Punch and Counterpunch: AGA Seeing Stars

Spent more time than I expected to yesterday reading and rereading that brief of the American Gaming Association objecting to the Rational Group’s bid to purchase the Atlantic Casino in New Jersey -- or, rather, specifically, to the involvement of PokerStars (owned by the Rational Group) in that possible purchase. (Here is the .pdf, if you’re curious.)

Kept looking for something new about the history of PokerStars, the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act, the Black Friday indictment and civil complaint, or anything else that might be news to the state of New Jersey’s Casino Control Commission and Division of Gaming Enforcement as it contemplates how to proceed in the matter.

But as others have already pointed out, there isn’t really anything there that those receiving the petition wouldn’t know about already. Even those of us with less direct reason to have followed the story as it has unfolded over the last six-and-a-half years know pretty much all of the details set forth in the petition. And in fact the brief seems at times to exaggerate or misrepresent certain details about the indictment/civil complaint and subsequent settlement, too.

I usually struggle a little reading these legal documents, sometimes having to admit limits to my knowledge and understanding that prevent me from appreciating what exactly they signify. Here, though, I felt more like a teacher reading a student essay. That is to say -- rightly or wrongly -- I felt as though I was in a situation where I could be fairly confident I knew as much or more than the author did about the chosen topic and argument.

Thus the primary message being delivered here is the desire of the AGA (i.e., the casino industry) to broadcast its opposition to the potential re-entry into the U.S. of PokerStars. F-Train spells it out for us in his piece for Flushdraw from yesterday where he explains how the AGA speaks for the casinos and its interests.

F-Train also alludes to the other bit of interestingly-timed news that Eric Hollreiser, Head of Corporate Communications for PokerStars, has stated that Caesars Entertainment had approached Stars about selling them certain assets, including the Rio All-Suite Hotel and Casino. Apparently that offer also may have included the WSOP, too. (Diamond Flush posted a copy of Hollreiser’s statement in full.) According to Hollreiser, the offer was declined and that Stars isn’t interested in trying to obtain any other casinos just now.

Reading backwards, it all sounds like the AGA’s opposition isn’t unrelated to the spurned offer (“Perhaps it is no coincidence...” writes Hollreiser). And that Stars was prepared and ready to share the news of the offer as a quick counter to the AGA’s petition. All moves comprising an interesting, complicated game, to say the least. (And again, I can’t help but think of puns about trying to take on a group whose very name suggests a commitment to reason.)

Let me backtrack a little from my earlier claim to possess some understanding about online poker’s recent history. I’ll admit that when reading about these new moves in the burgeoning battle for online poker in the U.S., I feel a little like I do when reporting on a tournament in which the players are skilled and seeming to operate on levels well above my own, making it hard if not impossible to identify with their decision-making.

Sort of thing necessarily puts one in a passive mode, unable really to judge or even react immediately. Which works, I guess, given how long we’ve all been stuck in “wait and see.”

Fact-Checking; or, The Professor’s Plight

Am still occasionally giving time here and there to ongoing fallout from Howard Lederer’s interviews for PokerNews (“The Lederer Files”) and for the Two Plus Two Pokercast (Episode 239). Have viewed QuadJacks’ “Oral History” compilation of responses, am reading Diamond Flush’s still-in-progress summary-response, have watched Daniel Negreanu’s latest rant, and have looked in on the forum discussions and op-eds continuing to pop up.

These responses kind of remind me of all the so-called “fact-checking” that happens following each of the debates between the major parties’ presidential and vice-presidential candidates. Some of that effort is legitimately aimed at seeking corroboration (or the lack thereof) to support or challenge statements made during the debates. But a some of it -- perhaps a lot of it -- is really just spin, that is, a rhetorically-savvy way to persuade others to read a particular, desired message or intent into what was said.

Speaking of fact-checking, there was a moment in the Two Plus Two interview with Lederer in which he instantly inspired pretty much everyone listening to engage in such. I’m talking about that moment when the “Professor” professes a kind of ignorance that Full Tilt Poker continued to deliver the “your funds are safe and secure” message to customers well after the point when it was obvious that was not the case. (I’ve written about this a little before, but forgive me a quick look back at it in the present context.)

