Wild Bill’s Last Hand

Over in the “Poker & Pop Culture” series on PokerNews I’ve reached the end of a section focusing on “saloon poker” during the 19th century, mostly focusing on some of the more notable names associated with poker of the era.

This week’s column is all about James Butler “Wild Bill” Hickok, covering his story in brief including his famous murder at a poker table in 1876. From there, though, I move on to talk more broadly about the idea of the “dead man’s hand” as it has played out in popular culture over the almost 140 years since.

Hickok, as many know, was said to be holding two pair, aces and eights, at the time he was murdered. In the column I talk about how in fact there were several other poker hands designated the “dead man’s hand” before a book about Hickock in the 1920s helped solidify the association between the term and his hand.

I also get into some -- not all -- of the later references to the dead man’s hand and/or aces and eights, a catalogue that includes John Wayne, R.P. McMurphy of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Motörhead, and Bob Dylan among others.

Here are links to all the “saloon poker” posts, if you’re curious to explore any of them:

Digging for Gold (and Aces) in California

Doc Holliday and Wyatt Earp, A Premium Pair

The Many Versions of Bat Masterson

Lady Gamblers and Poker Alice

The Long, Strange Life of the Dead Man’s Hand

My primary goal with these articles is to highlight the many ways poker enters “mainstream” popular culture, and not necessarily to write a straightforward history of poker as others have done (including most recently James McManus in his 2009 book Cowboys Full). However, particularly during these early installments of the series, I have nonetheless spent some time narrating the game’s early history to set up a useful context for what’s to come.

The next few articles come under the heading of “steamboat poker,” then after a brief discussion of poker in the Civil War I’ll be moving on to consider the game as it appeared in a variety of contexts -- in early clubs, on the bookshelf (with the first poker strategy titles), and in homes of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Photo: Wild Bill Hickok, public domain.

Green's Anti-Gambling Crusade

This week’s “Poker & Pop Culture” column over on PokerNews is mostly focused on a fellow named Jonathan Harrington Green, a 19th-century card player and gambler who is best known for having championed a lengthy anti-gambling effort during the middle decades of the 1800s.

Green wrote a number of books warning readers against the horrors of gambling. In the column I primarily discuss the first one, published in 1843 with the title An Exposure of the Arts and Miseries of Gambling; Designed Especially as a Warning to the Youthful and Inexperienced Against the Evils of That Odious and Destructive Vice.

Prior to becoming a anti-gambling proponent, Green was himself a gambler and “card sharp” for a dozen years, and so brings a certain degree of first-hand experience to his warnings about the relatively new game of poker and the chance of encountering cheating (or worse) at the tables.

He refers to himself as a “reformed gambler,” and indeed his nominal purpose going forward is to reform his readers and society at large, dissuading us all from “that odious and destructive vice.” A fairly conspicuous additional purpose is to sell books and make money, and in fact Green’s titles sold quite well, with several going through multiple editions.

Green also gave lecture tours to support his books, something I mention in passing in the column but don’t delve into that deeply. James McManus shares the story of Green’s lectures in Cowboys Full, including how Green used a bit of deceit in order to “demonstrate” to audiences that all decks of cards were marked, thus making the game fundamentally unfair to the unaware.

Drawing on a story told by Henry Chafetz in his history of gambling, McManus tells how Green would send an audience member from his lecture to buy a deck of cards and bring it to him, and he’d then “read” the backs of the cards to show the audience how cheaters worked. Only Green actually used a “shiner” or small mirror in order to identify the cards -- i.e., he didn’t have to rely on any markings.

“In other words,” writes McManus, “he was making himself rich and famously righteous by fixing the evidence that all card games were fixed.”

Like I say, I left that part of the story out of the discussion, while also omitting other stories by Green about early poker games (for the sake of brevity). But the point gets made well enough, I hope, about Green’s crusade, as well as about how even in some of the earliest references to poker, the game was viewed as corrupt and a potential source of trouble for those who played it.

If you’re curious, check it out: “Poker & Pop Culture: A Game That Is Immensely Destructive.”

Image: An Exposure of the Arts and Miseries of Gambling (title page, second edition), Jonathan Harrington Green, public domain.

