The Man Who Can’t Stop Firing

The most dangerous tweeter alive has fired off several more strange, unsettling, self-implicating messages for all of his followers -- and the rest of us -- to ponder. “Fired” was a word already associated with the reality TV star, thanks to his famous catch phrase. Now it’s the easy choice of verb to describe his weapon-like use of Twitter.

Last Thursday the president’s recently-named Attorney General recused himself from current and future investigations of the 2016 presidential campaign. Such investigations are presently focusing on the influence of Russia on last year’s election and the numerous ties between the foreign power and several of the president’s associates (including the president himself). The A.G.’s decision came after it became widely known that during his confirmation hearing he’d lied under oath about his own meetings with Russian representatives during the campaign.

We know that angered the president, as he let us all know via Twitter. Saw a funny tweet yesterday from the columnist Doug Sanders summarizing the absurdity of such a situation as speculative fiction: “Sci-fi where the president has lost his mind and everyone knows because his private thoughts keep appearing on little slabs in their pockets.”

“The Democrats are overplaying their hand,” the president furiously wrote, choosing a poker analogy in order to express frustration about his A.G. having succumbed to the pressure to recuse himself. The president wished to suggest the Democrats are betting too heavily with too weak of a holding, since (in his view) the connections and communications between Russia and his associates (and himself) are inconsequential.

“The real story,” he added, “is all of the illegal leaks of classified and other information. It is a total ‘witch hunt!’”

He hastily jabbed some more pettiness into his smartphone after that, then traveled to his supervillain-like lair in Florida, his estate in Mar-al-Lago. From there the embittered president launched an incredible accusation Saturday morning that his predecessor, Barack “Obama had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower just before the victory.”

He first called this action “McCarthyism,” which is at best an imprecise use of a term normally used to refer to someone making unfair allegations against another. Indeed, the president himself seemed to be the one making the unfair allegation, making his phrase “This is McCarthyism!” punctuating his tweet seem unintentionally self-referential.

Many soon picked up on the fact that the claim was derived from a far-right talk show host’s hypothesis that had been turned into a faux-report over on Breitbart, the website formerly run by the president’s assistant Steve Bannon widely known to have published several unsupported conspiracy theories and falsehoods in the past.

The president continued his accusation over a few more tweets, finishing thusly: “How low has President Obama gone to tapp [sic] my phones during the very sacred election process. This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy!”

The “Nixon/Watergate” reference is again another hazy allusion to history being made by the president, in this case triggered by the mention of phone taps. Again, it’s hard not to think that while he intends to suggest a comparison that accuses another, he is instead drawing attention to parallels with himself.

To name one, the investigation into the 2016 election includes questions about the president and his associates (among them his original national security adviser Michael Flynn who has already resigned over the allegations) having suggested to the Russians that United States sanctions against them would be lessened or removed once the new administration took over, severely undermining the Obama administration’s authority and ability to act in the nation’s interests (never mind violating federal law).

Such meddling resembles what Nixon was alleged to have done prior to the 1968 election when interfering with the sitting president Lyndon B. Johnson’s attempts to reach peace in Vietnam. (For more on the latter, see “‘I’m Reading Their Hand”: LBJ, Nixon, and the Week Before the 1968 Election.”)

In fact, the idea of one president accusing his predecessor of having formerly illegally tapped his phones is yet another example of the current commander-in-chief emulating Nixon. So, too, did Nixon on multiple occasions bring up privately that he believed he had been bugged by Lyndon B. Johnson during the last couple of weeks prior to the 1968 election.

For example, on October 17, 1972, Nixon told John Connally (the former Texas governor who served for a time as Nixon’s Secretary of Treasury before leading the “Democrats for Nixon” in the run-up to the ’72 election) that J. Edgar Hoover, FBI Director until his death in May 1972, had informed him LBJ had Nixon’s plane bugged because “he had his Vietnam plans... and he had to have information as to what we were going to say about Vietnam.”

“Johnson knew every conversation,” Nixon told Connally. “And you know where it was bugged? In my compartment!”

Later, after Nixon had been reelected and once Watergate began seriously heating up, Nixon would again bring up LBJ’s alleged bugging of his plane, wondering aloud to others how they might make it public so as to make the bugging of the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters seem less remarkable -- or at least not without precedent.

But Nixon never did that. Meanwhile the current president -- going off a speciously-sourced story that the present FBI Director is denying could be true (and a spokesman for Obama and others in the know are suggesting to have been wholly impossible) -- got out his phone and pulled the trigger without hesitation. And without even informing his staff he was doing so. And without seemingly any care for the effect such an accusation might have on the country he was elected to lead, or its standing in the world going forward.

I wonder sometimes what this presidency would be like without the tweets. Would it seem as obviously unhinged? Perhaps. After all, that first press conference in mid-February was an absolute horrorshow -- way, way more distressing than any performance by any president ever, including Nixon at his most petulant and paranoid.

Then again, it seems possible that if he were not to tweet he would at least seem less demented, wouldn’t it? Or is it too late? I mean with every single tweet he hurts himself, and often hurts lots of us, too. It seems like he has to figure that out at some point, right?

Or not. Brace yourself. He’s about to fire again.

Oh, Yeah... Online Poker

Was asked yesterday about what the election of Donald Trump as the next U.S. president might mean as far as online poker in the United States is concerned.

