Poker biographies can be very difficult to pull off successfully. For a start, the very absence of the pre-cursor ‘auto’ is a dead giveaway that the player in question did not write the book themselves, or at the very least dictate to a ghost writer.

Released in 2005, seven years after his death in a Las Vegas hotel room, One of a Kind is the first authorised biography of Stu Ungar – by the man himself in 1998, the year of his death. Written by well-known poker enthusiast and professional Nolan Dalla along with Peter Alson, who also write the 2006 book on Ungar, The Man Behind the Shades.

Alson’s familiarity is with the gambling side of the game, typified by his authorship of Confessions of an Ivy League Bookie and Atlas: From the Streets to the Ring. Dalla’s nous, however, is in the game of poker itself of course, and Ungar position in the game we all love – so often open to interpretation by those of us who never met Ungar – is brought to life in fine style by a man accustomed to such.

The story doesn’t just cut to the World Series of Poker Main Event wins, with plenty of backstory on Ungar’s days working for the Mob in New York, and from the introduction by Ungar’s friend in the game, Mike Sexton, to the tragic closing passages that detail Ungar’s untimely demise in a Vegas hotel room, the book oozes authenticity.