Review of Telling Lies and Getting Paid

Title:

Telling Lies and Getting Paid

Author:

Michael Konik

Publisher:

The Lyons Press

Date:

2002 (paperback edition)

ISBN:

1-58574-741-6

Pages:

241

Price:

$14.95

Reviewed by Nick Christenson, npc@lvrevealed.com

February 24, 2003

What do a backgammon hustler, a Chinese entrepreneur, a sports-crazy nun, and author Michael Konik all have in common? They're all subjects of stories in Konik's second gambling book, Telling Lies and Getting paid, the follow-on to his highly acclaimed The Man With $100,000 Breasts and Other Stories. The newer of Konik's books was recently released in paperback, making the present a good time to review this work.

Konik's second book contains fourteen stories with some sort of gambling slant, most of which were previously published by Konik in various magazines (e.g., Poker Digest, Cigar Aficionado, etc.) since his first book went to press. While some are better than others, even the least of these stories is pretty darn entertaining. While the story of a man who won two separate chances at a huge sum of money didn't really tickle my interest, Konik's description of feverish gambling on the Chinese island of Macau had me thoroughly engrossed. Although I didn't get all that excited by Konik's analysis of common mistakes made on the TV show, Who Wants to be a Millionaire (probably, mostly because I had already done a similar analysis myself), I thoroughly enjoyed his description of the events at the ultra-secretive Blackjack Ball.

Konik isn't afraid to take a fresh look at topics he has already covered. In 100K Breasts he reported on the shady, yet popular and extremely lucrative business of offshore sports betting. In Telling Lies, he revisits the topic, reconsidering most of what he said in the previous story. He also isn't afraid to bare his soul a little as he concludes the book with it's title story, the tale of Konik himself playing in the final event of the World Series of Poker. As a poker player who longs to play in this event myself and as a "wannabe" writer, I feel real empathy toward the author in this story. It becomes even more compelling as a prelude to Jim McManus' forthcoming book, Positively Fifth Street, about his experiences in the same tournament.

Overall, I think Konik worked with inherently more interesting subject matter in the first book making it slightly better than his follow-on. Still, that's about the harshest thing I can say about Telling Lies and Getting Paid. I enjoyed the stories in this book a great deal, and it's certainly a worthy successor to The Man With $100,000 Breasts and Other Stories. Certainly, anyone who enjoyed Konik's first book will enjoy the second one, and no doubt anticipates a third.

Capsule:

Konik's second book is certainly a worthy successor to his first. Telling Lies and Getting Paid contains fourteen well-written stories with some tie to the world of gambling. Konik makes a diverse set of subjects come alive. It's my opinion that his first book is marginally better then his second one, but all that means is that people who have neither should go out and buy them both, and then read them in chronological order. Telling Lies and Getting Paid is a great deal of fun.