A Decade of Hard-Boiled Poker

Ten years of blogging?! What kind of applesauce is that?

It’s true. Ten years ago today, inspired by other poker bloggers, some podcasts, and a love of poker and writing, I decided on a whim to begin this blog. No shinola.

I write today from the EPT Grand Final in Monte Carlo. I suppose ten years ago I could have imagined coming here for some other reason, perhaps. Vera Valmore and I did spend a whole year in France once before, during which we loved visiting Nice. But I couldn’t have then pictured a scenario where I’d be here writing about poker.

Nor would I have imagined going other places to do the same, as I’ve done a lot over recent years. And all because of this here blog. Amid my other posts on Hard-Boiled Poker, I’ve been submitting dispatches from tournaments all over the globe, including from Las Vegas, Ukraine, Peru, Morocco, Atlantic City, Uruguay, Macau, Pennsylvania, France, Connecticut, Florida, Spain, Niagara Falls, Chile, Canada, Panama, St. Kitts and Nevis, the Bahamas, Monaco, Brazil, Ireland, and even my home state of North Carolina (at Cherokee).

Such “Travel Reports” have been just part of the story, of course, among the 2,750 posts (including this one) that have appeared here. For the first five years (up through Black Friday), a lot of the focus was on my own low-limit poker adventures, mostly online. Other topics -- film, literature, music, television, politics, law, business, history, science, math, philosophy, psychology, and (more recently) life on a farm -- have been the focus of all of this relentless scribbling, too, with all of them somehow having something to do with poker the blog's leitmotiv, poker.

It was around Black Friday most of the other poker blogs all started going away. Their fading began a couple of years before, really, mostly in direct correlation to the rise of Twitter. I got my @hardboiledpoker account in 2009, and it was then most of the seats at the blogging tables began emptying in earnest. Still a few of us grinding along, though, for some reason finding it necessary to communicate in chunks lasting more than a sentence or two at at time.

The blog started as a hobby, then quickly became an unexpected entry into a large, fun, exciting community of others also enthusiastic about poker -- and about writing and reading about poker. Then came other opportunities and eventually a second, unexpected career for me, a life twist I described several years ago in a post called “Detour.”

The title of that post was an homage to the 1945 hard-boiled film starring Tom Neal as a down-on-his-luck hitchhiker. Neal’s character takes an unforeseen turn in that story, as did my own. I certainly didn’t see such a change coming ten years ago, back when I invented this “Short-Stacked Shamus” character and borrowed Neal’s image to use as a kind of avatar for it.

A “shamus” is a detective. And his being “short-stacked” suggests a down-on-his-luck context for his sleuthing, as though his situation mirrors in some way the desperate one Neal’s character (who becomes kind of a detective) endures in the film.

None of that really describes me or the adventure on which this blog has carried me. No, I’ve run especially well here, and it’s all thanks to those of you who have stopped by now and then or perhaps even more consistently. Friendly and generous responses kept me writing in the beginning. Continued good feedback kept me going in the middle. And the knowledge that some are still coming around even ten years on has kept me at it still today.

Thanks to everyone for making all of this traveling around -- both out into the world and the inner traveling that necessarily happens with every post -- so enjoyable for me. No shinola.

Detour: Four Years of Hard-Boiled Poker

Four years ago today I decided to start a poker blog. Was pretty much a total whim. I’d been playing online for a while, had read a number of books, and was following a few different magazines and news sites. Was also starting to listen to poker podcasts, was spending some time reading around in the forums, and had begun to visit some of the other poker blogs.

At the time, many of those poker blogs seemed to take the “journal” approach of chronicling one’s own progress as a poker player. Lots of hand histories and discussions, along with reports on how much the player/blogger was up or down. Some would include anecdotes and other fun poker-related stuff, too. And a few would diverge entirely from poker to discuss just about anything of interest to the writer -- e.g., an update on the writer’s relationship status, a review of a movie recently seen, a report from a recent vacation, what have you.

It was clear there were many ways to go when it came to poker blogs. Having little clue which way I’d be heading, I thought it would be fun to try one myself.

