In the winter of 1999, on the sixth floor of a Cardiff hotel, I walked into a lift to find it already occupied by an elderly couple and a tall, sinister-looking fellow in a black leather trench coat and red sunglasses.

"The Devilfish!" I breathed. "Can I hold your bracelet?"

Without a word, the shady gentleman slipped a heavy gold bracelet off his wrist and jingled it into my hand. The elderly couple must have thought we were both insane.

The lift was going down to the lobby, where a pair of nervous young researchers were waiting to collect a motley crew of gamblers for a recording of the cult new TV series Late Night Poker. By "motley", I mean that the scope was wide enough to include both me, a twentysomething university graduate with a column in the Daily Telegraph and a liking for recreational card games, and Dave "Devilfish" Ulliot, a Hull pawnbroker with a criminal record and a gold bracelet to demonstrate that he had been to Las Vegas and won a massive tournament in the World Series of Poker.

In my book, For Richer, For Poorer: A Love Affair With Poker, I tried to explain how a girl like me, with every advantage in life, a famous father, a private education, a decent job and a voice like Princess Margaret, could end up doing something as disreputable as playing poker.

In his new book, Devilfish: The Life and Times of a Poker Legend, Dave Ulliot explains how a man like him, from a council house "so small we had to paint furniture on the walls", with an innate gambling addiction and criminal friends, who had served two prison terms for burglary and safe-cracking, who was in so many street fights he started carrying a gun on the streets of Bradford, could end up doing something as respectable as playing poker.

But it doesn't matter where you come from; like a halogen lamp on a mosquito farm, poker will attract anyone who wants a buzz. That awe-struck meeting in the lift turned into a long friendship between like minds.

Ulliot does an excellent job of explaining how it is not about the money but the need to play. He and I are both, for example, suckers for a game of Scrabble. In my case, it was a calm and bonding pastime for a middle-class London family. In Dave's case, it whiled away the hours in Armley nick, where "everyone always ended up arguing because no bastard could spell".

He is no WG Sebald. If you're looking for a hyper-conscious examination of the nature of memory, this isn't the book for you. However, you will be in clover if you want to be rousingly entertained by a man who will tell you from experience that "If you live slap bang between a fish warehouse and an abattoir, you're happy when you catch a cold."

I am usually suspicious of ghost writers. But Marcus Georgiou, generously credited on page one, has done a great job of letting Ulliot's tone come through: this is clearly the man's own voice, well compiled to make a fast-paced, hugely enjoyable tale.

Reading this book is like sitting with Devilfish in a pub. His turn of phrase is naturally funny and occasionally poetic (an opponent is "as pale as Dracula's feet"); apply that verbal dexterity to the life he's had and you've got one solid piece of entertainment.

This is a man with juicy stories to tell. One time, after going broke in a poker game against a wealthy antiques dealer, Devilfish wonders how to raise more stake money and sit back down. Inspiration strikes: he breaks into a local auction house and steals a grandfather clock. Clanking back up the stairs of the antique dealer's home, giant clock in tow, he recalls that "it sounded like I was shagging Big Ben".

Now that poker is a respectable international sport, played on TV by clean-cut students with maths degrees, Devilfish (with his dodgy past, off-colour jokes and old-fashioned, obvious appreciation of women) can cut a controversial figure. There are some, in the newly clean and sober game, who disapprove of him. I am not one of them, for two reasons. The first is that Devilfish is the soul of poker: a link back to the days when it was all colourful characters with sharp wits and shady backgrounds. Say what you like about mathematical Scandinavians, but they're not the most fun on a long-haul flight.

The other is that he has a massive heart. Retired burglar he may be, but Dave Ulliot is a loyal friend and a kind man, whose tactile and deeply sentimental love for his ex-wife and children (expressed throughout the book without a trace of manly embarrassment) is born from instinct, not from anything he learned in his own upbringing.

Now wealthy, successful and famous, "The Fish" jets between glamorous gambling hotspots, but he knows where home is; this book may be unique in the history of literature for including the line: "Don't get me wrong – I love Hull."

I was nervous to review it, in case it was bad. Dave Ulliot is a friend of mine. And he has a gun. But I needn't have worried. The book is, like the man, fast, funny, scary, smart, cocky, colourful, and I adore them both.