Savannah on the River

So my birthday is tomorrow, and some time ago Vera planned a secret vacation for the two of us involving our leaving today and not getting back to the farm until Friday.

One of the consequences of getting the farm, incidentally, has been it suddenly became a bit difficult for the two of us to get away like this at once, given how much needs to be taken care of day-to-day, particularly with the horses. So this is a real treat.

I say it’s a “secret vacation” because Vera managed to plan the whole thing without my knowledge, and so I had no idea where we were headed. Was guessing to friends it would either be the beach (about a four-hour trip east) or the mountains (a bit less to the west), but as it turned out we went south down to Savannah, Georgia.

I should’ve guessed that, actually, as we had been talking about the fact that we’d never been to Savannah before and had more or less planned to go, although it had slipped my mind. But once we got out on the interstate I remembered those discussions, and so had guessed correctly before we arrived.

On the way down I kept thinking of the poker scene in Cool Hand Luke when Wayne Rogers, who plays Gambler, is dealing the cards in the five-card stud game and he pitches a second seven as an upcard to Koko, Luke’s opponent.

“A pair of Savannahs,” says Gambler, describing the pair Koko has showing (and which Luke eventually gets him to fold after relentlessly raising with his king-high). Don’t know much about the origin of that poker term, other than that it is used both to describe the seven and to describe a seven hand in lowball.

Gonna cut this one short, but tomorrow I’ll share one other fun aspect of the trip Vera kept hidden. I’ll give a hint -- we’re staying in a bed and breakfast that features a particular theme having to do with U.S. presidents.

Meanwhile, we’re going to go down to do some people watching on the river.

Paul Newman and Poker

When we think of poker in film, it is hard not to think of Paul Newman. Whether as prisoner Luke Jackson, repeatedly calling out to “kick a buck” with nothing but air in Cool Hand Luke (1967), or as con man Henry Gondorff surprisingly turning over quad jacks to outcheat a cheater in The Sting (1973), Newman’s grinning mug necessarily springs to mind whenever someone sets out to compile a short list of the best poker scenes on the silver screen.

By the time of his passing in 2008, Newman had appeared in over 60 films, with America’s favorite card game popping up in more than a few of them. As a result, Newman came to be identified somewhat with the game. In fact, among the many quotes often attributed to the actor is a poker-related one which anyone reading this post will undoubtedly recognize:

“If you’re playing a poker game and you look around the table and can’t tell who the sucker is, it’s you.”

So Newman is thought to have said, although the line likely had its origins elsewhere. Whatever its true source, it’s a line fans of poker films recognize instantly as paraphrased by Mike McDermott during the opening of Rounders (1998): “If you can’t spot the sucker in the first half-hour at the table, then you are the sucker.”

The actor was himself not an especially dedicated poker player, at least not according to his biographer Shawn Levy. “Despite the evidence of his film work,” writes Levy, “he played pool and poker passingly to badly; chess too.” Rather did Newman prefer bridge, says Levy, spending down time on sets “working out bridge hands silently in his head.”

Such evidence from his films is indeed ample, with the aforementioned poker scenes from Cool Hand Luke and The Sting easily the most memorable.

As the stubborn, intrepid inmate in Cool Hand Luke, it’s a game of five-card stud that helps Newman’s Luke earn a certain status among the other prisoners, as well as his nickname. In the hand, several disinterested-and-thus-super-strong-appearing raises from Luke ultimately force his opponent to fold his “pair of Savannahs” (or sevens), at which point Luke reveals his king-high. Or, as observer Dragline (George Kennedy) gleefully crows, “a hand full of nothing.”

“Yeah, well,” says Luke, pausing just a beat while opening a bottle, “sometimes nothing can be a real cool hand.” In just three minutes, Luke’s complicated character is comprehensively defined both to the other prisoners and to us via a simple hand of poker.