It’s a good question, although as I thought about it I quickly realized that if I were to make a list of issues to be concerned about regarding Trump’s taking over, there are probably 70 or 80 others I’d rank higher importance than online poker. Then again, it is an issue I am at least attentive to, given how much of my life is affected by the vagaries of poker’s place in the culture.

My first instinct was to say it probably didn’t matter much at all who won on Tuesday, as neither Trump nor Hillary Clinton were going to be huge proponents of any sort of federal regulation permitting online gambling and/or poker in the U.S.

I remember my shuttle ride from Atlantic City to the Philly airport last weekend. My loquacious driver was a Trump supporter, and even had a little Trump/Pence sign he held up and shook at me when making one of several points about the current state of his state and of the nation as a whole.

Thanks to the event from which he was driving me -- the inaugural PokerStars Festival New Jersey series -- we’d gotten onto the topic of online poker in the U.S. He was insistent Trump was the candidate to support for those wanting online poker up and running again. I expressed doubt, though, saying I wasn’t sure either candidate was going to be all that excited about such a cause.

I was thinking in part of the possibility of someone like Sheldon Adelson, the deep-pocketed Trump supporter and anti-online gambling lobbyist, perhaps influencing a Trump regime in a certain unpleasant direction. Then again, there’s New Jersey governor Chris Christie now standing by Trump’s side who signed NJ’s online gambling bill into law three years ago. Meanwhile VP Mike Pence has openly supported the Adelson-backed Restoration of America’s Wire Act (RAWA), if that might be said to tip the balance.

In any event, the Obama administration obviously has not viewed online gambling a cause to support, and if you think about certain measures like the surreptitious “Operation Choke Point” that targeted online gambling (in part), the evidence suggests an outward (if not so evident) antagonism toward it. I wouldn’t imagine a Clinton administration would have been so excited to adopt an alternate position than the current one allowing for the slow, slow trickle of state-by-state legislation with no federal push.

Like I say, it probably doesn’t matter much. The Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act -- the 10-year anniversary of which just recently passed -- has effectively reduced online poker in the U.S. to the point of near-insignificance, at least on the federal level. That could change one day, but just as I felt a week ago, there’s no more reason to think that it will anytime soon.

Even so, there’s a whole lot else to worry about first.

Image: “poker-online-logo” (adapted), texasholdempoker. CC BY 2.0.

Living Through Another Cuba

Lot of focus on Cuba this week, what with President Barack Obama’s visit, the exhibition baseball game between the Tampa Bay Rays and the Cuban national team, the Rolling Stones concert tonight, and other associated activities. While certainly historic, it’s hard to gauge in the moment whether these events are positive or not both for the Cuban people and for the United States’ relationship with the country going forward.

There’s much ambiguity on both sides here -- like watching a poker game play out without knowing either player’s hole cards nor getting to see any showdowns.

All of it is nonetheless very intriguing to follow, especially for someone who is already often reading and thinking about U.S. politics of the 1960s and so spends perhaps more time than most learning about the Cuban Revolution and Fidel Castro’s takeover, the Bay of Pigs invasion, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the continued complicated responses by the U.S. to Cuba over subsequent years and decades.

The ouster of Fulgencio Batista’s regime -- officially occurring on January 1, 1959 -- also meant the end of the “Havana high life” culture marked by casinos, gambling, numerous nightclubs, and the significant influence of organized crime. It’s a scene memorably depicted in Sydney Pollack’s 1990 film Havana whose protagonist is an American poker player played by Robert Redford (which I wrote about here before).

Perhaps influenced by these recent posts about “poker’s precursors,” I found myself wondering a little bit today about the history of poker in Cuba. I’ve read that following Castro’s takeover playing cards were banned altogether by the communist regime, which would considerably mute the development of poker and other card games post-1959 (even if games were no doubt still played). But looking back to the 1950s and before, I wondered a bit about how poker was played on the islands, including what variants were popular.

The games appearing in Havana resemble games played in the U.S. during that time (e.g., we see Redford’s character playing five-card draw in the film). One would assume both draw and stud were the favored games during the first half of the century and before, with other games like the Spanish game of mus -- a game that turns up in several Central American countries -- undoubtedly also making an appearance during Cuba’s earlier history.

There’s another popular Cuban game called “cubilete” that is actually a dice-based game though involves poker-related elements. The dice are in fact marked “ace,” “king,” “queen,” “jack,” “gallegos,” and “negros” -- that’s the order they are ranked (i.e., A-K-Q-J-G-N). Players take turns rolling and trying to make high hands. I believe aces are wild, but I’m not up on other details of scoring and game play. (Some irresponsible, unresearched speculation perhaps suggests “cubilete” represented a way to play poker without cards.)

In any event, I will continue to follow this seemingly new chapter in Cuba’s story and U.S. relations with its neighbor to the south.

The Cuban Missile Crisis is often discussed as having been a kind of heads-up poker game between John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev -- with the highest-stakes imaginable. I suppose the events of this past week might also be regarded as small-pot hands being played by a couple of wary opponents, with neither side appearing to go for much value just yet.

(That post title, of course, comes from the similarly-titled XTC tune, written at a time much closer to the crisis to which alludes -- in 1980 amid the ongoing Cold War -- than to today.)

Photo: “Sunset over Hotel Nacional, 2014,” LukaszKatlewa. CC BY-SA 3.0.

