Poker Cheating First-Time Author?

Everyone remembers how the magazine reporter and author James McManus broke into the professional poker world and scored big at the World Series of poker, right? Well, if not, it was through a writing assignment for Harper's Magazine to cover the 2000 WSOP. It was there that he perhaps crossed the line from writer to player. But now, this first-time author, Martha Frankel, went overboard in her poker research, but in a very negative way. Read this New York Times article to see how:

“MY heart is pounding,” Martha Frankel, first-time author, says when a reporter calls to reschedule. “You’re not calling to cancel, are you? My nephew is dying. I told him, ‘You die on Sunday, I’m not coming to the funeral, because I got The New York Times coming up on Monday.’ ”

This is what the seasoned reporter regards as an Open and Forthright Personality, an indication that the only enticement that will be needed to convince the subject to reveal his or her innermost secrets is the word “Hello” — even if, as is the case with Ms. Frankel, the subject is a veteran interviewer herself.

Meet her at a bakery on a miserable morning of freezing rain and treacherous roads in the Catskills, not far from Woodstock, and in five minutes you will feel not only as if you have known her all your life, but as if you still have one of her sweaters. As her book, “Hats and Eyeglasses: A Family Love Affair with Gambling,” to be published next week by Tarcher, is an intimate memoir about her online gambling addiction, with a cheerful foray into the drugs she’s tried over the years and didn’t become addicted to and an explicit description of what she’s done in bed to keep her husband, Steve Heller, from getting interested in her family’s cockamamie quick-money schemes, it probably makes sense. Then again, Ms. Frankel, who is 57, throws off more warmth than the rental car.

“You O.K.?” Ms. Frankel asks when the reporter arrives, and while her lips move, the voice is Fran Drescher’s. “I saw those ambulances screaming up 28 — I was worried. We’re going to my house in my car.”

And, after arriving there: “Watch out on those steps — they’re icy. Two days before Christmas I slipped on them and got two black eyes. Everybody in town was saying to Steve, ‘Ya finally did it, huh?’ ”

The house is trimmed in ’50s turquoise and accessorized inside with car parts by Mr. Heller, a furniture builder, sculptor and ’50s car fanatic who runs a shop called Fabulous Furniture a few miles away in Boiceville. Taillights from a ’59 Chevy Impala are mounted over the fireplace; the kitchen cabinet pulls are made from car trim.

When the tour is over, she sits down in the living room to talk. How, she is asked, did the nephew take it when she told him that if his funeral conflicted with the interview she wouldn’t attend?

“Fine,” Ms. Frankel says. Apparently he’d already said there was no way he’d be leaving before the Super Bowl. A few minutes later, though, her tone changes and she seems on the verge of tears. “My niece has children the same age I was when my father died — knowing what’s going to happen, it’s almost too much for me to bear.”

Ms. Frankel’s father was an accountant, her mother a bookkeeper. She grew up in a housing project in the Bronx and then in Queens, where games of chance — mah-jongg for the women, poker for the men — were a part of life. And though the title of her book, “Hats and Eyeglasses,” is an old gambling expression for a dreadful run at the table, Ms. Frankel’s childhood memories are happy ones, in which gambling equaled friendship equaled food equaled laughter equaled love. They bet on everything, from sports to how much her mother would lose at Weight Watchers.

Then, just after she was accepted to the Bronx High School of Science, her father died. His death unmoored her; she chose a less challenging high school. At the University of Miami, she had a brief marriage to a classmate who bet on sports games and was dealing cocaine. Ms. Frankel left him after he was convicted of selling cocaine to an undercover agent, then dropped out of college and moved to Woodstock, N.Y. There, 38 years ago, she met Steve Heller. The moment he said he did not watch football, she says, she fell in love.

She managed her husband’s business for 10 years, and then, after meeting Annie Flanders, who was then the editor of Details magazine, started writing, specializing in celebrity interviews. Her work appeared in Movieline magazine, Cosmopolitan and American Film. Her Web site, marthafrankel.com, shows pictures of her with her arms around her subjects, and many of the stories were the genial “tell us who you most loved working with” sort, but not all.