Talk About Table Captains

There’s a short compilation of stories about U.S. presidents playing poker today over at the N.Y. Times, pulled together Michael Beschloss. All of the stories are quite familiar to anyone who has looked into the subject before, but for those who haven’t it serves as a quick introduction to some of the highlights.

Actually anyone who’s read James McManus’s 2009 history of poker, Cowboys Full, will be familiar with almost of the stories in the piece, so much so that I’m kind of surprised Beschloss doesn’t at least acknowledge McManus (a former NYT columnist) in his article.

For example, when rehearsing the story of the pre-Iron Curtain speech game of poker involving Harry Truman and Winston Churchill (something I’ve written about here), Beschloss includes all of the same details and even implies the same connection McManus does between the Americans’ good showing in the game and Churchill’s declaration of alliance with the U.S. in his speech the day after.

He also echoes McManus’s connections between cold war politics and poker, although the discussion of the Kennedy-Khrushchev showdown over the Cuban Missile Crisis (and its interpretation as a poker-like confrontation of high-stakes raises and bluffs) has been explored by many other writers as well.

The article-concluding anecdote about former Secretary of State George Shultz comparing Ronald Reagan’s bargaining with the U.S.S.R.’s Mikhail Gorbachev as “the highest stakes poker game ever played” is the only one included that is not mentioned in McManus’s book. Meanwhile, no mention of Barack Obama’s poker-playing seems a strange omission in the NYT piece.

Anyone with an interest in presidential politics will find these stories interesting, though. Those interested in poker will, too. And if you’re like me and interested in both, you can’t get enough of this stuff, even if you’ve read it all before.

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.

More on Tricky Dick

I was talking about Garry Wills’s excellent Nixon Agonistes last month, a book written and published during Nixon’s first term as president (i.e., prior to Watergate). The book is about a lot more than Nixon, actually, providing a comprehensive examination of American history and politics as well as other aspects of the culture. It’s a dense, scholarly book, and I recommend it highly to anyone with an interest in the subject and/or era.

Have since picked up a few other Nixon-related titles, including a couple at a used bookstore this week. While I was there I saw taped to a bookcase that picture above featuring a creative use of a Nixon postage stamp (no shinola). Also have spent a few hours here and there listening to some of the Nixon tapes online and marveling at the wealth of other resources available regarding his presidency.

I’m not quite old enough to remember him as president, and so didn’t form any impressions of him until well after his fall. Such a complicated figure, endlessly fascinating yet almost never sympathetic (at least not to me).

In my “Poker in American Film and Culture” class we do discuss Nixon, primarily focusing on the much-repeated tale of his having been a successful poker player while serving in the Navy during World War II. James McManus frontloads his history of poker, Cowboys Full, with a catalogue of stories of U.S. presidents playing poker, and since we use McManus’s book as kind of a core text for the first part of the course, we focus a lot of energy early on thinking about some of those stories, a few of which come up again later on in the semester, too.

Earlier this week Bob Pajich pulled together a nice piece for Card Player in which he goes over the story of Nixon’s poker playing, titled “Men of Action -- Richard ‘The Big Bluffer’ Nixon.” Pajich draws on various sources including a 1983 interview in which Nixon addressed the idea that being a skillful poker player might be of special use to a president. Such is an argument advanced by McManus, too, at the start of Cowboys Full, and thus is one we consider as a class when we read and discuss that first chapter.

As Pajich points out, the place of poker in Nixon’s story is primarily confined to that early period prior to having begun his long, arduous ascent to the White House. It’s interesting, though, to overlay various poker-related strategies to his later political career, including the various ways he misplayed his “big stack” once he became president.

It was John Mitchell, Nixon’s first Attorney General who became part of the notorious Committee to Re-Elect the President (and who’d eventually serve prison time for his role in the Watergate cover-up), who characterized the many abuses of power during Nixon’s presidency as “the White House horrors.” And really, the more one reads and learns about all that was happening during that period, the more horrific it all seems. Talk about putting one’s “stamp” on the presidency (pun intended). It is amazing (and I guess, kind of heartening) to think how the U.S. government was able to survive a Nixon administration.