Six Paradoxes of Poker

Continuing yesterday’s discussion of what poker is -- or, rather, those elements that are essential to the game (cards, money, and bluffing) -- today I want to talk about some of the game’s more interesting contradictions. What follows is a discussion of six such “paradoxes of poker,” all of which add to the game’s complexity and, in some cases, popularity.

Obvious to most is the competitive nature of poker, a “zero sum” game in which no one can win without someone else losing. A rake being taken from a cash game or tournament fees actually make it not quite “zero sum,” but the point still holds -- there are no winners in poker without there also being losers.

That money is being won and lost adds further incentive to players’ desire to best one another, with even the smallest-stakes games sometimes encouraging antagonism given the fundamental need for each player to pursue his or her self-interest. Yet cooperation among adversaries is also needed for game play, and while many rules are unalterable, mutual agreement often must be reached regarding various particulars in order for games to proceed.

There’s one paradox of poker, then -- it’s a game that at once promotes self-interest and community. (For more on that one, see an earlier post titled “Poker, the Antisocial Social Game.”)

Furthermore, poker is often heralded for its promotion of egalitarian ideals -- “a truly democratic activity,” as Al Alvarez once described the game. “Race, color, creed, what you look like, where you come from, and what you do for a living are of no interest at all,” he argues in Poker: Bets, Bluffs, and Bad Beats. “A little green man from a distant galaxy could sit down and play without anyone blinking, provided he had the necessary amount of chips in front of him and anted up on time.”

Charles A. Murray’s New York Times op-ed from about three years ago titled “Poker Is America” (discussed here) anecdotally reinforces such a position, noting how the “occupational and income mix” and variety of races and ethnicities he routinely encounters while playing suggests “a poker table is America the way television commercials portray it but it seldom is.”

Even if the political scientist’s account of never having “experienced a moment of tension arising from anything involving race, class, or gender” while regularly playing poker in a West Virginia casino was met by many with counter-examples of less utopian scenes around his idyllic baize, his point that the game itself does not discriminate remains valid.

Such is one reason why a succession of poker-playing presidents would be inspired to describe their domestic programs in poker terms, with Theodore Roosevelt’s “Square Deal,” FDR’s “New Deal,” and Harry Truman’s “Fair Deal” all aimed at resetting the game of economic opportunity according to poker’s inclusive impartiality. A similar view has been voiced by Barack Obama -- another poker player -- during his time in office, who has often reiterated “I believe that this country succeeds when everyone gets a fair shot, when everyone does their fair share, when everyone plays by the same rules.”

However, as soon as the cards are dealt and the first pot is pushed to a winner, a problem becomes evident. In a game that necessitates cooperation and promotes parity, chips are exchanged with every hand played. In other words, if all are really are equal at the start, the goal of everyone involved thereafter is literally to better him or herself at others’ expense, or make things as unequal as they can.

As Garry Wills wrote in Nixon Agonistes when describing mid-century administrations’ economic efforts, “to protect the game, the government would give everyone a new deal, making sure it was a fair deal,” but “each time the cards have been newly dealt, we must collect and reshuffle them to allow for new players who have drifted up to the table; we are endlessly ‘dealing,’ never getting to the game.” (“The metaphor is a mess,” Wills concludes.)

I would suggest this paradox of poker is in fact a central part of the game’s appeal, with the game (in a way) providing what society or government cannot. Every hand really is a new beginning, a chance to start over and get it right, to reinvent oneself and others and reimagine one’s place at the table -- or in the world.

Other contradictions characterize poker as well, including the related one that finds poker promoting individualism and self-reliance while also necessitating the kind of collectivism or interdependence described above. Poker is not a team sport, yet it cannot be played alone.

A third paradox of poker is borne from the disparate approaches taken to the game by that great variety of players it attracts, with the so-called “professional” motivated more by profit than pleasure sometimes seated directly across from the “recreational” opponent for whom time spent at the table is viewed a vacation from genuine labor.

From the time of the Civil War and even before, those making a living off of cards adjudged their activity as work, not play, a group that would come to include those 19th-century card sharps for whom the occupation of “gambler” included an understanding of and willingness to cheat and sometimes literally fight for their livelihood. Even the ill-fated Wild Bill Hickok’s last ride to Deadwood was primarily motivated by a desire to earn an income from the poker tables such as the one at Saloon No. 10 where he’d be dealt his final hand.

The subsequent growth of the game in the later 20th century later fashioned new types of poker pros, such as those inhabiting the California card rooms categorized by anthropologist David Hayano in Poker Faces (discussed here) according to their degrees of financial commitment (the “worker professional,” the “outside-supported professional,” the “subsistence professional,” the “career professional”). Las Vegas card rooms would likewise come to be populated by “regs” showing up daily to earn livings off the succession of tourists whose participation in the games were of much shorter duration.

The later rise of tournament poker then created a new class of “circuit grinders,” among them a subsection of “sponsored pros” whose monetary investment would be lessened by the online sites they represented. Tours criss-crossing the United States and several other continents would feature tournament series in which amateurs routinely took on the pros, with the World Series of Poker in Vegas each summer attracting tens of thousands of home game heroes to compete directly with the game’s elite.

That poker can be viewed at once as both work and play is a direct consequence of yet another of poker’s paradoxes -- the fourth in our list -- namely the complicated way the game rewards skillful play yet also does not deny luck as a factor affecting outcomes.

