When Everything Seems Like Everything Else

Last Friday I was writing in part about feeling a little distanced from poker at the moment, pointing out how not playing regularly has lessened my enthusiasm somewhat when it comes to watching others play. Yesterday I found myself again kind of in a position of sitting over to the side while others collectively enjoyed participating in a different sort of shared activity.

It started early yesterday morning on my Twitter feed, countless references to the upcoming episode of Breaking Bad scheduled to premiere on AMC later in the evening. They continued throughout the day, then intensified during the airing of the show and afterwards, with nearly everyone (save a few outliers) in unanimous agreement that it was pretty much the greatest thing ever in the history of everything.

My tone likely gives away the fact that I’m not a watcher of the show. The fact is, over the last couple of decades I’ve kind of fallen out of the habit of watching TV altogether, other than sports or news. Or, when Vera’s on the couch next to me, various programs about buying or renovating houses on HGTV.

I can’t even remember the last non-sitcom I made it a point to watch regularly. The old Barry Levinson-produced Homicide: Life on the Street from the 1990s springs to mind as a possible candidate. I seem to remember watching almost all of that first season of Survivor back in 2000, but didn’t continue with it after that and never got into any of the myriad other “reality” shows that have come to dominate since. I always preferred less intense comedies, although even there I never did follow too many, and even fewer today. I’ll burn a half-hour with Family Guy or old eps of Seinfeld or Cheers when they run, but that’s about it.

For me watching TV remains a non-immersive activity. I never made the transition over to the sort of “binge watching” of TV series that has become the most popular means by which viewers now tend to consume TV shows. We don’t even have DVR, so when we do turn on the tube we’re stuck watching whatever happens to be on at the time (and it has never seemed a burden). We do have a VCR, actually, still hooked up and ready to tape programs, if desired, although we almost never do.

That said, this weekend I did in fact tape and watch that CNN Films presentation Our Nixon over the weekend, which was kind of intriguing in the way it was driven by Tricky Dick’s supporting cast (Bob Haldeman, John Ehrlichman, and Dwight Chapin) and the home movies each had taken during their years working for him. So it isn’t like I avoided TV altogether. In fact, I even sent a tweet yesterday about the documentary, commending the choice of Kirsty MacColl’s transporting “They Don’t Know” to accompany the opening credits.

Like everyone else seemed to be doing for much of the rest of the day, I wanted to share with others something about what I was watching on television, I guess in part to see if anyone else was watching, too.

But all of this about my own TV-consuming habits is really just a digression from the primary point I meant to make regarding all of those Breaking Bad tweets. Obviously they held less meaning for someone who doesn’t watch the show. But I realized something kind of interesting, nonetheless, about the tweets people were sending.

All wanted to communicate to their followers that they were watching the show, with some going further to praise it within Twitter’s familiar constraints, the character limit presenting an obvious obstacle to more in-depth evaluations or analyses. All were further restricted as well by the need not to speak directly about the episode’s plot or be detailed enough to introduce any “spoilers” for other potential viewers.

We’re all now well accustomed to the “Spoiler Alert” disclaimer borne from the new way of consuming cultural products like television shows, movies, video games, sports, and other varieties of entertainment. Since everything is more or less “on demand” -- aside from those rare instances when everyone is made to wait for a particular time before first being able to see an episode of their favorite show -- the collective experience of, say, a new show is accompanied by a lot of tiptoeing and whispering as individuals strive to avoid being too detailed about what it is they are experiencing.

Eventually time passes and people begin to share thoughts and responses more openly with one another, but during that earlier moment in the life of the cultural product, the community’s response to it is marked by a couple of curious traits -- namely, that everyone seems to be talking about it while no one is actually saying anything specific about it.

I suspect the catching up that happens later is also full of problems in communication, with the different methods of viewing and varying degrees of attention given to the show introducing various gaps when it comes to sharing ideas about it afterwards with others. Like a poker hand which every player at the table experiences from a different point of view, so, too, do these seemingly “shared” moments get fragmented into all sorts of experiences that are related but not identical.

One of those I follow on Twitter who was not tweeting about Breaking Bad last night was the fiction writer Joyce Carol Oates. She’s an interesting follow, full of opinions and insights and seemingly quite comfortable with delivering pithy, maxim-like thoughts about culture, politics, literature, or anything else. I’m convinced some Ph.D. student has already come up with a dissertation topic focusing primarily on her tweets and using them as a lens through which to study her novels and stories.