Like I say, though, the man himself is uncannily captivating. In his book, Wills characterizes Nixon as “the least ‘authentic’ man alive,” a “plastic man” who “does not exist outside his role, apart from politics.” “He lives in a cleared circle, an emotional DMZ, space razed and defoliated, so he cannot be ‘got to’ unexpectedly.” Referring to the ubiquitous Nixon masks that were already beginning to appear at the time of Nixon’s first inauguration (and would become especially popular during Watergate as a countercultural symbol), Wills describes the new president’s uneasy relationship with the youth of his day.

“At the 1969 inauguration,” Wills writes, “the streets were full of ashen Nixons. Kids in town to cause trouble wore crinkly white masks with that undeniable nose. But Nixon’s car sped past their jeering ranks, and, up on the reviewing stand, his face bunched in its instant toothed smile, so circumspect, so vulnerable.”

Then comes the devastating punchline: “He had this in common with the kids; he wears a Nixon mask.”

From the perspective of a poker player, being able to interact with others while existing within an “emotional DMZ” might seem favorable. Always being “circumspect” with regard to how others view you -- i.e., being cognizant of one’s own “image” and how others are responding to it -- is a much-needed ability at the tables, too. I’ve even heard poker players sometimes talk about playing as though they were wearing a “mask,” that is, kind of employing a bit of self-delusion as part of a strategy to prevent revealing too much to others.

But Nixon was “vulnerable,” too (surmises Wills), and while he may have consistently won in those stud games with fellow Naval officers -- and later on, as well, in the other “games” he played within the GOP establishment and the American voters -- there was a lot of uncertainty and self-doubt in his play, too, especially after he took office as president.

I was saying before how I might like to write some sort of short monograph about “Tricky Dick” that focused on his poker playing and perhaps tried to discuss some of these later episodes through the lens of poker. I may still do something along these lines, although now I’m thinking I’ll more likely try to create a kind of textbook for my class that looks at poker in American culture more broadly, perhaps with a Nixon chapter along the way. (Such a book would certainly attract a wider audience, I think.)

So I’ll add working that project to the growing list of goals for the new year. Sort of feeling like Nixon a little bit, who also tended to study and plan a lot before acting. Such was how he learned poker, working diligently away from the table to devise strategies he would then later employ. And as a politician, too, he studied and developed a complicated theory of leadership he then carried to his duties.

But there was a pretty severe disconnect between theory and practice in the latter case for Nixon, I think, wherein the application of his ideas failed. Hopefully I’ll avoid that misstep in the execution of my plans.

Playing Poker With Truman and Churchill

One very fun thing about teaching this “Poker in American Film and Culture” class each semester is discovering additional readings, films, or other material related to the course. I’ve taught the class a few times now and every time I do I end up finding new, interesting items to incorporate.

Of course the class remains just one semester long, which means I have to decide sometimes whether to cut readings in order to bring in the new material. I’ve compromised somewhat in this regard by introducing an ever-growing “Recommended Readings & Viewings” section where I’ve been moving articles and clips that are getting replaced.

James McManus’s Cowboys Full remains a core text for the class, a book we spend a lot of time with especially early on. Doing so ensures we have some idea of the history of poker in the U.S. and thus some context for the films and other cultural productions we examine later on.

Those of you who’ve read McManus’s book know how he makes lots of references to events in American history in which poker was of particular relevance. A few examples come in the chapter about Harry Truman, one of many poker-playing U.S. presidents.

Truman’s adopted motto -- “the buck stops here” -- is in fact derived from poker, the “buck” referring to the buckhorn knife once used as a the dealer’s button. McManus explains that bit of trivia while also telling the story of Truman playing stud with the press aboard the U.S.S. Augusta battleship while waiting for news regarding the detonation of the atomic bomb over Hiroshima.

We all know how the Enola Gay, piloted by Paul Tibbets, was the name of the aircraft from which the first bomb was dropped. McManus doesn’t mention the names of a couple of other aircraft involved in the missions over Hiroshima and Nagasaki -- the Straight Flush and Full House (both of which handled weather reconnaissance).

McManus does go on to talk about WWII’s aftermath, including Winston Churchill’s famous “Iron Curtain” speech delivered in March 1946. Churchill had arrived in Washington D.C. and rode with Truman on his private train to Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri where he gave the speech (pictured at left). On the way, Churchill, Truman, and others played poker on the train.

McManus explains how the game went, with Churchill losing steadily before finally quitting at 2:30 in the morning. The next day Churchill then delivered the speech that along with Stalin’s response many point to as the start of the Cold War.