To review, Lederer was asked during the 2+2 interview about Full Tilt Poker’s continuing to tell customers that their funds were safe even after Black Friday. Lederer responded by saying he did not believe the words “safe and secure” were still being used in any of FTP’s communications “after April 20 [2011].” And if they were, “it happened without me knowing about it.”

To me that was one of the more blatant bits of culpability dodging Lederer exhibited in either interview.

For one, as just about everyone listening to the podcast knew immediately, the statement was obviously inaccurate. We all remembered how assurances to players about the return of their funds continued to appear well after April 20, 2011 via emails and forum posts by FTPDoug (Shyam Markus). Some of us also recalled the amended civil complaint, filed on September 20, 2011, which catalogued several post-April instances of the “funds are safe and secure” message being repeated.

I included a reference to this point in a post earlier this month. There I noted how the FTP website continued to display the message until after the amended civil complaint appeared that “funds are safe and secure.” I also referred to a post I wrote on 9/22/11 called “Talk About Red Pros (More on the DOJ vs. Full Tilt Poker)” in which I included a screen shot of the front page of the FTP site, taken that day, showing the statement still appeared.

But you don’t have to believe that. Or rather, if you want to check my facts, just take a look at the amended complaint where the DOJ makes the same assertion. “As of September 19, 2011,” they write, “Full Tilt Poker’s website stated that players’ funds were ‘safe and secure.’”

Which means not only is the statement inaccurate, it also sounds highly insincere.

That’s because when Lederer says he doesn’t believe FTP was saying anything about funds being “safe and secure” after April 20, he’s suggesting both that he had no idea what was posted on the fulltiltpoker.com site between April-September 2011 and that he wasn’t aware of the long list of examples of the assurance being repeated that appears in the amended civil complaint.

The latter suggestion is especially odd to consider, given how Lederer himself is being directly charged with funneling player funds into his own accounts in that very complaint. Indeed, it is at the end of the long section titled “FULL TILT POKER’S AND THE FTP INSIDER DEFENDANTS’ THEFT OF PLAYER FUNDS” that we find the quote about FTP’s website continuing to maintain on 9/19/11 that player funds were “safe and secure.” In other words, it is beyond disingenuous for Lederer to have us believe he never read the civil complaint in which he himself is named.

So he’s factually incorrect. And he’s not credible, either, when he explains why his facts might be wrong.

I call this one of the more blatant instances from the interviews of Lederer ducking under a hood of supposed ignorance in order to evade blame, but it isn’t the most significant example of him doing so. And really, in the larger scheme, while Full Tilt Poker’s misrepresentation of the situation to customers during 2011 is certainly blameworthy, worse crimes were committed in order to create that situation.

Again, I think of the debates and the so-called “fact-checking” that follows them. In some cases, those engaged in the effort to confirm or dispute candidates’ statements are being moved by a genuinely estimable intention -- i.e., to seek truth, and to hold those seeking our votes accountable for the words they say. Others are motivated by the less noble purpose of political spin, their goal being to recast objective evidence (the words that were spoken) as supporting this or that self-serving narrative.

While I suppose some of those engaged at present in fact-checking Lederer are just piling on or following the mob, I think most are doing so with good, constructive intentions.

Even so, at the risk of sounding overly cynical, in the end I’m afraid what we’re all mostly engaging in is a big, distracting game of trivial pursuit. The same goes for the debate fact-checkers. Most of the details of their findings will be forgotten come Election Day, and all of them will essentially buried thereafter, only to be dug up later by academics and other obscurists.

It’s a curious text, no doubt, the two-act absurdist play in which Lederer starred in those interviews with PokerNews and Two Plus Two. Call it The Professor’s Plight, another drama helping comprise that fascinating and varied genre of theatrical works that have been produced over the last decade by online poker. About which someone will someday be writing a dissertation, I am sure.

On the Author Function in Poker and Poker Writing

I was in graduate school a long time. Long enough to be infected -- briefly, though significantly -- by the literary theory bug to which most of those who go for advanced degrees in English are necessarily exposed.

I choose a disease-related analogy because in the end most of us who put aside the novels and plays and poems and even the criticism written directly about various works of literature to pick up these works labeled “theory” found ourselves momentarily disoriented as though affected by a fever.

