Little time to scribble this morning, I’m afraid. We had a less lengthy day and night yesterday for Day 2, but with no dinner break we ate afterwards -- another big steak-centered meal for your hungry scribbler -- and so ended up not getting to sleep until late. Then my morning was eaten up by a lot of pre-work work, living me little time even to reflect on the day, let alone write about it.
Why did I write about the novel? Well, Fleming had spent some time visiting the casino in Deauville a couple of decades before when younger, and his experiences gambling and watching others gamble inspired a lot of the plot and setting of Casino Royale. In fact he sets the story in northern France in a fictional seaside city named Royale-les-Eaux, which more or less combines elements of Deauville and nearby Trouville.
I read the book recently and so wanted this week to share both the Deauville connection and some of its insights about gambling. The game is baccarat in the novel (as well as the spoofy 1967 film), but there are still some decent points made by Fleming about the psychology of the gambler that apply pretty readily to poker. (Dostoevsky it ain’t, but it’s still thought provoking.) And he seems very interested in making a willingness to gamble an important part of Bond’s character as he introduces him, a trait that gets picked up in future stories and of course in the films.
I wouldn’t necessarily recommend the novel as a great one, but there are some decent passages amid the page-turning action. Bond plays three different games in the novel, you might say -- baccarat versus Le Chiffre, intelligence-based warfare versus the Soviets and SMERSH (the counterintelligence agency), and the romance-based game versus Vesper Lynd.
There’s some heavy-handed talk of women in the book that reads a little weirdly today (and might understandably put off some). There’s also something kind of odd about the way the story resolves (I’m realizing in retrospect), with Bond not even really being responsible for doing anything more heroic than getting lucky at baccarat and defending himself against would be assassins (getting lucky there, too). In a way he mostly functions as the center of attention while others direct the more meaningful events of the plot.
Anyhow, I don’t mention much of those personal thoughts about the book in the post, but rather stick to sorting out the Deauville connection and also making the discussion relevant the ongoing tournament. Check it out and let me know what you think -- either about the post, or anything else to do with Bond, Casino Royale, and/or poker.
Among the poker headlines coming through the reader yesterday was a Punto Banco story. That’s right, another interesting chapter in that situation involving Phil Ivey and the Crockfords Casino in London.
Recall how we heard Ivey had visited the Mayfair casino last August, transferring a cool £1 million into the casino’s bank account while accompanied by a mysterious Chinese woman (styled “a beautiful Oriental female” in most of the U.K. reports where the adjective isn’t considered non-PC the way it is in the States). Then over a couple of evenings Ivey proceeded to play high-stakes Punto Banco, a variant of baccarat, for about seven hours altogether.
On the first night Ivey started out betting £50,000 per hand, then was allowed to increase the stakes to £150,000. After initially finding himself down nearly £500,000, the momentum swung back Ivey’s way and he ended the evening £2.3 million up. He then came back the next night and his streak continued, enabling him to leave £7.8 million ahead -- i.e., a win of almost $12 million or the equivalent of Jamie Gold’s 2006 WSOP Main Event first prize (the largest ever for the ME).
Ivey’s session immediately made headlines in the Daily Mail, with the initial reports also noting how Crockfords had not paid Ivey his winnings right away. Then came word of the casino’s plan to investigate casino footage, interview staff, and inspect the cards and dealing shoe used during the two sessions before paying Ivey. Another item of potential interest was the fact that the woman accompanying Ivey had been banned from another London casino previously.
Crockfords did allow Ivey to withdraw the £1 million with which he’d started, but otherwise they were resisting paying Ivey the rest. By the time the situation had dragged on into the fall, it was apparent the case may end up in the High Court, and indeed last week news came that Ivey was suing Crockfords in an effort to claim his winnings in what will surely be a huge, sensational legal story.
Then yesterday the Daily Mail reported that in response to Ivey’s lawsuit, Crockfords is now alleging that rather than having enjoyed a streak of good fortune in the chance-based game, Ivey “exploited tiny flaws in the card design” as he played, and thus was able to bet accordingly. According to the article, “the cards were flawed because of a mistake during the cutting process at an overseas manufacturing plant.”
Thus the allegation is that Ivey somehow knew about or discovered the flaw, with his request to the dealer that the cards (while face down) be turned in such a way that would enable him to spot the distinctive characteristics more easily and thus know what cards had (or hadn’t) been dealt.
From the outside, the casino’s case sounds sketchy, given that Ivey obviously had nothing to do with the cards being used in the game. Anyhow, it’s all very eyebrow-raising in an “international-man-of-mystery” kind of way, and the Mail and other outlets have routinely brought up by way of comparison James Bond and his game of baccarat in the original Casino Royale to help their stories more readily catch the reader’s eye.
Another film frequently mentioned in these articles is the 1966 Bond-like comic caper Kaleidoscope starring Warren Beatty and Susannah York. Coincidentally it was last August -- around the time Ivey visited Crockfords -- when I wrote up a “Pop Poker” column for PokerListings about the film, which often gets mentioned in those “best poker movies” lists one sees popping up from time to time around the web.