McManus resists drawing any substantial connections between the poker game and the speech, but reading between the lines it is tempting to give it some symbolic significance as a prelude to the cementing of a significant and enduring alliance.

We’ll be discussing this chapter along with others today in class. When preparing I found this clip in which long-time journalist David Brinkley talks about playing in the poker game on the train with Truman and Churchill. I think I’ll show the clip in class today and let the students hear Brinkley talk about how after beating up on Churchill for most of the night, the Americans finally eased up before the game concluded.



Like I say, it’s tempting to give the game some significance it probably doesn’t deserve and talk about how it demonstrated something of the Americans’ character to Churchill. Or perhaps even illustrated a modest example of diplomacy. In any event, it’s fascinating how often poker comes up at key moments in the nation’s history.

Two of a Kind: W. Joseph Johnston and Russ Hamilton

Poker in Florida is experiencing a significant boom these days. Since betting limits were uncapped and other restrictions (e.g., games offered, hours of operation) were loosened on July 1, 2010, poker rooms throughout the state have witnessed unprecedented growth over the last six-plus months, with players pouring into the state’s more than two dozen card rooms in droves.

One player who has turned up at the new Florida games is Russ Hamilton, the 1994 World Series of Poker champion who remains the only person implicated in the four-and-a-half-year-long UltimateBet insider cheating scandal. According to the Kahnawake Gaming Commission’s “final decision” on the matter (issued September 11, 2009), 31 individuals were involved in the cheating, with former UB “consultant” Hamilton the only one of them named in the report. The site refunded over $22 million to cheated players, and the KGC fined UB an additional $1.5 million.

According to the report (which I can’t seem to locate on the KGC site any longer), “The vast majority of the computer devices and IP addresses used by the cheating accounts were directly associated with Russell Hamilton.” The report also suggested that “the cheating incidences detailed herein could constitute criminal behavior,” indicating that the regulatory body might pursue such, even though doing so was outside of the scope of its responsibility.

As we all know, no criminal charges have been sought against Hamilton or any of the others involved in the cheating at UB. Thus is the disgraced WSOP champ free to go where he likes, including showing up at the Gulfstream Park Casino for the 5/10/20 uncapped NLHE game there a couple of weeks ago.

A player at the game who recognized Hamilton confronted him about his involvement in the cheating. The resulting brouhaha was subsequently documented in detail in a Two Plus Two thread with the excellently descriptive title “Russ Hamilton verbally eviscerated; breaks down into an obscenity laced tirade.”

As the title indicates, Hamilton showed some defiance during that incident. And reports since of further appearances in Florida card rooms seem to suggest that Hamilton remains undeterred.

I thought of Hamilton yesterday when rereading a chapter in James McManus’s history of poker, Cowboys Full (2009), one concerning an incident of cheating that occurred at the Americus Club in Pittsburgh in 1906. Much like Hamilton seeing his opponents’ hole cards while playing online at UB, in that case the cheater, a man named W. Joseph Johnston, used a mirror ring to catch a glimpse of the down cards he was dealing in a game of five-card stud.

After cleaning out his opponents, one of them, Frank Sauers, spotted the mirror ring and beat up Johnston. Then he had him arrested “on a charge of obtaining money under false pretenses” (as a New York Times article reported). The case went to court and Johnston was ordered to give Sauers back the money (and diamond ring and a diamond stud) he’d swindled from him, plus play court costs.

Johnston “sneeringly” paid what was due, says the article, but when the magistrate ordered him to leave Pittsburgh he insolently declared he’d “take his own time” doing so, insisting on first letting everyone know what he thought of the Americus Club members and their “squealing.”

“You fellows who have yelled at your losses have always been looking for the best of it at cards,” Johnston is reported to have said. “Yet when someone better than yourself at the game beats you you yell.” Johnston was even brazen enough to ask that his mirror ring be returned to him! The magistrate didn’t, though, and instead indicated he’d have the cheater arrested again if he didn’t skedaddle.