The Sting found Newman teamed with Robert Redford as a pair of Depression-era grifters out to score revenge on a large scale against a hated crime boss named Lonnegan. Along the way, the twisty, surprise-filled plot places Newman's Gondorff on a cross-country train across the poker table from their enemy in a private, high-stakes game.

Playing five-card draw, the villain Lonnegan has a deck prepared to ensure Gondorff receives quad treys versus his own four nines. But Gondorff has an extra deck himself from which to draw cards, and when the betting concludes, he is the one who surprisingly turns over the best hand -- four jacks -- to the disbelief of Lonnegan. “What was I supposed to do?” says a fuming Lonnegan afterwards. “Call him for cheating better than me in front of the others?”

There are other Newman films in which poker makes an appearance, including Hud (1963), The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (1972), and Nobody’s Fool (1994).

Adapted from Larry McMurtry’s novel, Hud finds Newman as the irascible title character, a woman-chasing man in his mid-30s growing increasingly uncomfortable with a life working on his father’s cattle farm. A family drama in which Newman plays an antagonist pitted against his father and nephew, relationships are further complicated by the presence of their housekeeper, Alma, played by Patricia Neal in an Oscar-winning performance.

Midway through the film comes a sexually-charged meeting between Hud and Alma during which she explains how her ex-husband was a gambler whom she now suspects is probably working as a dealer in Reno or Las Vegas. In fact, Alma has just come from a poker game herself where she left a winner. Hud asks her “how much you take the boys for tonight,” her ability as a player clearly increasing his fascination with her.

While Newman doesn’t play poker in Hud, he does in another western, The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (1972). Though loosely based on a true story, the strange, uneven film plays out like a fantasy with a sequence of oddball episodes featuring Newman’s eccentric Bean surrounded by a cast of oddballs.

As an outlaw Bean stops in a frontier town where he is robbed and nearly killed. He soon exacts bloody revenge, then appoints himself the “judge” of the town where he eventually surrounds himself with marshals, a mayor, and others amenable to his idiosyncratic rule. In a sense, Bean is a Don Quixote-like figure, living in a world of his own imagination and successfully persuading others to do the same.

The judge frequently holds court over poker games, said by one of the marshals who narrates part of the story as having “had as much to do with winning the West as Colts .45 or the Prairie schooner.” Indeed, poker is described as “more a religion, than a game,” with Bean believing himself “a past master.”

That said, the games shown in the film serve mainly to show Bean to be a losing player, though nonetheless confirm his authority over his dusty kingdom. For example, after losing a hand to one of his marshals, Whorehouse Lucky Jim, the Judge immediately charges him $25 for the next beer he orders.

“That ain’t sportin’,” complains Jim. “What is a man supposed to do?” “Start losing or quit drinking,” declares Bean.

One last poker game precedes a final battle between Bean and a rival to his authority. As if to foreshadow the gunplay to come, the players use bullets for chips. “I open for a .38,” says one. “I call the .38 and raise you two .45s.” It perhaps goes without saying that when the end comes for Bean his demise is reported thusly: “the judge cashed in his chips.”

Finally, Newman again found himself at a poker table in Nobody’s Fool (1994), a smart, occasionally moving film that probably deserves a wider audience. There Newman plays yet another against-the-grain type in Sully Sullivan, a freelance construction worker struggling to get by in wintry upstate New York.

Sully hates Carl Roebuck (Bruce Willis), owner of Tip Top Construction, but is forced to take work from him. The pair butt heads at the poker table, too, where Carl taunts Sully by calling him “the only guy I know still dumb enough to believe in luck.” Sully has a response for a man who inherited his business from his father: “I used to believe in brains and hard work ’til I met you.”

Whether by luck or otherwise, Carl beats Sully in their game, and appears to be beating him in life, too, having married the beautiful Toby (Melanie Griffith) -- with whom Sully openly flirts -- though Carl is cheating on her with a succession of secretaries.

