Financial executive puts on his game face

''Pokernomics," the title of the fifth chapter of this tantalizing tour de force on high finance and gambling, would have been a more fitting title for the entire tome.

The one given by Morgan Stanley executive and poker expert Aaron Brown, ''The Poker Face of Wall Street," risks suggesting to potential readers that it is just a rhapsody on the same ''law of the jungle" theme explored in Michael Lewis's 1990 bestseller, ''Liar's Poker."

Brown's Wall Street-specific title also suggests that he has woven an elaborate gambling-extended metaphor focused only on that locale.

The author does reflect on ''Liar's Poker" in some detail. He explains how the game was misused for hazing and discrimination. He admits to having been ''an anti-Liar's Poker activist" and says he was accused of being ''puritanically opposed to gambling" on the trading floor, of organizing a cheating ring, and of providing a ''diabolically clever algorithm" for sabotaging the game.

''All false: I like gambling, the system was not cheating, and it was simple. But you're getting my side of the story here. It's my book; let those guys write their own books if they like," he writes. ''The cheaters stacked the deck, but cheaters are always the easiest people to beat."

''Poker Face" covers the waterfront of trading everywhere. It is not intended as an expose of unethical behavior by traders, although Brown does paint a few unsavory portraits of practitioners of that profession. This book is primarily about showing that gambling, poker in particular but also other games of chance, have common economic and psychological roots and are governed by similar numerical probabilities.

''Finance can only be understood as a gambling game, and gambling games can only be understood as a form of finance. Many people have no trouble accepting the first part: They believe Wall Street is a big casino," Brown writes. ''When New York introduced off-track betting in 1971, it chose the slogan 'If you're in the stock market, you might find this a better bet.' "

He is not content, however, with a superficial comparison of making or losing money in New York or Las Vegas. Brown writes that financial products have the same kind of ''negative-sum, pure-random" risk embedded in them that goes with craps and roulette.

Brown discounts long-term buy-and-hold investors with diversified portfolios as a small fraction of the action.

''No one gets paid a lot of money to sit around worrying about what the average return on equity will be over the next 20 years; no one screams and shouts about it," he writes. ''People do get paid a lot of money, and scream and shout, to trade one stock versus another or buy a stock and sell it."

All other markets, except commodities markets, are zero-sum, Brown says. ''Every loan or bond has a borrower and a lender; every foreign currency transaction has a buyer and a seller; every derivative contract has one party paying another. For anyone actually working in the markets, all the excitement and opportunity come from these kinds of bets," he says.

It's a tossup which readers will derive the most from this book -- poker players or financial professionals. Brown is a poker player's poker player, and much of the book is devoted to explaining poker and discussing poker strategy as to financial wheeling and dealing.