McManus explains how Johnston’s audacity in fact reflected general attitudes about poker during the 19th and early 20th centuries, namely that cheating was widely accepted as part of the game. Johnston’s boldness in court stemmed from his belief -- shared by many -- that “poker was a cheating game” and thus “it was unmanly to ‘squeal’ when someone got the better of you.” In other words (McManus explains), it was “by virtue of their superior sharping skills” that Johnston believed he had “earned the right” to steal from his opponents at the tables there at the Americus Club.

Rereading that chapter in Cowboys Full caused me think of Hamilton and wonder if perhaps that idea -- that in poker, cheating is part of the “game” -- somehow lingers in his mind as a kind of vestige of an earlier age. Certainly the decision to cheat in the first place was inspired by such, perhaps even rationalized by the thought that in poker one tries to find whatever edge one can in order to get one’s opponents’ chips into one’s own stack, including stealing peeks at others’ cards.

But perhaps the idea somehow remains in his thoughts today? Somehow providing Hamilton the needed courage -- or nerve -- to allow him to continue to show up in poker rooms to play?

And evoke the ghost of a certain W. Joseph Johnston, shouting invective in a Pittsburgh courtroom over a hundred years ago, with his own “obscenity laced tirade” at the Gulfstream Park Casino.

Shamus the Scribbler Betfair Bound

With the 2009 World Series of Poker Main Event restart just a day away, most all of our thoughts are focused toward the Nevada desert. I’ll likely be posting some here later today and over the weekend, as I can’t imagine being able to resist commenting on the proceedings in some fashion. Might as well warn anyone who doesn’t want to know how things are going to avoid Hard-Boiled Poker (and just about every other poker-related site, too) until the show finally airs on ESPN Tuesday night.

I’ve yet to join any of the “pick’em” pools that have sprung up all around us during the last few days. I might still do so, but am kind of reluctant, partly because I don’t really want to follow the final table with any particular rooting interest regarding who finishes seventh, sixth, fifth, etc.

Like anyone else, I’m highly intrigued by the prospect of a Phil Ivey win, and I’ve also given some thought to the various consequences for each of the others coming out on top -- the whole “is it good for poker?” thing. A question which, by the way, the always cogent Nicole Gordon has addressed very well regarding each of the November Nine over at PokerNews.

But really, I’m just excited to see how all nine of these guys handle the situation. And to see what cards come their way.

Of course, while I am certainly thinking about what’s happening at the Rio All-Suite Hotel and Casino over the next few days, my thoughts are turned in the opposite direction as well -- across the Atlantic toward the U.K. Why? That’s because today marks the debut of a new column of mine over on Betfair!

Some of you recognize Betfair as the sponsoring site for the recent World Series of Poker Europe. It’s the largest online betting company in the U.K., and includes a fairly popular online poker site under its tent. The recently-turned-21 Annette Obrestad is probably the site’s best known sponsored pro.

Included on its site is a nifty poker blog to which Betfair has invited me to begin contributing. Am starting out today with a book review of James McManus’s Cowboys Full: The Story of Poker, a book I have written about here a bit. I also interviewed McManus last week, and for my next Betfair piece will be sharing that interview. The plan at present is for me to be posting over there once per week, and it looks like Fridays will be my day.

If you don’t have the Betfair blog already listed there in your favorite reader, here is the RSS feed. And if you happen to check out the review, do let me know what you think!

I’ll be posting more book reviews over there, I expect, as well as other pieces covering different poker-related subjects. I’ve already used two exclamation points in this post, so you can probably tell I’m fairly psyched about starting the new column. Much thanks to Dave Allan and the folks at Betfair for bringing me aboard.

Meanwhile, I’ll be talking to you again over here soon.

A Good Read: McManus Tells the Story of Poker

I mentioned a couple of times recently having gotten myself a copy of Cowboys Full: The Story of Poker, the new history of poker by James McManus. I’ve finished it and have in fact written a review of the book for another outlet, so I’m not that inclined to review it formally here as well. However, as the book is officially due out next week, I thought I would go ahead and share a few thoughts regarding it here.

We’ve been hearing about this one for a long time, actually. I first recall reading something about it several years ago, with a 2009 target date for publication being mentioned. McManus, of course, carved himself an important place in the poker publishing business with his Positively Fifth Street, which first appeared in 2003 (a great year for anything poker-related to appear). Wrote something about that one way back during the early days of Hard-Boiled Poker, if you’re interested.