A sound grasp of odds and probabilities has always provided an edge to some, as has being equipped to suss out the significance of opponents’ game-related actions, words, and other non-verbal “tells” while successfully masking the meaning of one’s own. Yet as all who have played poker well know, a hand perfectly played does not guarantee a positive result. “Suckouts,” “bad beats,” and “coolers” frequently occur, the many ways players lose despite outplaying opponents reflected by the variety of terms indicating different types of misfortune.

The relative weight of skill and luck in poker has been the subject of numerous legal arguments dating back to the 19th century, with proponents wishing to distinguish poker from other types of gambling by emphasizing skill, those wanting to forbid the game rather motivated to argue for luck’s role, and judges having ruled for either side many times over.

That poker involves both skill and luck also has encouraged some to argue further for its close connection to American history and the country’s development and character. Defining what he calls the “American DNA,” James McManus has written of “two strands in particular that have always stood out in high contrast: the risk-averse Puritan work ethic and the entrepreneur’s urge to seize the main chance,” noting how poker uniquely satisfies both urges. Here McManus echoes others linking poker to the “frontier spirit” that at once values hard work yielding legitimately gotten gains while embracing risk in the name of seeking even greater rewards.

That a lucky card can help an amateur win a hand against a pro provides encouragement to the former to take a seat against the latter. But an understanding of luck’s role and that skillful play generally wins out in the long term likewise encourages the pro to endure. As Jesse May’s poker-playing protagonist in his novel Shut Up and Deal explains, “Poker is a combination of luck and skill. People think mastering the skill part is hard, but they’re wrong. The trick to poker is mastering the luck.”

A fifth paradox of poker that like others might be said to have added further to the game’s popularity is the way poker alternately -- or simultaneously -- satisfies desires for both realism and romance (an idea I’ve explored here before). As evidenced by a river one-outer denying a 98% favorite to win a pot in Texas hold’em, the cards force upon players an occasionally cold reality that must be accepted. So, too, must players hopeful to win at poker on a regular basis understand and accept their own limitations as a prerequisite to improve.

“There can be no self-deception for a poker player,” pro player Mickey Appleman once lucidly explained to Alvarez (as reported in The Biggest Game in Town). “You have to be a realist to be successful. You can’t think you’ve played well if you lose consistently. Unless you can judge how well you play relative to the others, you have no chance.”

It’s a position well supported by others, including Anthony Holden who in Big Deal once articulated one of the more often quoted pronouncements regarding poker’s unflinching requirement of players to be realistic about themselves: “Whether he likes it or not, a man’s character is stripped bare at the poker table; if other players read him better than he does, he has only himself to blame. Unless he is both able and prepared to see himself as others do, flaws and all, he will be a loser in cards, as in life.”

But even a poker realist like Appleman recognizes how the game can likewise provide an inviting exit ramp to carry one away from reality.

“I’m a romantic,” Appleman continues, with nary a trace of irony, “and for me gambling is a romance.... That’s what I enjoy; the rest is by the way. I play and I play and I play; then I pick up the pieces and see how I did. It’s only at that moment that I realize I was playing for real money.”

Like other favorite pastimes, poker provides many a similar kind of “escape” into a more interesting, consistently gratifying world whose pleasures are precisely related to their distance from the tedious redundancy of the everyday. It’s a game so absorbing it can create a world unto its own, a place where players can be themselves or something else entirely, as though they were not just playing a game, but playing a role as well.

For some, that role might resemble the one forged by many of poker’s most famous players, individuals who by the strength of their card sense managed to enjoy success outside the “system” -- or perhaps fashioned systems of their own.

Real life poker heroes may serve as templates, with examples going back to Doc Holliday and Poker Alice and extending forward through players like Tex Dolly, Kid Poker, and a man named Moneymaker. So, too, might fictional poker players like the Cincinnati Kid or his nemesis “the Man,” Bret Maverick, or Mike McDermott provide notions of the type.

All of these many contrasts add depth and richness to poker, while also complicating significantly the task of presenting a straightforward history of the game. Because poker is a game of bluffing, the line between truth and fiction is frequently challenged by it, with omissions and embellishments often compromising the veracity of even the most straightforward chronicle of a hand or session as conflicting accounts of what took place exhibit Rashomon-like contradictions and hopelessly blinkered subjectivity.

Meanwhile fictional representations of poker necessarily involve creative enhancements that have helped affect understandings of the game and how it has actually been played over the decades whether on steamboats or trains, in saloons and gambling dens, on military bases and encampments, or in card rooms, casinos, and private homes.

One might argue the story of poker as told in popular culture -- in both history and fiction -- is itself one long-running bluff, the game having been shaped into a romantic version of its historical reality by all of the many letters, memoirs, biographies, articles, guide books, paintings, radio programs, songs, films, television shows, stories, and novels describing poker and its players.

We’ll call that yet another paradox of poker -- a sixth and last in the list -- that is, how the game as it is actually played and the fictional renderings of it exist together in simultaneity, overlapping each other even as hands are dealt, bets are made, and narratives about the cards, the money, and the bluffing are constructed.

Images: “Dealer Button - Poker,” Poker Photos. CC BY 2.0 (top); “A Misdeal” (1897), Frederic Remington, public domain (bottom).

Taking Your Breath Away: Operation Choke Point

I wanted to follow-up on yesterday’s post about my bank of nearly 11 years -- Fifth Third Bank -- without warning and with no explanation deciding to close my account. I don’t anticipate writing again about this topic, but after writing yesterday I was able to learn something useful regarding what happened and thought I’d share it.

