“A Deck of Cards is a Book of Adventure”

Readers of this blog are aware that I try to keep up with all of the current poker podcasts as well as I can. A lot of good stuff out there, and -- as us short-stacked types prefer -- it’s free!

The vagaries of my so-called “professional” life -- i.e., that non-pokery part of my existence from which I derive the majority of my income -- sadly require I remain behind the wheel for a significant number of hours every week. Like a lot of Americans, where I live and where I work are separated by a significant distance. So every weekday (and sometimes on the weekends, too) I make the long drive there and back. That’s the time when I generally listen to such podcasts. As you might notice over there on the right-hand column, the number of different shows that have made it into the weekly rotation has grown a bit over the last couple of weeks.

There is now a second internet radio “network” called Rounder’s Radio (not to be confused with Rounders, the Poker Show), on which several different poker-related shows appear. From the new network I’ve listened to Gary Wise’s show, Wise Hand Poker, a couple of times, and I also have heard the one called Poker Talk Beyond the Books. (Am withholding judgment until I hear a few more of each.)

Hold ’em Radio continues to chug along as well, with Keep Flopping Aces and Poker Psychology being the two shows I try to catch over there.

Meanwhile my favorites continue to be Beyond the Table, Ante Up!, and Rounders, the Poker Show. These are the ones (perhaps with Keep Flopping Aces) I look forward to the most each week.

This week’s episode Ante Up! featured the return of occasional co-host Mike Fasso, who sometimes will join regular hosts Chris Cosenza and Scott Long. I always enjoy it when Fasso -- sometimes referred to as “The Bard” -- turns up. The nickname comes from his occasional efforts to introduce literature into the show, such as when he will share a Shakespearean monologue rewritten as poker commentary. This week the show began with Fasso quoting a passage from Anatole France’s 1893 novel, La Rôtisserie de la Reine Pédauque (At the Sign of the Queen Pedauque).

I’ll admit I’m not familiar with Anatole France’s works. Vera, who as it happens has degrees in French lit., has read A. France, and tells me Queen Pedauque is one of the French novelist’s best. The passage Fasso read features two characters who find themselves with a bottle of wine, a pair of dice, a deck of cards, and an evening free to enjoy such items. One then offers an especially interesting reflection on the significance of card-playing.

You can hear Fasso read the passage by clicking here, but I thought it worthwhile to transcribe it here as well. Regarding, then, the subject of card games:

It is indeed excellent entertainment. A deck of cards is a book of adventure, and it has this superiority over other books of its kind in that it can be composed and read at the same time. And it is not necessary to have brains to compose it, nor knowledge of reading to read it. It is a marvelous work also in that it makes sense and has a new meaning every time its pages are shuffled. It is of such cunning design that it cannot be admired too much, for from mathematical laws it draws thousands and thousands of curious combinations and so many singular juxtapositions that people have been led to think, contrary to all truth, that in it are discoverable the secrets of the heart and the mysteries of fate . . . .

See what those of you who don’t listen to poker podcasts are missing!

Fasso keeps a cool blog on 1970s cinema, too. Check it out.