Cowboys Full is the story of poker, from its roots to its ascent as a global—but especially an American—phenomenon. It describes how early Americans took a French parlor game and, with a few extra cards and an entrepreneurial spirit, turned it into a national craze by the time of the Civil War. Presidents have used poker and its strategies to explain policy, to relax, to negotiate, and as a political networking tool. The ways we do battle and business are echoed by poker tactics: cheating and thwarting cheaters, leveraging uncertainty, bluffing and sussing out bluffers, managing risk and reward.

Cowboys Full shows how poker has become a contest of mathematical precision and luck. It combines colorful history with firsthand experience from today’s professional tour. It examines poker’s remarkable hold on American culture, from paintings by Frederic Remington to countless poker novels, movies, and plays. Cowboys Full is sure to become the classic account of America’s favorite pastime.

Author James McManus is also known for his earlier book Positively Fifth Street: Murderes, Cheetahs, and Binion's World Series of Poker. He has been the poker columnist of the New York Times and currently writes the history column for Card Player. He has spoken about the game at Yale, Harvard, Google Inc., Goldman Sachs, and on numerous media outlets.

“Entertaining, informative and genial. . . . McManus writes with verve [and] authority. [A] copious, lively account of poker’s past and present.”

Robert Pinsky, New York Times Book Review

 “If there were a World Series of Poker Writing, then James McManus just won the main event. It’s not only that McManus delivers the definitive history of the game with Cowboys Full: The Story of Poker, it’s that he’s so entertaining doing it that even non-pokeristas will get swept along for the ride. [He] manages to transform poker into a character in a historical novel—a character we follow from its ancestry in Asia, Europe and the Middle East to New Orleans in the early 1800s, then up the Mississippi on riverboats to every corner of the inchoate country. . . . Just as Doyle Brunson’s Super System and Dan Harrington’s Harrington on Hold’em are the books on playing poker, Cowboys Full is now the book about the game.”

Rathe Miller, Philadelphia Inquirer