Before hole-card cams, Jim McManus or Chris Moneymaker, there was only one reliable authority on the World Series of Poker and its eccentric characters. And that was by joining Al Alvarez by experiencing poker through his eyes and words in the classic “The Biggest Game in Town,” which remains the greatest single text ever written about the game.

It’s not a stretch to say Alvarez scooped all of this now-poker-crazy country more than 25 years ago when the U.K. native spent a month at Binion’s during the WSOP and chronicled the characters – winners, losers, cheaters, high rollers and degenerates, gamblers all – that he witnessed in his unforgettable and timeless prose.

To say “The Biggest Game in Town” is required reading for a poker fan would be the equivalent of saying “Catcher in the Rye” is a nice novel, or the Bible a recommended text for religious folks. It’s that mesmerizing; Alvarez is Hemingway on a flush draw, and he gets there.

His book is three decades old and, yet, it never gets old. Before writing this review, I realized it had been a couple of years since my last reading and decided it would be a good idea to brush up on a few chapters. Then, like a song that reminds you of your first love or a film so moving you catch something new with each viewing, Alvarez hooked me again on the first page with this passage: “Women in halters and men in cowboy boots and Stetsons jostled each other around the roulette and craps tables, rattled the armies of slot machines, perched in semicircles before the blackjack dealers.”

You realize right away you are reading something special, and it becomes more difficult to put down with each turn of a page. Before poker was televised and ahead of numerous would-be copycats, Alvarez enlightened readers to the magical and mystical world behind the scenes of big-stakes poker, visuals that seemed to be his secret alone until he put pen to paper and chronicled it all for the rest of us.

His influence on the game should not be understated. When Alvarez covered the WSOP, the Main Event had fewer than 100 participants and a jump of 10 participants was considered significant. Of those, you could bet that at least five would cite “The Biggest Game in Town” as a motivating factor for them to take a shot on poker’s biggest stage.

Alvarez describes the biggest games featuring larger-than-life characters in a free-flowing and engaging prose that was - - and remains -- unrivaled by almost any writer of his generation. He sweetly and poetically records the lives and times of legends such as Johnny Moss, Doyle Brunson, Puggy Pearson and Jack Straus, their insatiable appetites for action of unfathomable heights and wanton disregard for the value of money.

Take, for example, this account of Moss in a heads-up match for the 1981 WSOP seven-card, high-low split title: “Moss, who was wearing a pale brown suit flecked with darker brown, like a chocolate chip cookie, took off his heavy gold bracelet and watch and laid them on the table beside his chips. His shirt was open, showing a necklace of heavy twisted gold.”

Or this observation of poker players at the WSOP: “I have never seen so many apparently healthy men gathered together in one place for so long with such single-mindedness: no sex, no drink, just the turn of the cards hour after hour and the little thrill of excitement and expectation at each new deal.”

The amusing stories, laugh-inducing quotes from the game’s luminaries and vivid details of everyone and everything Alvarez encounters are far too many to mention here. But together, they form a lasting masterpiece that stands as unique even against newer works that have tried to pick up where “The Biggest Game in Town” left off.

Anthony Holden, Alvarez’s colleague and fellow countryman, tried to one-up him in the ego-driven and mostly dull “Big Deal,” in which Holden writes of his experience of giving professional poker in Las Vegas a shot for one year. McManus wrote a fantastic and hip account of his run to the 2000 WSOP Main Event final table in “Positively Fifth Street.”

However, Holden and McManus share an inherent flaw in that their stories are largely about themselves. Alvarez understands that those around him are much more interesting; from the glitziest high rollers to the hard-luck punters hanging their hopes on nickel slots, his mastery of the psychology and imagery that surrounds downtown Las Vegas and Glitter Gulch are what puts “The Biggest Game in Town” in a class of its own.