As I say, it truly was a whim. The title of the blog came to me at the end of no more than five minutes of meditation on the decision, inspired by an anthology on my bookshelf, Hard-Boiled: An Anthology of American Crime Stories edited by Bill Pronzini and Jack Adrian. I’d long been a fan of those stories and writers, guys like Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Jim Thompson, Charles Willeford, James M. Cain, and so forth. And when it came to writing myself, most of my attempts at fiction had been in the same vein -- including a draft of what eventually became my novel, Same Difference.

So when I thought of writing, I thought “hard-boiled.” And there seemed a reasonable connection between poker and these sort of detective stories. All poker players are detectives, more or less, right? Some very good, some hopelessly inadequate. And every hand is a sort of miniature mystery with its own dramatic arc of exposition, climax, and resolution. Some potential there, I thought.

The “Shamus” character was also pretty much an on-the-spot-type invention. A “shamus” is a detective. My understanding is that it’s a slang term that originated early in the 20th century, probably first used with reference to New York City cops, some of whom were of Irish descent. It’s an Americanization of the popular Irish name “Seamus.”

Some have wanted to argue that the word also has a connection with the Yiddish word “shammes” which comes from the Hebrew “shamash” or a synagogue beadle. The idea there is that the beadle -- a parish officer -- is a person who knows everyone and thus is a good one to go to for information about what is going on (i.e., like a detective). I’ve always thought that was a bit of a stretch, but there could be something there.

In any event, writers of hard-boiled fiction picked up the word and routinely used it to refer to their detective protagonists. Comes up in the movies a lot, too. Go watch the beginning of The Big Sleep, where Humphrey Bogart (as Philip Marlowe) introduces himself to Carmen Sternwood by saying “I’m a shamus.”

So I started the blog, and in fact thought early on I’d try to write “in character” and employ more of that hard-boiled lingo in my little first-person narratives of my pokery adventures. Found it hard to keep that up, though, and so soon settled into a voice that came a little closer to my actual self.

However, as part of that “character” I was creating, I decided to borrow the mug of Tom Neal as Al Roberts in the 1945 noir film Detour. Shot in less than a week for practically nothing (around $20,000 say most), the movie tells the story of Al’s efforts to hitchhike across the country to meet up with his fiancee, though as the title suggests those efforts get sidetracked along the way.

Lean and mean, I recommend this 68-minute gritty marvel directed by Edgar G. Ulmer every chance I get. I liked Neal’s look in the film (I mean, really, doesn’t the poor sap look like he’s short-stacked?). Additionally, the film is in the public domain, which made me less hesitant to borrow them there images. That also means Detour can be easily found online, if you are curious to see it.

I also soon decided I didn’t want exclusively to write about my own low limit struggles. There was a lot else of interest happening in poker. Indeed, not long after I began the blog, we were all blindsided by that Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act, and for a short while there I actually thought I wouldn’t even be able to play online poker anymore. Suddenly there were other topics to discuss, and somewhere in there I came up with the different “sections” (On the Street, The Rumble, Shots in the Dark, High Society, and By the Book) for which I’d write.

Those first six months or so I had very few readers, and even though I got a great deal of enjoyment from writing, I did wonder sometimes why I even bothered. Vera Valmore encouraged me to continue with it, though, and so bears a lot of responsibility for my having kept at the sucker.

After a year or so I’d picked up a few more readers, and soon after that got the chance to do some poker writing for other sites, too. Then came an invitation to go cover the World Series of Poker (in 2008), something I described to many at the time as one of those “life detours” I never really would have expected even a few months before.

Other opportunities came along, and now I find myself about to head back to the WSOP for a third time. There’s been another significant development, too. For a variety of reasons -- this here freelance writing career being just one of them -- I’ve decided to move on from the current “day job” to pursue other possible futures, most of which involve doing a lot more writing.

Not quite at the moment of official transition yet, so I won’t go into other specifics. But the decision has been made. I’ve put on the turn signal. Just waiting for that green light and I’ll be going down a different road.

It has been apparent to me for a while now how that choice of the film Detour to help flesh out the blog’s motif has turned out to be weirdly prophetic, given that Hard-Boiled Poker has itself had a lot to do with the change in direction I’m now taking. Am excited, for sure. And a bit anxious, too. But again, I’ve encouragement from Vera. And, less directly, from many others, too, including all of you who have stopped by here from time to time.

So thanks again, everybody. Will let you know where this detour leads.