At times, Martha Frankel could be not merely formidable, but outrageous, asking Anne Rice if she and her husband, Stan Rice, had engaged in one of the sexual practices Ms. Rice wrote about in the S-and-M novels she published under pseudonyms. “Stan was alive then,” Ms. Frankel says. “I wouldn’t have done it if he had died.” She reconsiders. “No, I would have. I just didn’t like her. “

Life was good. Ms. Frankel was flying to Europe, bringing in $3,500 to $4,000 a profile and making about $80,000 a year. Then in 1995, while writing a script about a card shark, she tracked down a family friend who had been a professional poker player. She also joined a weekly neighborhood game, where she limited herself to betting $99 and never, she says, went over her limit. About once a month, she’d visit a casino. She remembers that she usually made money, but she was becoming obsessed with the game.

“Before ’95, I never turned down an assignment,” Ms. Frankel says. “If the money was good enough, I’d interview Adolf Hitler and make him sound very fascinating: I’m a ho. But when I started playing poker, I started turning down stories. It was the beginning of a slippery road.” In 1999, after finding out about online poker, Ms. Frankel registered at a site called Paradise Poker. The betting limit was $300 a day, and up to $3,000 a month. She lost from Day 1, but she could not stop.

“It was almost like a chemical change in me,” she says. “I always heard crack cocaine was so different from cocaine — it has this thing that immediately hooks you. I was hooked on online poker the minute I started.”

What made online poker different from the poker she had played for years?

It was faster, Ms. Frankel says. In an amateur game, perhaps 18 hands would be dealt an hour; in the casinos it might be 30, but online it could be 60. And there were no people to “read.”

“It was like a visceral change in me,” she says. “All of a sudden I was in front of a computer eight or nine hours a day. It didn’t seem like real money.”

Playing poker with friends or at the casino, she always knew when it was time to leave, but online, she says, “I was unable to leave.”

She began playing 10 days a month and working the rest, so it seemed things “evened out.” Then she persuaded the site’s administrators to raise her monthly limit to $5,000. She could not make enough money to pay off her losses, so they were mounting. She handled the household bills, and could hide much of what was happening from her husband, but at times the mortgage payment was late and money was tight. Too ashamed to tell anyone what was happening, she withdrew.

“Every day this was my prayer — probably this is the prayer of every addict: Please let me stop today, please let today be the day,” she says. “I had no idea what would make me stop. It felt like it was out of my hands.”

Her mother was sick, but Ms. Frankel discouraged her from calling. because calls broke her online connection. Then one day her mother called, crying. “She was hysterical,” Ms. Frankel says. “She kept asking what she had done to make me so angry.” Her voice clutches up. “She was a great woman and that I made her feel like that made me feel so awful.”

That was the end of online poker. Ms. Frankel went to visit her mother; she took every assignment she could and kept away from her computer, writing at her husband’s shop. She had played online poker for a year and a half, and while she does not reveal the figure in her book, she estimates that she lost $50,000 to $60,000, compounded by interest rates of up to 20 to 23 percent, which took her a few years to pay off.

Still, she was unable to tell her husband and friends about the addiction until last year, when she sent them her manuscript. Her husband was infuriated, she writes. He demanded that she tell him how much she had lost. She refused.

Ms. Frankel’s lifestyle today hardly resembles Gamblers Anonymous recovery: though she long ago deleted the poker site from her computer, she still plays poker once a week with friends.

Has she also gone to casinos?

“Many times,” she says. “It feels like a totally different thing.”

Some would call this denial.

“I don’t think I’m in denial,” Ms. Frankel says. “Gambling barely affects my life. I know recovering heroin addicts who drink. I play poker.”

“I only play for what I can afford,” she adds. “It might not suit everyone, but it’s impossible to think one thing suits everyone.”

A few days later, the reporter calls back with a question she had forgotten: When did Ms. Frankel finally tell her husband how much she lost?

The night after the reporter left, Ms. Frankel says. Her husband said he had imagined it was much worse. That night she slept better than she had in a long, long time.