Aggression pays off - but only in poker. Gambling guru and music critic Anthony Holden talks to Mary Russellabout winning at the tables and losing in love.

He's the Observer'smusic critic, has an MLitt from Oxford (Merton, since you ask), and has written an intriguing book about Lorenzo Da Ponte, the womanising Jewish-born Catholic priest who wrote the libretti for three of Mozart's greatest operas. He smokes (it helps him concentrate), his socks are black, shoes brown slip-ons. His suit (shirt collar unbuttoned, no tie ) is well cut with a hint of world-weariness to it - or maybe it's just that he's been in it since last night and it's now this afternoon.

The quality he thinks makes him good at poker is aggression - and I move back out of range: this is Anthony Holden, Tony at the card table, poker-playing cultured gent who has lost a few pots but won some very big ones and who can hack it as happily in Vegas as at the Oxford Union.

Last time we met was 10 years ago when I interviewed him about his marvellous poker book, Big Deal. Now, we're meeting again to talk about his latest poker book called - guess what - Bigger Deal.

The first book describes the year he spent in Las Vegas, financed by his poker winnings there and if you haven't read it, do. It sets the scene for this next one which is about what happened afterwards because yes, there is life after Vegas. It's called reality and for an opera buff, used to sitting at a green-baize table, counting his chips and reading the faces of those around him, it's a tough number because the poker scene has changed. Now it's blank-faced young men mostly, who sit in front of their computer screens, curtains drawn day and night, playing two or three hands at a time, big into game theory and artificial intelligence and whose main form of communication is a grunt - which translates on the screen as GH or good hand.

He sighs: "They're young, smart and they know all the odds." Many of them, he adds for some reason, are Swedish.

Not that Tony Holden is totally against Internet poker. As he points out, it has its advantages: you don't have to shave or get dressed to do it.

Still, it's clearly not his game. His favourite is Texas Hold 'Em. "It's the Cadillac of poker games, " he says, and is the one he mostly writes about, each game replayed on the page, each hand analysed, each call dissected, each triumph celebrated, each loss mourned but acknowledged.

There have been many books written about poker - some classified as how-to books - but this one is a poker narrative, taking us to, among others, Vegas, Malta, London, New York, Yale and Walsall and putting flesh on poker giants like Doyle Brunson, who plays himself in that great poker movie, Rounders. Brunson lays great stress on courage. "You can't be afraid to lose all your chips," Brunson told Holden after Holden had done just that.

We meet octogenarian Henry Orenstein who escaped death in no fewer than five concentration camps, took up poker in his mid-60s - because bridge was giving him a headache - and went on to develop the under-table camera that allowed the rest of us see what was going on in Channel 4's Late Night Pokerprogramme.

Orenstein, a winner from the get-go, gave Holden his four golden rules: "First is reading the other players; second, finding the tells; third, remembering everything that has happened now and in previous games; fourth, money management." Tells - those small giveaway signs that reveal something about a player's hand - are part of Holden's strategy. One player he knew always shifted his bum a bit when he had a good hand so that it was a simple matter to make sure he always arranged for them to sit on a bench where the shifting bum could make itself felt, so to speak.

The hand Holden gets excited most often about in this book is AK (ace king) and he groans when I point this out mainly because it's not a hand that has always filled. "It's rated the fifth best starting hand," he says, "but I've come to prefer its latest nickname, Anna Kournikova - because it looks good but always loses."

So is poker a gambling game? "It's a very controlled form of gambling," he concedes, but maintains that it is one of the most democratic games you could play. Lawyers, plumbers, builders, poets and journalists sit shoulder to shoulder pitting their skills and their money against each other. "It's not like racing or boxing. You're waging favourable odds in that you know what they are." Not everyone, though, would agree. "Casinos take your money too," says one player. "That's how they come to have chandeliers and thick carpets."

So what characteristics does he suggest a poker player needs, apart from aggression? With most games running into the small hours, he says, and some big tournaments beginning at 9am, you have to be able to survive with little sleep. "And it helps to be fit," he says, smiling ruefully. (Now in his late 50s, endearingly he'd deviated to the Gents before our interview proper began.) As a smoker (though it's not allowed at the table) who takes a sleeping pill to quieten his poker player's brain and enjoys the odd glass of wine, he clearly hasn't become the successful player he is from living good.

AND IT'S WHENhe writes about living that this book really does become a narrative. Ten years ago, our interview took place in the family home where children's bikes lay in a jumble outside the front door and his lovely American wife Cindy swanned in wearing a denim jacket studded with sparkling poker symbols. As The Moll, Cindy stalked the pages of that first book with the walk of a dollar queen. They were both married to other people when their eyes met over a poker game at which he cleaned her out. "I won her at poker," he liked to say, but after 10 years of high-life London, gambling Vegas and family holidays on Cape Cod, she left him.

At the Amazon Room, converted into the world's largest poker hall in Rio's convention centre, the corridors are packed with snack bars and stalls, one of which encourages players to give one per cent of their takings to help fight cancer. Put a Bad Beat on Cancer, says the poster, looking for signatures. Soon, there's another one: Anthony Holden - For Cindy Blake. "The Moll may have left me," he writes, "but a part of me still loves her; and she has since been through breast cancer, which has also robbed her of both her sisters, so this for me is a solemn commitment."

For a moment, his eyes are sad and the incurable romantic in me hears the strains of Il Pagliaccidrift over Waterloo Bridge where he smokes a last cigarette before going into his agent's office. Why did she leave, I ask. "You'd have to ask her that," he says, so I e-mail her to ask what was it like being married to a poker player, but there's no reply.

Bigger Deal: A Year On the New Poker Circuit by Anthony Holden is published by Little, Brown, tomorrow, £17.99.