Meanwhile, Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays force Sully to consider whether he ought to try to amend what has been a life as a neglectful father and grandfather, with the subsequent development of that primary plot providing both an absorbing story and opportunity for Newman to shine in a particularly well-fitting role.

Sully gets another crack at Carl in a later poker game, by which point his change in character has taken place. Things go better for him there, but when others mention his luck turning, he insists “luck has nothing to do with it.”

There’s at least one other film of Newman’s in which poker does take place, although only in passing -- The Hustler (1961). Nonetheless, in his 1977 book of essays Total Poker, David Spanier provocatively suggests The Hustler to be “the best film about poker,” even though “it isn’t about poker at all.”

Pointing out how the story of the pool-player Fast Eddie constitutes “probably the definitive statement about winning and losing in games, if not in life,” Spanier believes the movie to provide cinema’s most cogent commentary on poker without even focusing on the actual game.

“Although The Hustler is about pool, its lessons apply just as strongly, indeed precisely, to poker,” argues Spanier.

Can’t really blame Spanier too much for thinking of poker while watching a Paul Newman movie, even one in which poker isn’t being played. After all, the guy always seemed to have cards in his hand.

Bluffing and Nothingness

Have been playing tourneys more often lately, including this $40K guarantee they run on PokerStars every night at 8:00 p.m. Eastern time. Normally I don’t play much at night, preferring to spend the time with Vera Valmore, but she was away at a conference and so I once more hopped in the game.

This particular $40K guarantee is a rebuy tourney -- just $3 plus 30 cents to start, then $3 for each rebuy or add-on -- with a relatively slow structure (15-minute levels). The rebuy period lasts an hour and is often characterized by the gambly shenanigans one frequently sees in rebuy events. However, thanks to the long levels I found it’s usually possible to be patient and wait for a good spot to double-up for free.

I’ve been doing okay in these, cashing enough to make for a decent-looking ROI. Even a min-cash tends to approach $20, not bad if you can manage to get through the rebuy period without laying out too much.

Also, this particularly tourney seems frequently to have overlays, or at least there have been the times I’ve played ’em. For example, last night there were 3,370 players, 6,040 rebuys, and 2,182 add-ons. That meant a total of $34,776 had been contributed by the field, so Stars added $5,224 to the prize pool to make the guarantee.

I did cash last night. Had an okay stack going for much of the way, then was below average (down to about 16 big blinds) when I ran into pocket kings to go out earlier than I’d have liked.

Had one hand in particular I enjoyed quite a bit, one in which I open-raised from the button with 8-2-offsuit and got a caller, then double-barrelled to take it down on the turn with my eight-high. Nothing too special, really, but the hand came right before a break and won me a decent-sized pot, carrying my total close to its highest point of the evening. So I had five minutes to get a drink of water and congratulate myself. And think of Cool Hand Luke.

Earlier in the day in my “Poker in American Film and Culture” class I’d shown that well-known clip from the great 1967 film directed by Stuart Rosenberg and starring Paul Newman, perhaps one of the best, smartest poker scenes in any movie. You know what I am referring to, the scene involving a five-card stud hand in which Luke (Paul Newman) picks up his nickname:



After showing the clip I asked the class to respond to that line “sometimes nothing can be a real cool hand.” Has a kind of obvious meaning in poker, I suppose, referring to the fact that it can be easier to bluff with nothing at all than with a hand of marginal value. Sometimes, anyway.

But I asked the students to think about the phrase in a broader context, relating it to the so-called “American” themes (e.g., freedom, independence, etc.) we’ve been saying poker tends to illustrate. Not to get all lecture-like here, but it doesn’t take too much cogitatin’ to see how the line represents more than just a neat thing to say after successfully running a bluff. It’s an entire “philosophy” or world-view, really, one which I think we see illustrated in a variety of ways in the U.S.

I’ll leave you to think about what I might be getting at there. Sort of like a teacher might do. Or someone who is bluffing.