Those of you who have read Positively Fifth Street know that it is certainly a page-turner for (most) poker players. The book probably has some appeal to non-poker players, too, although I recall Vera Valmore never could get into it, having been turned off somewhat by the salacious opening scene detailing the murder of Ted Binion.

Positively Fifth Street ultimately weaves together three primary storylines. There’s the murder of Binion and subsequent trial of Sandy Murphy (his girlfriend) and Rick Tabish (her lover). There’s the 2000 World Series of Poker, for which McManus had been hired by Harper’s Magazine to produce a feature on women in poker. Then there’s McManus’s own involvement in the WSOP that year, where he won a satellite into the Main Event and then proceeded to make the final table, finishing fifth.

The book also includes numerous other digressions regarding the history of poker, plus stories from McManus’s family tree. In fact, while the primary storylines were all compelling enough, those digressions were my favorite parts of Positively Fifth Street. They did, of course, make the book longer than it needed to be, and I think it is safe to say even though I found the book engaging from beginning to end, I sensed how it could have stood some editing and/or reorganizing. Thus I’d rate Positively Fifth Street a notch below other “classic” poker narratives like Al Alvarez’s The Biggest Game in Town or Anthony Holden’s Big Deal.

(Incidentally, it appears a film adaptation of Positively Fifth Street is in the works, although we’ve been hearing about that pretty much since the book first came out six years ago.)

Soon after Positively Fifth Street appeared, McManus began writing a regular poker column for The New York Times. If you remember, at the time we were in the midst of that “poker boom” and his landing that position was rightly viewed as further evidence of poker’s splash into the mainstream. Of course, the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006 came along to stem the tide and somewhere in there McManus stopped writing for the NYT. He did resurface, however, with columns in Card Player (starting in late 2006) which in fact were essentially chapters from his forthcoming history of poker.

If you’ve read any of those Card Player columns, you have a good idea what to expect in Cowboys Full. The book is comprised of 52 chapters (a nice, pokery number) which mostly follow a chronological progression from the ancient world and early gambling games on up through the invention of playing cards and eventually poker.

Most of the book focuses on poker in America, and thus pursues an early-stated thesis about how poker fits neatly within a peculiarly American ethos. Says McManus, poker provides a perfect context within which to highlight the “American DNA,” which “expresses itself -- in some environments, at least -- as energetic risk-taking, restless curiosity, and competitive self-promotion.” There’s more, but you get the idea: to us Yanks, poker ain’t just a game, and so it is worth our while to tell its story.

The book then carries that story all of the way through its having been the “cheating game” on 19th century riverboats and in Old West saloons to its growth during the 20th century to the birth of the WSOP and on up to the present, including discussions of the UIGEA, the cheating scandals on Absolute Poker and UltimateBet, and the most recent WSOP. Lots of gripping anecdotes throughout, and, like McManus’s earlier poker book, a definite page-turner.

I will say -- also like Positively Fifth Street -- that McManus’s new book is similarly lacking somewhat in terms of editing and organization. There are more than a few moments along the way when I found myself traveling down some digressive path away from the story of poker and through some other, tangential tale from the Civil War or presidential history or the like. (“What does this have to do with poker, again?” I’d wonder.)

In other words, one gets the feeling the author kept just about everything from that first draft, even if perhaps it might’ve been a good idea to trim things up a bit here and there. Kind of like a band who rather than craft a single disc every year or two churns out albums every month. Which is awesome if you really dig the band and love everything they do, but less dedicated followers might appreciate a little more selectivity.

Then again, at around 500 pages, Cowboys Full does present itself as a kind of definitive, all-encompassing reference work, and so it probably isn’t that fair to complain about it having included too much. (Although, like I say, some of the tangents might seem not-so-vital to “the story of poker.”)

All in all, the book should prove highly entertaining to those wanting to learn more about the history of the game, and useful to those interested in writing about poker’s storied past, too. Probably not a bad ideer for a Christmas gift, I’d think, for that poker player in yr life.

First, the Invention of Lying; then, the Invention of Poker

This weekend Vera Valmore and I made it out to the movies, catching The Invention of Lying. A fun flick, affording several grins along the way. Not a life-changer by any means, but entertaining enough. I wrote up a review over on Film Chaw, if yr interested.