With some difficulty I was today able to speak once more with my (former) local branch of Fifth Third. As I expected, they had no further information for me, and were surprised Customer Service (to whom they had directed me) had sent me back to them. I’d been sent around in a circle, no more informed at the end than when I’d begun.

Meanwhile, I very much appreciated the comments to yesterday’s post as well as those I received via Twitter. Among those responding to the post was Grange95, a lawyer, who very helpfully pointed me to a document describing a recently begun initiative by the U.S. Department of Justice called “Operation Choke Point” that appears a very likely explanation for why my account was closed.

The report comes from Darrell Issa, a Republican from California who chairs the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. It’s dated May 29, 2014 and is titled “The Department of Justice’s ‘Operation Choke Point’: Illegally Choking Off Legitimate Businesses?”

The report begins by explaining how the initiative was created by the DOJ late last year to “choke out” businesses considered by the Administration to be “‘high risk’ or otherwise objectionable,” with the nominal purpose being “to combat mass-market consumer fraud.” Following the initiative, bank regulators have identified a number of different businesses, industries, merchant types, and activities as “high risk,” strongly suggesting to them that if they continue to serve those involved in the activities on the list they could be subject to federal investigation.

In other words, you might say there are two varieties of “pressure” (or “choking”) happening here. One is the Administration pressuring banks to review customers’ account activity, to track and flag those involved with anything having to do with activities on the “high-risk” list, and to close those accounts or be subject to federal investigation. The other is the “choking out” of the businesses by removing their means to conduct financial transactions.

The report (compiling the Committee’s findings) goes on to explain how “Operation Choke Point has forced banks to terminate relationships with a wide variety of entirely lawful and legitimate merchants,” how the DOJ “is aware of these impacts, and has dismissed them,” and how the DOJ “lacks adequate legal authority for the initiative.” For these reasons and others, Issa -- speaking for the Committee -- is calling for the dismantling of Operation Choke Point, flatly calling it “illegal.”

The report includes quotes from letters sent by banks to customers informing them that their accounts were being closed. The quotes resemble language appearing in the letter I received (discussed yesterday), and in fact there is one from Fifth Third Bank which specifically tells the customer -- someone whose business is making payday loans -- that their business is the cause of the account’s closure.

“During recent reviews of the payday lending industry, we have determined that the services provided by clients in this industry are outside of our risk tolerance,” says the letter. “As such, we will no longer be able to provide financial services to businesses that operate in that industry.”

By comparison, my letter lacked such specificity, only referring vaguely to “federally mandated requirements” as guiding Fifth Third Bank in its reviews of account activity. But from reading the quotes I do think it is probably safe to assume my bank was similarly encouraged simply to close my account rather than have to deal with the threat (real or imagined) of any type of federal investigation as suggested by my apparent connection with one of the “high-risk” activities.

Speaking of, also included in the report is a list of 30 different examples of such “high-risk activity.” For a time the list was posted on the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation’s website as a warning, although I see from a Wall Street Journal article dated July 28th that the list was removed.

Among the items included is “On-line gambling” (sic), which appears the only one with any possible relevance to my situation. I’ll mention again that the only account activity I might have had that could be construed as meaningful here would be to have received payments via wire transfer from businesses located outside the U.S. whose interests include poker (live and online) and gambling. In other words, my “business” is not even “online gambling,” but rather writing, editing, and reporting as a freelancer.

The list is interesting, and even though it has been removed from the FDIC site the WSJ article points out how the FDIC continues to tell banks they “should still take caution in handling transactions for payment firms, due to the potential risk of illegal activity.” Here’s that list:

Ammunition Sales

Cable Box De-scramblers

Coin Dealers

Credit Card Schemes

Credit Repair Services

Dating Services

Debt Consolidation Scams

Drug Paraphernalia

Escort Services

Firearms Sales

Fireworks Sales

Get Rich Products

Government Grants

Home-Based Charities

Life-Time Guarantees

Life-Time Memberships

Lottery Sales

Mailing Lists/Personal Info

Money Transfer Networks

On-line Gambling

Payday Loans

Pharmaceutical Sales

Ponzi Schemes

Pornography

Pyramid-Type Sales

Racist Materials

Surveillance Equipment

Telemarketing

Tobacco Sales

Travel Clubs

Some company to be in, eh? However you feel about some of the “activities” on this list -- and some are most certainly objectionable -- it’s easy to see how for nearly all of them merely having such a business or being involved in some fashion doesn’t automatically make one guilty of mass-market fraud, money laundering, or any other unlawful behavior.

Issa’s report notes how despite the DOJ’s public statements, Operation Choke Point “was primarily focused on the payday lending industry” before being expanded to include these other activities. “Internal memoranda and communications demonstrate that Operation Choke Point was focused on short-term lending, and online lending in particular,” explains Issa. However, the DOJ seized an opportunity with the initiative to curtail many other types of activities without having even to identify or prove any type of unlawful behavior beforehand.

Having no answers from Fifth Third, I still cannot be sure my account was closed because of Operation Choke Point, although it seems highly probable. The initiative reminds me a little of how the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006 similarly targeted the means of making financial transactions to play poker and/or gamble online and not the actual playing -- another kind of indirect “choking.”