Part of the reason for such a response had to do with the head-spinning novelty (I think) of leaving the “primary” texts for a while -- the novels, the plays, the poems -- to read the utterly different, often confounding prose of writers with names like Derrida, Lyotard, Lacan, Bakhtin, Althusser, Spivak, Fanon, and Foucault (the philosopher, not the poker player). Then came the extreme mental gymnastics required when trying somehow to apply these writers’ ideas to the literature we were supposed to be studying.

For a lot of us, the drawing of such connections was mostly beyond our capabilities. But we made the attempt, anyway, because it seemed like everyone else was doing it and, well, we didn’t want to be left behind. Not surprisingly, we wrote a lot of poor, confused essays as a result. And while a few found literary theory enticing enough to become a focus of their studies thereafter, most of us made our way back to the novels and poems and plays once the fever finally broke.

That said, those courses and readings in literary theory did provide me with a few ideas that have stuck with me and proven useful from time to time. In most cases those ideas were in the form of invitations to question certain aspects of a text I might have otherwise taken for granted. You know, things like the cultural conditions under which a given work of literature is produced. Or the relationship between form and content the work exhibits. Or the way the work addresses (or doesn’t address) issues of race, class, and sex. And so on.

One of those useful ideas -- something I probably would’ve never thought much about had I not endured and survived my theory fever -- was the significance of the author to a given piece of writing and how our ideas of the author necessarily affect the way we interpret what we are reading.

It might seem like a simple idea, but whenever we pick up a book we typically make note of the author’s name and thus allow whatever connotations we associate with that name to shape our interpretation of what we read. Right? Even if we don’t know the first thing about the author, as we read we start to form ideas and opinions about who that person might be, and thus our response to what has been written still gets shaped by the notion that someone -- a person we think of as “the author” -- has attempted to communicate something to us via these words we are reading.

It was an essay (actually a lecture) from the late 1960s called “What Is an Author?” by Michel Foucault that probably first introduced this idea to me in a way I could understand. That is to say, the idea that there is what Foucault calls an “author function” we tend to associate with certain kinds of writing or “discourses,” for example, so-called “literary” writing (novels, plays, poems). These would be varieties of discourse in which certain standards occur to us that make the idea of the author important or needful -- in other words, there are certain kinds of writing for which the idea of the author is more important to us than others.

What was really eye-opening for me was the idea that Foucault proposes that the “author function” is something the reader (or the culture, which influences the reader) brings to the text and is not necessarily inherently part of the text itself.

Foucault gives the example of scientific writing and how during the Middle Ages its validity and thus influence (as determined by readers) was often affected greatly by who authored it. But later on, who wrote an article advancing a new scientific discovery was thought to be less important than the discovery itself -- that is to say, the way the text was read and interpreted was less affected by the “author function” than was earlier the case.

One other idea Foucault points out (and he’s not the only literary theorist to come up with this one) is how when we do start thinking about the author of a given text -- or give significance to the “author function” when we read -- that person we’re thinking about is not identical to the person who wrote the sucker. Rather, it’s a limited, skewed version of that person, necessarily shaped in the reader’s mind by the text itself as well as by other cultural factors influencing the reader.

So “Freud is not just the author of The Interpretation of Dreams or the Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious; Marx is not just the author of The Communist Manifesto or Das Kapital” writes Foucault. Rather when we read, say, The Interpretation of Dreams, we think about this “Freud” fellow as we do and let our idea of that person affect how we interpret the book. But that person we’re thinking of isn’t Freud. Not really (or utterly).

I’m not going to go any deeper into Foucault’s essay than I already have -- I’ve barely scratched the surface, if you can believe that -- but hopefully you see how just asking the question “What is an Author?” can open us up to all sorts of other questions when it comes to interpreting a piece of writing.

I was reminded of all of this “author function” business recently after reading Diamond Flush’s announcement that Howard Lederer had backed out of his planned-for interview with her following his two long interviews with PokerNews (“The Lederer Files”) and for the Two Plus Two Pokercast (Episode 239).

Actually, Lederer himself already had me occasionally thinking a little bit about the “author function” from things he said in those earlier interviews. For instance, when he attempts to dodge responsibility for various poor decisions by alluding to the “Operating Agreement” or the “owners” or the “board” as if they were the true “authors” of FTP’s demise who were somehow to be understood as distinct from himself.