If you’ve seen the commercials, you know the film stars Ricky Gervais (of the original, British version of “The Office”). You might also have picked up on the film’s premise, namely, that Gervais, playing a fellow named Mark Bellison, lives in a world very much like our own, except for the fact that no one ever lies. One day Bellison accidentally manages to utter a lie, and when it is received as the truth finds he has discovered a means to fortune, fame, and just about anything else he can imagine.

One of the first scenes following his discovery of his new power involves Bellison visiting a casino. Thought for a moment there might be a poker scene coming -- indeed, there did appear to be poker being played in one of the establishing shots as they entered the casino. But Bellison instead opted for roulette and the slots, both of which proved relatively simple to cheat. All our hero had to do was lie about what number he had, or that he’d hit the jackpot but no funds came out, and he was believed and thus given his winnings.

Afterwards Vera and I were talking about the film and I suggested to her that poker was avoided because it would have made Bellison seem less sympathetic if he were shown cheating other players rather than the house. Might’ve been worth a laugh or two, having him lie about his hands or ask others the truth about theirs. But probably would’ve made him seem too insensitive, directly taking money that belonged to others (besides being more elaborate a ruse than was necessary).

I thought a little more about it, though, and realized that poker simply couldn’t work at all in the movie. In fact, one could argue it didn’t make much sense even to show poker being played in the background (one of a few “how could that be?” elements that nit-pickers might want to highlight in the film). Because, really, how can you even play poker without lying?

No, there’s no doubt about it. The invention of poker could not have come until after the invention of lying.

Speaking of the invention of poker, I’ve started reading James McManus’ new book, Cowboys Full: The Story of Poker, his long-awaited history of poker that I believe is officially due to hit the bookshelves in November. Much of the book was serialized in Card Player from 2006 to early this year, and so I’ve read a lot of it before, particularly these earlier chapters. (I’ll probably share some thoughts about the book here once I’m done.)

During this first part of the book, McManus describes how poker came to be in the U.S., dating its origin near the start of the nineteenth century. As he traces the game’s journey through riverboats and saloons in the Old West, McManus greatly emphasizes the preponderance of cheating that characterized the game, ultimately suggesting that in reality the game wasn’t so much about the cards at all, but merely an occasion for a kind of complicated form of robbery.

“Even against run-of-the-mill sharps,” writes McManus, “an honest player had to summon prodigious amounts of concentration and courage simply to limit the sums he was cheated out of, which didn’t leave much left for playing good poker -- calculating pot odds and value bets, picking up tells while disguising his own, figuring out whom to bluff and when. A poker world in which those skills were paramount wouldn’t fully evolve until late in the twentieth century.”

I don’t disagree that one had to be on the watch for “sharps” at all times at the poker tables of the 19th century. Nor would I object to the claim that cheating was highly prevalent well into the 20th century, too, although it might be overstating things a bit to suggest actual poker skills were not as important as one’s ability to cheat and/or catch cheaters until the late 20th century.

That said, notice how McManus characterizes “good poker” in the above-quoted passage, which includes hiding one’s tells and knowing how to bluff. You can’t play poker without lying, even when you aren’t cheating. The game doesn’t work without it.

In fact, if you think about it, the ability to lie (and to suss out others’ lies) is pretty much what we’re talking about when we argue for the “skill” of poker. Sure, as McManus notes, “calculating pot odds and value bets” is part of “good poker,” too. But knowing those things is hardly sufficient. One has to be able to lie, and lie well, to succeed.

Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) once stated on the House floor with regard to the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act that he believed the “real reason” the UIGEA was made law was “a moral disapproval of gambling” on the part of some people. Some have since taken up the cause for poker by trying to distinguish it from other forms of gambling, pointing out how poker requires skill and thus shouldn’t be subject to such condemnation on moral grounds.

But what if the “skill” of poker is (primarily) connected to being able to lie? I mean, really, there’s no lying with the lottery, horse racing, sports betting, or other casino games, is there? Whatever the other “moral” objections are to those forms of gambling, they certainly don’t require players to lie. Maybe that’s what makes poker seem even worse to some -- the fact that it involves gambling and lying. (And cheating, too, sometimes.)

The Invention of Lying does suggest how dull and humorless the world would be without lying. And, indeed, whether you want to associate lying with “skill” the poker or not, it certainly makes the game more fun.