Jonny Magic and the Card Shark Kids: How a Gang of Geeks Beat the Odds and Stormed Las Vegas

Written by David Kushner

Narrated by David Kushner

If you think a gang of real-life geeks can't take on the world and win big...think again. And whatever you do, don't sit down across a gaming table from Jon Finkel, better known as Jonny Magic.

Jonny Magic and the Card Shark Kids is his amazing true story: the jaw-dropping, zero-to-hero chronicle of a fat, friendless boy from New Jersey who found his edge in a game of cards and turned it into a fortune!

The ultimate bully-magnet, Finkel grew up heckled and hazed until destiny came in the form of a trading-card game called Magic: The Gathering. Magic exploded from nerdy obsession to mainstream mania and made the teenage Finkel an ultra-cool world champion.

Once transformed, this young shark stormed poker rooms from the underground clubs of New York City to the high-stakes tables online, until he landed on the largest card-counting blackjack team in the country. Taking Vegas for millions, Finkel's squad of brainy gamers became the biggest players in town. Then they took on the town's biggest game, the World Series of Poker, and walked away with more than $3.5 million!

Thrilling, edgy, and ferociously feel-good, the odyssey of these underdogs-turned-overlords is the stuff of pop-culture legend. Acclaimed author David Kushner masterfully deals out the outrageous details while bringing to life a cast of characters rife with aces, kings, knaves¿and more than a few jokers. If you secretly believe every player has his day, you're right. Here's the proof.

This audio also includes an interview with Jon Finkel, a.k.a. Jonny Magic.

©2005 David Kushner; (P)2005 Listen & Live Audio

• Language: English
• Publisher: Listen & Live Audio
• Release date: Jan 1, 2005
• ISBN: 9781593163457

David Kushner

A contributing editor of Rolling Stone, David Kushner also writes for publications including The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Wired, The New York Times Magazine, New York, GQ, and Esquire. Kushner served as the digital culture commentator for National Public Radio’s Weekend Edition Sunday, and has taught journalism at Princeton University and New York University. He has been featured in The Best Business Writing, The Best American Crime Reporting, and The Best Travel Writing, and his ebook The Bones of Marianna: A Reform School, a Terrible Secret, and a Hundred-Year Fight for Justice. His books include The Players Ball; Alligator Candy: A Memoir (an NPR Best Book of the Year); Jacked: The Outlaw Story of Grand Theft Auto; Levittown: Two Families, One Tycoon, and the Fight for Civil Rights in America’s Legendary Suburb; Jonny Magic and the Card Shark Kids: How a Gang of Geeks Beat the Odds and Stormed Las Vegas; and Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture.

Reviews for Jonny Magic and the Card Shark Kids

[mrs_mcgreevy · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

These days, you can't throw a stick in a bookstore without hitting a gambling book. Poker tournaments are becoming regular sights on network TV, and online poker sites grow more and more popular. And if you watch those TV tourneys, you'll notice one thing: the final table is often filled with guys who look like they might still be in college. David Kushner, author of Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture tells us who those guys are and how they came to be there in a story that should warm the cockles of any true geek's heart.

Johnny Magic and the Card Shark Kids is many things, among them a history of D&D culture and an account of the creation and subsequent pop culture explosion of the game Magic: the Gathering. But first and foremost, it's the story of Jon Finkel, a prototypical uber-geek who harnesses his massive brain to the study of Magic and goes farther than anyone would have believed.

Finkel's story resonates with the reader because we've all been there, to some degree. We've all felt alienated and alone, and a good many of us have turned, like Jon did, to the welcoming arms of SF, fantasy, and D&D. Watching Jon grow and change from a lonely, troubled teen into a successful and happy adult is an uplifting experience, and Kushner does a great job telling his story.

Kushner is equally adept at telling the story of Richard Garfield and the creation of Magic: the Gathering. We get it all, from idea to inception. Plus, Finkel's story is so intertwined with the story of Magic that we end up with a pretty good history of the cultural phenomenon that the game became.

People like Garfield and Finkel leap off the page, as do the more minor characters -- Kushner is adept at capturing their voices and letting them speak to the reader.

Everything about the book works, from story to design. It even includes appendices on the basics of Magic: the Gathering, Blackjack, and Texas Hold 'em. There's an author afterword where Kushner lays out his own geek credentials, and I'm tempted to believe that this is the secret to the book's success: Kushner is one of us. The story rings true not just because it's factual, but because the author really understands his subject. It's Kushner's gift to be able to share that knowledge in a way that makes us all able to understand as well.