Anyhow, about a week ago Oates offered an observation that in part covers all of these online interactions passing through our consciousness such as occur on Twitter:

“Perhaps it’s a superficial aesthetic but online everything looks, feels, behaves, ‘seems’ like everything else,” she wrote. “Print culture more diverse.”

All of those tweets from yesterday certainly seemed alike, especially to this non-Breaking Bad viewer. But like I say, that was largely due to the fact that while everyone wanted to talk about the same thing, everyone couldn’t talk about it, too. Not really.

I guess again watching those tweets go by was sort of like watching others play a poker game. Everyone looked pretty much the same and seemed to be doing pretty much the same sort of thing. And no one could really tell me what they were experiencing as it happened, either, because to do so would ruin the game.

Know Thy Own Friggin' Self

In Joyce Carol Oates’s 1995 essay titled “I, the Juror” (a play, of course, on the title of Mickey Spillane’s first Mike Hammer novel), Oates recounts her first time serving jury duty. If you can track the essay down, I recommend it -- Oates really hits on all eight throughout. In her particular trial, race emerged as an issue that most dramatically demonstrated to her the difficulty of judging others. That there is the meat of this post, trying to get at what makes judging others such a hard nut to crack.

The case involved a black defendant and black witnesses, while the jury was mostly white. Oates expresses dismay at how the white jurors seemed unaffected by the case, as if they couldn’t hope to identify with any of those involved and (therefore) couldn’t take the case as seriously as one would hope. Oates makes good points about race and the legal system, although Oates also makes a broader, more philosophical point toward the end of the essay when she says “In judging others, the burden is ours to transcend the limits of self.”

While Oates here speaks primarily of race (and how it tends to limit our perspective when judging others), I think her point can be applied more broadly to any situation when one is evaluating another’s actions. Indeed, when judging others, one of the greatest challenges is to get out of your own damn way . . . that is, to try not to compare others to oneself.

It goes without saying that much of poker involves judging others. While certain sequences suggest certain hands, knowing something about how an oppponent plays (e.g., starting hand requirements, his tendency to slow play, his willingness to bluff, etc.) goes a long way toward helping you decide how to play back. This business of (as Sklansky puts it in The Theory of Poker) “getting into your opponents’ heads, analyzing how they think, figuring out what they think you think, and even determining what they think you think they think” has a hell of a lot to do with one’s success at the table.

In practice, there exists for all of us a serious, difficult-to-overcome obstacle to “getting into your opponents’ heads,” namely, what is going on inside our own heads. Let’s say you’ve been sitting at a low stakes limit table for a good while and have played 100 hands with the person sitting to your left. Early on he established himself as someone willing to play just about any two cards. He also tends to showdown almost every hand in which he is involved. He’s demonstrated a few other, less obvious patterns as well, such as never check-raising, always betting out with top pair (regardless of his kicker), and even a few times check-calling on the river when holding less than the nuts.

Now we can all gander at our hypothetical cat and break him down according to what we might agree are “objective” criteria. We might even agree how we ultimately want to categorize him (as “loose-passive,” a “jackal,” or what have you). However, in practice, how (let’s say) you would evaluate him is largely affected -- sometimes in a negative way that obscures rather than clarifies -- by what kind of player you are. If you are also loose with your starting hand requirements, you may be less apt to evaluate his requirements as a bunch of damnfoolery. If you never check-raise, having determined it to be a play that at low limit tables ultimately has a negative EV, then your judgment of this particular opponent’s neglect of the check-raise would also be affected. And so forth.

I suppose the lesson here is that before one can truly evaluate other players, one needs to understand more about one’s own game. We need to know what our own tendencies and preferences are (and why we have those tendencies and preferences) and then try, if possible, to “transcend the limits of self” when assessing others. This may well be one of the most difficult tasks in poker, that is, to learn how to judge others without letting our own example determine what is “correct” and what is not. We shouldn’t be surprised that the world is full of people unlike ourselves, yet in many situations (including sitting around a poker table) we nevertheless are. Constantly.

Such was Socrates’ point, I guess. Know thyself before presuming to know others. Also (argues Socrates), knowing who you are helps you become the best person you can be. By the same token, knowing precisely what kind of poker player you are will make you a better judge of others’ play, and thus, the best player you can be.

Image: I, the Jury (1947), Mickey Spillane.