It also makes me think about the many examples of corruption in government I’ve been reading about constantly over the last many months as part of my “Nixon studies.” I was telling Vera how when I read about Watergate and all of the illegal machinations and maneuvers conducted by the Nixon Administration to continue the cover-up, part of me always regards it all as somehow entirely separate from my own experience -- as though it were fiction, almost, thanks to the seeming distance between past and present.

But the fact is, there are obviously many contemporary (and similarly astonishing) examples of our government acting in ways we should question and about which we should be concerned, with Operation Choke Point -- as grievous as it appears to be -- hardly the most troubling.

Capitol Games

Last week I mentioned briefly that faux-filibuster perpetrated by Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) and made a passing reference to coverage of televised poker coverage by way of comparison. Over the weekend I read a piece about Cruz and his bit of political theater which noted how Cruz himself had used a poker analogy to describe his own strategy.

We’re seeing today how the crisis over passing a spending bill to fund the government for the upcoming fiscal year (scheduled to begin tomorrow) is reaching a kind of climax, with a government shutdown now appearing a distinct possibility. The issue goes back to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act -- a.k.a. “Obamacare” -- and the efforts of some Republicans to have the new spending bill include amendments to it, something the Dems aren’t willing to accept.

Seeing references to this issue as a “bargaining chip” (again, evoking poker vocabulary). Although it doesn’t actually sound much like anyone’s in the mood to bargain.

Cruz’s 21-plus hour speech last week was motivated by his wish to defund the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Responding to a question by his colleague Rand Paul (R-KY) about whether or not he could go along with any sort of middle-ground solution that didn’t involve defunding the new health care law, Cruz couched his negative response in the language of cards.

“In a game of poker,” explained Cruz, “if somebody makes a bet, and then says to you, ‘if you raise me, I’m going to fold,’ [he] will lose 100 percent of [his] poker games.”

In other words -- if I’m following correctly -- Cruz is choosing this way to express an unwillingness to compromise at all when it comes to Obamacare. Cruz (and the other non-negotiating Tea Partiers) is making a bet, he says, and is not going to give his opponent any indication that he might fold (give in) should his opponent respond with a raise, because to do so would be a losing strategy.

Brings to mind players who cannot bring themselves to fold after having put any chips at all in the middle. Of course, table talk can be misleading sometimes. A player could well say he’d fold to a raise, then do something else. That is to say, I’m not sure the analogy is as obvious as Cruz seems to think, and I can imagine several better ones to indicate more clearly an intention not to fold.

Anyhow, watching the news today and the deepening impasse on Capitol Hill, the only poker analogy that comes to mind would be one involving players stalling on the bubble. Or maybe something having to do with not playing with a full deck.

McCain Under the Gun

An item that popped up last week while I was in Barcelona was this story about former presidential candidate and U.S. senator John McCain getting caught playing a poker game on his iPhone during a Committee on Foreign Relations hearing. Not that any hearing of such a committee is unimportant, but in this case the topic was the possible use of force in Syria -- still being considered and the subject of President Obama’s prime time speech last night -- thus exposing McCain to some censure for having allowed his focus to drift.

When I saw a few tweets and then followed a link or two to read about the incident last week, I initially thought it was a Photoshop-fueled hoax. But soon it became clear that the photo above taken by Washington Post photographer Melina Mara was exactly what it appeared to be. McCain was playing a play money game, VIP Poker, and it looks like he was calling from under the gun with Q-2-offsuit (click to enlarge).

Almost unseemly to use that term in this particular context. “Under the gun,” I mean.

I immediately thought of the first chapter of James McManus’s Cowboys Full in which he focuses a lot on poker-playing presidents, and in fact draws a pretty sharp distinction between Obama and McCain.

Tipping his hand (pun intended) in terms of his political leanings, McManus favorably highlights Obama’s poker-playing background both by noting the many correspondences between political tactics and poker strategy while also linking Obama to a long list of U.S. presidents who played the game.

Meanwhile McCain is contrastingly drawn as a lesser candidate in part because of what seems a willful turning away from poker. McManus tells of McCain’s father, John S. McCain, Sr., once advising his children “Life is run by poker players, not systems analysts,” then notes how John III “turned out to prefer craps, a loud, mindless game in which the player never has a strategic advantage and must make impulse decisions and then rely on blind luck.”

Some might recall how in the run-up to the 2008 election both Obama’s poker background and McCain’s preference for craps were briefly highlighted, most particularly in a Time feature by Michael Weisskopf and Michael Scherer appearing in July and titled “Candidates’ Vices: Craps and Poker.” Going further than McManus does in his chapter, the article vigorously searches for all sorts of meaning in the two gambling games to discover ways they might reflect personality and indicators of leadership ability.

It was the memory of these stories about McCain and craps that probably added to my skepticism when first seeing the story last week. Wait, I thought... he was playing poker? But that’s not his game...?

Shortly after Mara’s photo whipped around the web, McCain deflected the incident with a jokey tweet that shruggingly tried to make light of its significance. “Scandal!” tweeted McCain. “Caught playing iPhone game at 3+ hour Senate hearing - worst of all I lost!”

Well, of course he lost. I mean really, limping queen-deuce UTG?

Op-eds since have mostly fallen into two categories -- Sheer Outrage and No Biggie. Late night comedians have all taken their shots, too. Jon Stewart on The Daily Show used more acid than others in his treatment:

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
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David Letterman was relatively tame with his top ten:

And over on Conan O’Brien’s show came a sorta inspired clip from a newly imagined C-SPAN show, The Senatorial Hearing Poker Challenge:

However one responds to the story, it is safe to say “poker” doesn’t come off all that well here, once again playing the role of troublemaker.