Or when in the 2+2 interview he responds to a question about FTP continuing to repeat that message to customers that “funds are safe and secure” well after Black Friday -- in fact, all of the way until late September 2011! -- by saying he did not believe “that those words would have been used after April 20 [2011]” and that if they were “it happened without me knowing about it.”

In that latter case, Lederer is suggesting two wildly improbable ideas: (1) he did not read the amended civil complaint in which he himself is named which spells out several instances of Full Tilt Poker telling customers their “funds are safe and secure” and were continuing to do so on September 20, 2011 (the date of the amendment); and (2) he never once visited the Full Tilt Poker website after April 20 where the “funds are safe and secure” message remained prominently displayed until late September 2011 (i.e., until after that first amendment to the civil complaint).

Relatedly, the whole issue of the “author function” comes up again when we think about good old “FTPDoug” (a.k.a. Shyam Markus), i.e., the apparent “author” of many of those “safe and secure” messages. His transformation into “FTPMarkus” in preparation for the launch of FTP 2.0 in November has encouraged all of us to think differently about the significance of a signature and how it isn’t necessarily to be understood as representing “authorship.”

But it was while reading a thread on 2+2 about Lederer’s backing out of the Diamond Flush interview that I found myself thinking most specifically about the “author function,” namely thanks to a post by Pokercast co-host Mike Johnson regarding Diamond Flush herself.

“I’m not knocking the massively important role she has played in all of this, she has been beyond invaluable,” writes Johnson. “I just personally believe that once you start interviewing the biggest names involved in the story on the record you have officially made the transition from info-leaking blogger to media member. I actually can’t think of any other media person who interviews major news personalities for public consumption anonymously.”

Johnson’s post inspired some interesting discussion about journalistic standards, the so-called “poker media” (and whether it adheres to such standards), as well as blogs and pseudonyms. There were several direct responses to Johnson’s observation, some quite thoughtful. My friend Change100, a.k.a. Kristin (of “Pot Committed”), came up at one point in the discussion. Diamond Flush herself then jumped in with an explanation of her reasons for using a pseudonym and a defense for doing so. “It’s not the name that’s important,” she argued. “It’s the content.”

Someone later humorously responded that “Diamond Flush is the Isildur of poker insiders.” Another made a Watergate reference by referring to her as “the Deep Throat of poker journalism.” One poster pointed out how DF has appeared on the Pokercast as a guest in the past and Johnson never insisted she identify herself there. And 2+2 Grand Poo-Bah Mason Malmuth hopped in as well to say he believes DF needs to identify herself publicly.

Thinking again about the “author function” and how it affects our understanding and interpretation of the written word, I think this whole debate makes clear that there are certain contexts in which it continues to have great importance, for better or worse.

I think it is interesting that Johnson’s objection to Diamond Flush’s use of a pseudonym was clearly inspired by the content of her posts which to him has reached a certain level of significance (“interviewing the biggest names involved in the story on the record”) that to him changed the nature of the discourse and thus introduced a different standard according to which the identity of the author is somehow more significant. As Johnson says of DF, “you have officially made the transition from info-leaking blogger to media member.”

I certainly see where Johnson is coming from. And, of course, I understand Diamond Flush’s position as well. After all, I started this blog using a pseudonym -- for some of the same reasons DF says she uses one, actually -- and only when I began writing for other poker sites did I begin using my real name for a by-line.

But really, even if a person signs his or her real name to something he or she has written, the “author” of the piece is still going to be distinct from the person who wrote it. The credibility of the piece might be affected by the “author function,” but other contextual factors have as much or more to do with credibility, too, including other texts produced by the same hand, others’ responses to those texts, as well as additional culturally-determined factors regarding journalistic standards.

I’ve written before about how the poker world is filled with characters with multiple identities, with lots of examples of pseudonyms and attempts to participate with anonymity, and with other factors complicating what we might regard as the “author function.” And of course all of that becomes even more evident when it comes to online poker.

There’s a lot more to say about it all, really. But I’ll sign off now. As “Short-Stacked Shamus,” that version of me who regularly -- sometimes feverishly -- writes here.