You don’t get a nickname like “The Mouth” for being reticent and retiring. Chances are if you’ve been slapped with that moniker, you’ve earned it. Poker player Mike Matusow – who has achieved worldwide notoriety for his televised tournament blowups and meltdowns – certainly earned it. Watching him in action can be excruciating. It’s not just his prickly banter, mood swings and lack of control that make you cringe; it’s also the way he plays the game itself, at times brilliant, intuitive, swashbuckling; but more often than not reckless and self-defeating. And – though this may simply be clever television – he seems to suffer more bad beats in those televised tournaments than any other player in the world. It’s as if he and the poker gods were knocking heads in their own private meta-contest, and the poker gods were intent on steamrolling him. And given that he is considered one of the top professional poker players in the world (or perhaps, more correctly, one of the most well-known) you’d expect to see the kind of public scorn and antipathy for his antics that his colleague and friend Phil Hellmuth – known as "The Brat" – seems to draw. Such is not the case.

While it’s hard to imagine most people cheering for the obnoxious Phil Hellmuth, what with his 11 World Series of Poker Bracelets and incessant boasts about being the best poker player in history, you get the feeling that as ugly and ridiculous as Mike Matusow has been on television, his seething mix of pathos, rage, humour, self-deprecation, candour and bad luck makes him infinitely more simpatico than Hellmuth – indeed, The Mouth has legions of fans around the world, and seems to be liked by almost every professional (who often have a Mike Matusow anecdote to share). I’d think that reading a Phil Hellmuth autobiography would only expose you to more of his gloating and insufferable self-regard; despite all his hardware, Hellmuth isn’t particularly compelling, and seems to have had an unruffled ride to the top. On the other hand, given all his vices, frailties, neuroses, imperfections and combustibility, Matusow is intrinsically more intriguing.

So when Check-Raising the Devil, Mike “The Mouth” Matusow’s autobiography arrived in our offices I wasted no time sinking my teeth into it, and went through it pretty much in one go. Hellmuth, for once not blowing his own horn (at least not too loudly), actually wrote the book’s foreword and blurbs the back cover with “... love him or hate him, you will not be able to put down this book.” And he’s right. You’ve got to figure that a guy like Matusow – whom, to slightly correct Hellmuth, more people pity than hate – would have a captivating tale to tell, and he does. “My story starts in a trailer park ...” Somehow not surprising. But while most stories that start in a trailer park end there (as Matusow himself points out), he discovered poker, which he had a talent for and which gave him a ticket out of his particular ghetto. Check-Raising the Devil documents his frenetic ride from a lowly trailer to the stretch limousines, strippers, drugs, and rock and roll lifestyle of a successful high-stakes poker player, and then down the path of excess, bad choices and self-doubt that led him directly to jail, where he served a short but tumultuous sentence.

But apart from the racy details of the narrative, which stops short of being a cautionary tale for wannabe poker pros (Matusow seems to have recently regained his form), there’s something about the candour of the narrative voice that engages from the outset and delivers throughout, perhaps not surprising given the author and subject: “Then again, who knows what my life would have been without poker. Maybe I would be running my own furniture store. Or maybe I would have put a bullet in my head long ago after one more pathetic losing night on video poker. But I did drugs and fried my brain, that’s all on me. You’ll never catch me making an excuse for it.” You get the feeling Mike isn’t one to hold back any punches, and he doesn’t. Here’s how he describes himself during one of his low points: “I was so wired I couldn’t get the sleep I knew I needed. I remember lying there in bed and thinking about what my last two weeks had been like. I’d partied on cocaine with my friends because I’d been depressed after the Series, played poker in Paris for a week on meth, and followed it all up with two days of meth and sex with a stripper whose name I didn’t know.”

Matusow wound up doing jail time for a drug offence and he writes about his six months inside in some detail (though admits to blocking a lot of the experience out), including an accidental transfer to a maximum-security wing of the prison that scared the hell out of him. He doesn’t apologize for the drugs but does make a case for excessive attention from the arresting officers and perhaps some abuse either through their machinations or due to systemic negligence. In any event, Matusow emerged from jail in one piece but flat broke and desperate to regain his poker status. “After six months in Clark County Jail I couldn’t wait to play.” And he didn’t have to wait long. Ten days after his release he played in the World Poker Tour tournament at the Bellagio in Vegas. He did not play well and was knocked out of the tournament early.

Nevertheless, The Mouth was back, perhaps more subdued and humble than before, but who wouldn’t be? And depending on how you view poker players – as the skilled professionals they claim to be or the degenerate gamblers they might very well be – it would be difficult to make a case for Matusow being “admirable.” Maybe he’s not altogether admirable, but what is appealing about him, and about this book, is his honesty and his willingness to open up his life to us, warts and all. And while the 41-year-old Matusow still has a few chapters left to complete, let’s hope that at the end of his story he doesn’t wind up back in a trailer park.

CHECK-RAISING THE DEVIL
Mike “The Mouth” Matusow
Cardoza Publishing
267 pages
$32.99

Salvatore Difalco is, among many things, senior writer for TORO and the author of Black Rabbit & Other Stories.