I suppose the story wouldn’t have played too differently had McCain’s chosen game had been Words With Friends or Plants vs. Zombies. But there’s something about poker and the ready application of the game, its vocabulary, and its strategies to the world of politics that made the incident all the more enticing. And made it all the more likely to be passed around the web by the rest of us, similarly distracted by our phones.

Still About Even

President Obama delivers his State of the Union address tonight. Pokerati Dan today is posting about the “State of the Poker Union.” I guess it’s as good a day as any to think about the state of my own online poker game.

Am still piddling away on a couple of Merge network sites from time to time, playing with those funds won via freerolls. Most nickel-and-dimin’ it at the PLO tables, or sometimes playing limit hold’em where I am also mainly just passing quarters back and forth. Occasionally I will hop into low-limit sit-n-go, though not that often. Meanwhile I’m not terribly anxious to try to deposit anywhere, as I imagine is likely the case for most U.S. players these days.

I was talking with a friend over the weekend, a recreational player who first got interested in poker after seeing it on television over recent years. He’d opened a PokerStars account a while back on which he played for play chips for a few months. He was right on the verge of making a deposit and starting to play the micros when Black Friday hit. Interestingly, he doesn’t play at all on Stars anymore, even though technically he still can in the free games.

“How do you still play online?” he asked. Not a simple question to answer.

I told him the story of winning a few bucks in freerolls on Hero and Carbon and how I’ve kind of held steady on both. I actually ran the Hero roll up to a point where I might’ve considered trying to withdraw a little, but never quite pulled the trigger. Then I fell back down to where I no longer want to try to take any out. If I even can, that is, without enduring too much hassle.

But in truth, as I’ve suggested here before a few times over the recent months, it doesn’t even feel like I’m playing the game we all enjoyed for the several years prior to last April. So when my friend asks how I am still playing, I almost feel like answering that I’m not. Not really.

If you scout around you can still find a number of online poker sites that are serving Americans. For instance over on the Cards Chat site there’s a list of poker sites that are still serving U.S. players. (Anybody ever play on Juicy Stakes?)

Actually most other poker news sites and forums have similar listings, in most cases highlighting a half-dozen or so sites in an effort to get sign-ups as affiliates. One of the more comprehensive lists (that gets updated fairly frequently) can be found over at Compatible Poker.

I did finally get around to balancing my online poker ledger for 2011 last week. Used to be I kept that stuff constantly updated after each session, but the urgency to do so has lessened considerably as the stakes got smaller and the frequency of play slowed down. Was mildly happy to find I’d ended the year in the black, although not by a lot. In fact, the final figure essentially represented just a tad more than what I’d won in those freerolls.

I think my online poker career has probably followed an arc very similar to others, with the best years coming shortly after the boom (through about 2007 or so), then things flattening out a bit after that once the UIGEA came and opponents became less plentiful (and less fishy).

The height of my graph is of course way, way below that of many, though perhaps above some, too. But the shape is probably similar, with the peak coming around the same point on the timeline.

Right now, though, at least for Americans, most of those lines are strictly horizontal. And have been for a good while.

Such is the state of things at present as we hope for online poker to revive back to life.

Poker’s Not-So-Square Deal

President Barack Obama yesterday delivered an address on the economy in Osawatomie, Kansas. Or campaign speech, if you like. We are, after all, already amid another presidential campaign, even if the election is nearly a year away.

This isn’t a political blog and so I’m not alluding to Obama’s speech for any reason other than to evoke an idea about poker -- specifically about the “skill-vs.-luck” argument that often comes up in discussions about legislating the game.

Much of the reporting on the speech today is pointing to parallels between a few of Obama’s talking points and ideas advanced by Theodore Roosevelt in a famous speech also delivered in Osawatomie in 1910.

Roosevelt became president when William McKinley was assassinated in September 1901, just a few months into McKinley’s second term. TR was reelected in 1904, then chose not to run again in 1908. However, TR came back to compete for the 1912 election, and the Osawatomie speech was part of that effort. (TR would not be elected again, as Woodrow Wilson became the nation’s 28th president.)

This was the speech in which TR argued that government needed first and foremost to protect American workers’ ability to earn a living and make their own way without being exploited by corrupt business practices. The speech is known especially for introducing TR’s “New Nationalism” idea which dovetailed with the “Square Deal” agenda he had pursued when president.

It was that assurance of a “Square Deal” -- a term borrowed from poker -- that most commenting on Obama’s speech are highlighting today. One sound bite from Obama’s speech getting a lot of play goes as follows:

“I believe that this country succeeds when everyone gets a fair shot, when everyone does their fair share, when everyone plays by the same rules. These aren’t Democratic values or Republican values. These aren’t 1 percent values or 99 percent values. They’re American values. And we have to reclaim them.”

There are a lot of ways we could talk about this idea of everyone getting “a fair shot” and “play[ing] by the same rules” in the context of poker. But I have just one thought in mind I wanted to throw out that kind of connects with this “square deal” talk.

Many of those who defend poker do so by highlighting its skill component, something that is said to distinguish the game in a meaningful way from other purely chance-based gambles like the lottery or roulette or what have you. For some, this makes poker worthy of being legalized as a game not unlike sports or other competitions in which players test their skills against one another.

