling as hell, so in spite of feeling average to me, it earns a boost simply because the book is at least partially about Magic. Would I suggest paying a full $25 dollars for your copy? Hell no. 183 brisk pages does not merit the price tag, but it you could find it for around $15 or so, I’d say pick it up and then pass it to your friends when you are done.
If you find you want more in this general vein, both Bringing Down the House by Ben Mezrich and Positively Fifth Street by James McManus are good, recent, and currently available in paperback. If you can’t stand the wait to order Jonny Magic and don’t want to stop by Barnes and Noble on the way home to pick up a copy, here’s a helpful link directly to Amazon’s listing for the book.
Cheers,
Ted Knutson
Mail us at https://sales.starcitygames.com/contactus/contactform.php?emailid=2
PostScript: Personal Reflection
First of all, let me start by saying it’s just plain cool to read a book about a bunch of people you personally have met or know through people who were there at the time. Even when I steeled myself not to be enchanted by it, it still turned out to be cool. I’m such a sucker.
Two quotes from Finkel in the Prelude really got me thinking about how I’m now sad that he essentially retired before I really got a chance to get to know the guy. The first one is, “We could be finding a cure for cancer, but instead we’re playing cards. Why is that?” I recently wrote something in my journal about how “playing cards” could certainly be restated as “exploring Azeroth” and may be contributing to one of the greatest brain drains the world has ever seen. The power gaming holds over really smart people is a bit frightening at times.
The second quote is: “It’s amazing that a guy like me can become the best in the world at something.” I think that sort of goal is what subtly (or not-so-subtly) drives a lot of us to do what we do. Men are naturally competitive, whether they are battling at sports, video games, or whatever and there’s a lot of glory in sitting at the top of the geek food chain, especially when that position means you are likely smart enough to earn hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars a year if you can just find something that motivates you to do so. Even as a kid, the concept that maybe there was something out there that I could be the best at was a driving force for me. I’ve long been impressed by how many gamers seemingly create a pretty good income out of nothing, and particularly how long the lifespan of pros on the Pro Tour is these days. Perhaps more intriguing, however, is that nearly any one of these formerly maladjusted (yet now successful) dorks is plenty smart enough to earn more money than most of us have ever imagined both in normal jobs and how Finkel has done it by taking sort of grey economies and milking them for all they are worth. It gives me hope that many of us who despise the 9-5 grind may never have to actually go back to it if we don’t want to.
Two final thoughts before I wrap this up: When I was in college, my best friend was exactly like Finkel. He was the guy who got a 1580 on his SATs and came into college with 3 semesters of credit and was clearly the smartest guy pretty much anybody had ever met, except… he was also good looking. Like really good looking. What a bastard. For long-time readers, this is the same guy that learned how to swing dance after his girlfriend dumped him in graduate school and who managed to parlay that into a double-dip with two actual models at the same time. Last time I talked to him, he was thinking about marrying a Houston Rockets cheerleader. What does this have to do with anything? There are some people even luckier than Finkel, I guess…
Also, as I said in the actual review section, Kushner does a good job at striking the chords that make geeks identify with Finkel. Because of that, I found myself wondering if Jon hates every single stupid thing he has ever done in his life as much as I do. I think there’s a special living hell that involves smart people committing self-flagellation for all the dumb sh*t we’ve done in our lives, even when we didn’t know better at the time. Does anybody else experience this?
Alright, enough babbling. Enjoy the book and your weekend.
*Okay, maybe not fatter. You kids need to find an exercise program and stick to it. Stop eating all that fast food while yer at it too.