Those comparisons are being made because the plot of Kaleidoscope involves Beatty’s character, Barney Lincoln, pursuing an elaborate scheme whereby he doctors the plates from which the Kaleidoscope brand playing cards are printed. The cards are used in casinos all over Europe, and thus we see Lincoln spend the first half of the film enjoying win after win as he plays Chemin de Fer (another baccarat variant), wearing a conspicuous pair of thick-framed eyeglasses as he does to help him see the markings.
Lincoln is eventually found out in the film, and the plot takes a turn as he gets recruited by Scotland Yard to help them capture a villainous crime lord, Harry Dominion, played in over-the-top fashion by Eric Porter. The latter half of the film features a high-stakes game of five-card stud involving Lincoln and Dominion, and does include a few interesting moments -- particularly after a deck change introduces non-Kaleidoscope cards into the game.
If you’re curious about the film, check out my discussion over on PokerListings. There you’ll see I was kind of lukewarm on it, not really being that entertained although I can see some fans of Bond and/or Bond parodies perhaps getting into it. It’s also cool for those who enjoy swinging ’60s fashion, U.K. style.
It’s sort of funny to compare Kaleidoscope to the Ivey-versus-Crockfords situation, since doing so invites us to imagine Ivey as some kind of supervillain-cat-burglar type breaking into card manufacturing plants and manipulating the printing process in order to set up his big score later on. Obviously that’s not what is being alleged, but still, it’s a funny image, perhaps even easier to entertain for those of us who have gotten to know Ivey as a larger-than-life figure.
More pertinently, those of us who know Ivey and his high-roller ways also find his enjoying a winning streak of 40-50 bets’ worth at a chance-based game to be much less remarkable than is the case for Crockfords’ owners. Then again, as we’ve been thinking about a lot over the last few days with regard to the revival of the UB cheating scandal, being able to know all of the cards that have been dealt is a sure way to increase one’s chance of winning.
Here is the groovy title sequence for Kaleidoscope:
Been back for a week from Macau, and I’m repeatedly encountering people responding to stories of my trip with references to the new James Bond film Skyfall. Apparently there’s a sequence set in Macau, including a visit to a place called the Dragon Casino (?). I will have to investigate in short order, which shouldn’t be hard to do as Vera has already been indicating she wants to see the flick.
I’m not a huge Bond buff, although like everyone I’ve seen and enjoyed a lot of the films over the years. We did catch Casino Royale in the theaters several years ago, and in fact I wrote up a “poker review” at the time as that film -- released at the height of the poker boom in 2006 -- featured several scenes of our hero playing high-stakes hold’em.
At the time we all remarked on poker surfacing in the mainstream so prominently, although to be honest that was a period when poker was simply everywhere. Such is not so much the case anymore, which is why an episode of The Simpsons from a week ago featuring a subplot in which little Lisa plays online poker stood out as something a little different.
I wrote a “Pop Poker” piece for PokerListings about The Simpsons episode, if you’re curious for more about it. One point I made there was to say that the show’s presentation of online poker was essentially no different than it might have been back during the “boom” -- that is, before the Unlawful Internet Enforcement Act of 2006 and Black Friday and everything else that has significantly altered online poker in the U.S.
Indeed, the Simpsons episode essentially ignores the current reality of online poker altogether, proceeding as though Black Friday never even happened. (In truth, I wouldn’t be surprised if the idea for the story had been hatched before Black Friday -- perhaps several years ago -- and only now found its way into an episode.)
Speaking of mainstream references to poker, there was another one recently when former NBA star Jalen Rose, now a commentator on ESPN, offered some candid thoughts about pro players’ poker playing in a clip appearing over on the Grantland channel. Here is that clip:
Referring to the plane rides between games, Rose speaks of the popularity of poker as a pastime among many players, with the amounts changing hands sometimes climbing up to the $10K-$20K range. Rose weirdly insists on the games’ legality as he justifies them, while also pointing to the way they satisfy players’ competitive desires.
He also explains the reason why players play with chips rather than money on the planes, settling their debts afterwards. “The reason why you bring poker chips,” he explains, “is that
coaches and general managers and sometimes... the owners [are] on the plane.... [Therefore, you] don’t want to see guys passing around hundreds and thousands of dollars. It’s just not good etiquette.”
In other words, as much as Rose defends the players’ gambling, there’s still a kind of “underground” element to the games insofar as the true significance of the money being exchanged is in need of being suppressed. If they aren’t doing anything wrong, why bother with such “etiquette”?
Like with The Simpsons episode, I wouldn’t say poker is necessarily being promoted by Rose’s mention of it. In fact both instances seem to reinforce ideas of the game’s “outlaw” status, which is how the game is usually treated whenever it surfaces in the mainstream.
Of course, there was that time, just a few years ago -- say, when Casino Royale was in the theaters back in ’06 -- when it wasn’t automatically the case that poker was considered to be like pool in that song from The Music Man....
You know, starting with P. Which rhymes with T. And which stands for Trouble!