A few who make this argument get carried away and try to minimize or ignore entirely the fact that chance does play a role in poker. Poker is certainly a form of gambling, but one in which various skills can be employed which often help one overcome the game’s chance element and promote the more-skilled players ahead of those with less ability.

It occurred to me recently how the very fact that poker does reward the skillful -- that it isn’t like just picking a number and hoping it hits -- might make some people less comfortable with it than they are with pure chance games like the lottery.

With the lottery, there’s no disputing that everyone has a “fair shot” (relative to one another, anyway). And unless the operation of the lottery is crooked, everyone “plays by the same rules,” too. But in poker, some really are better equipped than others to succeed. It’s a game that divides us, that highlights our differences. The fact is, whenever we sit down at a table it is very likely some are going to have an advantage over others.

Those of us who play poker understand how players come to gain that advantage -- i.e., by study, by experience, by work. Sure, you could say we all had a “fair shot” at some previous point, but once we’ve taken a seat it soon becomes clear that some have an edge over others.

That’s never the case with the lottery. We’re all equally equipped there.

I wonder if perhaps some percentage of non-players who are made uncomfortable by poker dislike it even more because it requires skill -- that it isn’t a game in which anyone can play and have a “fair shot.” And since it involves money and players betting on themselves and against others -- and, well, that chance element in there complicating things, too -- poker thus becomes all the more difficult for some to tolerate.

I’ve probably unnecessarily complicated my point with the Obama/Roosevelt references, but I hope the idea is coming through. Obviously some oppose poker because they view it as gambling -- they object to poker just as they object to roulette or slots or other gambling games (on moral grounds, or for other reasons).

But could it be there are others who object to poker because it isn’t enough like those other games? People to whom talk of poker’s skill component in fact makes them less comfortable with the idea of legally allowing the game? People who fear poker because, well, they realize it isn’t necessarily a “square deal” in the way the lottery is (even if the “deal” the lottery offers is equally bad to all)?

Seems like this could be an issue -- not the biggest one, but an issue -- with which proponents of poker might have to... erm... deal.

Do Not Ask for Whom the Tells Show

Gonna be a lot of folks standing in line today as America finally decides who will be our next president. Lots of big races in the Senate and House, too. Expected turnout (overall) is supposed to be huge -- like in the 70% range, much higher than the usual 50% of registered voters who vote. And some of those lines are sure to be superlong. I believe 34 states (and the District of Columbia) had some sort of early voting, and while a lot of people took advantage, the majority of ballots will be cast today.

I voted about ten days ago. Went down to one of the public libraries near where I live, stood in line for just 45 minutes, and used one of those touch screen machines to cast my vote. Remembering a much longer wait back in 2004, I took a book this time, the second volume of Dan Harrington and Bill Robertie’s Harrington on Cash Games.

I’ve finished both books now. As was the case with the Harrington on Hold’em books, these are highly readable, smart discussions of strategy. I’m certain not everyone is buying into all of the various pieces of advice associated with the tight-aggressive style that gets the most attention in the two books, but there’s definitely a lot in there worth a poker player’s time.

When I was standing in line, I remember reading most of Part Eight, a kind of digression from the primary strategy discussion titled “Tells and Observations.” As you might expect from Harrington, the position taken is that physical tells such as those outlined with great specificity by Mike Caro in Caro’s Book of Poker Tells aren’t nearly as important as recognizing betting patterns.

As the authors put it, “the whole science of spotting tells is more difficult and less useful than most people suppose.” They refer to their 2+2 colleague Mason Malmuth’s point that “tells are only useful when they cause you to make the right decision when otherwise you would have made the wrong one.” And that circumstance -- the one where you actually are able to apply the info you (think you) have obtained in a way that is profitable -- they maintain just doesn’t come up all that often.

Dunno if I would be quite so dismissive of tells, though I do share the pair’s skepticism about being able to break the whole subject down like a “science.” Which is kind of ironic, given that Harrington and Robertie (and Malmuth) tend so frequently toward advice that is somehow “less human”-sounding than most.

You know what I mean -- all of those inordinately long compilations of probabilities when faced with a particular decision in one of their sample hand “problems.” There’s one in Volume II (Hand 6-2) where “you” call a middle-position raise from the cutoff with a pair of sevens, the flop comes 9-7-3 rainbow, and your opponent bets out about three-fourths of the pot. Then we get seven pages running through all of the possibilities (“He has nothing and we raise,” “He has nothing and we call,” “He has something and we raise,” “He has something and we call”), culminating with a chart (or “matrix”) showing the expected EV based on the probabilities established by this exhaustively thorough analysis. Certainly a useful discussion, though I can’t imagine any humans really play poker this way.

Anyhow, even if the authors are dismissive of the value of recognizing others’ tells, they do stress the importance of minimizing one’s own tells. They recommend minimizing one’s movements as much as possible (“The Patrik Antonius Way”), or following what they call “The Scripted Defense” whereby one follows the same, idiosyncratic pattern of movements every time one acts. Again, the idea seems to be to minimize one’s “human”-ness if possible.

There have been a few articles over the last few months analyzing the “tells” of Barack Obama and John McCain. For instance, this July article from the Telegraph concluded that both candidates need to work on their tells. Perhaps at one time -- such as during the debates -- that might have been a genuine concern. Of course, as far as the campaign goes, all that ends today.

Whomever comes out on top, he’ll have a hell of lot more than tells to worry about.