Blasts from the Past

One of the neat things about keeping a blog is the feedback one sometimes receives. Particularly fun are those times when I have written about a particular person and gotten a comment or email from the subject of my post. Sometimes those responses come right away, while other times many months might pass before the response arrives, the sender perhaps not seeing the post until much later.

For example, earlier this week I received some nice feedback from Kyle Siler on that post from last month in which I discussed his study “Social and Psychological Challenges of Poker” (appearing in The Journal of Gambling Studies). Siler responded both to my summary of his study as well as to observations made by poker pro Andy Bloch there in the comments section. For those who were following that discussion, you might check that out.

Of course, sometimes comments or responses come much later. In July 2008, I had just gotten home after a summer of reporting on the World Series of Poker. While in Vegas I had visited the Gamblers Bookshop and picked up some old magazines, including some issues of Gambling Times.

I ended up writing a post titled “Reporting on the 1979 WSOP” in which I shared a lot from one particular article in that magazine chronicling the ’79 Series, one written by John Hill. I got a kick out of comparing how the WSOP was covered in 2008 and how it was covered some three decades earlier.

Anyhow, it was about six months later that John Hill himself came around and left a comment on that post. “Glad to see a reprise of my coverage,” he began, noting that “those were heady days of the game and provided grist for many a mill.” He shared a few more memories of those days in his comment -- take a look if you’re curious.

I also had some feedback just recently to another post I had written some time ago. In August 2008, I spent a little time going through the first 40 years’ worth of Rolling Stone magazine (a task made easier by my having gotten them on DVDs), searching for references to poker. I thought it would be interesting to see how poker had been covered -- or not covered -- in this non-poker, mainstream publication.

I ended up writing two posts, focusing in particular on a few articles that had appeared along the way. Here are those posts: “Poker & Pop Culture: Rolling Stone (1967-2007) (1 of 2)” and “Poker & Pop Culture: Rolling Stone (1967-2007) (2 of 2).”

In the second of those posts, I gave some attention to a particular article that appeared in 1981 amid a series of pieces about college life. Actually it was two articles -- companion pieces that dealt with students and professors interacting in social settings: “On Drinking with Professors” by Grif Fariello and “On Drinking with Students” by William Kittredge.

Both of the writers -- the student (Fariello) and teacher (Kittredge) -- make reference to poker games, and finding all of that very interesting I summarized it in great detail in my post, noting both how the students were routinely beating the profs and also what the game seemed to signify to each.

Anyhow, just last week I received a nice email from Grif Fariello offering some background on how the articles were put together. I asked him if it would be okay to share some of what he told me here on the blog, and he said it would be fine.

“I should fill you in on that piece I wrote for Rolling Stone,” he began. Apparently William Kittredge (“Bill”) had gotten a last-minute, panicky request from the editor at Rolling Stone. “They’d come up short for the next issue and could Bill fill in with X amount of words in 24 hours,” came the appeal. The editor had come up with the student-teacher “gimmick,” and Kittredge asked Fariello, then a grad student in the writing program, if he could write the student half. “I said sure,” responded Fariello.

“We blasted the stuff out overnight,” Fariello told me. “Some of the anecdotes in my half are true, but the poker aspect is not.” Indeed, it turns out that while the articles are somewhat based in reality, there are several embellishments in there, some likely resulting from the necessity of the quick turn-around. Fariello said that while he’d “shared plenty of drinks with Bill... I've never played poker with him or any other Prof. If I had I would've lost my shirt. I'm a lousy poker player and never really enjoyed playing cards much beyond cribbage and not even that anymore.”

The fact is, the articles weren’t really meant to be taken as on-the-scene, documentary-like reports (as I did in my post). “Both articles were intended as amusing blather in the heroic mode, quick filler, not reportage,” explained Fariello. He added a few more comments about how other details of the interactions between the students and teachers were further enhanced for added drama.

I thought it very interesting to learn that the poker angle had been introduced into the articles as a way of helping flesh out the student-teacher dynamic a bit more, even though no poker had actually been played. Kind of says something about the symbolic value of the game, really, as a way to bring together different groups and have them interact in ways they might not otherwise.

As I said, I asked Fariello if it would be okay to share his postscript here, as I know some readers might remember those Rolling Stone posts and thus might find it as interesting as I did. Big thanks to him for letting me do so, as well as to John Hill and Kyle Siler for their feedback, too.

For another example of a story I thought once to be true but later found out otherwise, check out my Betfair article from today, “The Nuts, the Wheel, and the Hammer.” And, as always, feedback is welcome!

Have a good weekend, all.

Poker & Pop Culture: Rolling Stone (1967-2007) (2 of 2)

Following up on my search of the Rolling Stone archives for references to poker (see previous post), I wanted to give some attention to three other instances when the magazine did focus on poker in a somewhat meaningful way. Indeed, as I pointed out before, these were really the only three times in the first forty years of Rolling Stone that the magazine specifically addressed the game of poker at all, really. And even in these cases, one could argue the real focus was elsewhere.

Poker & Booze: College Life (1981)

The first is in a pair of companion articles about college life that present the phenomenon of professors and students socializing with one another. In the April 16, 1981 issue, several different pieces were presented under the heading “College 1981,” and these two -- “On Drinking with Professors” by Grif Fariello and “On Drinking with Students” by William Kittredge -- both bring up poker as a regular facet of teacher-student interactions outside the classroom.

Fariello and Kittredge were both at the University of Montana, and so in a sense they are writing about each other in these two articles. Kittredge’s article is decidedly pro-drinking with students, viewing it as an important part of his role as an educator. He looks down on a colleague who takes it too far and thus finds himself enmeshed in a sticky, adulterous liaison with a student. “No one ever said drinking with students would be easy,” says Kittredge. “Nothing sacred ever is.”

Then comes a discussion of the “Student Poker Game.” Kittredge recognizes that he, like other drinking teachers, “is supposed to bring lots of money and be a Terrific Sport.” He shouldn’t object or find it at all unusual for a student to take him to the cleaners, for “this is a teaching experience and not be confused with coldhearted gaming for profit.” Then they start smoking some dope.

The fact that he ends up losing at the poker game is largely immaterial to Kittredge. He continues to argue -- somewhat disingenously, one must admit -- for the importance of these occasions in which “personalities are being formed,” with Kittredge apparently being gravely serious about his own mentoring role.

The article by Fariello (the student) also celebrates the activity, arguing that “drinking with professors is an honor and a privilege and an rite of initiation into the higher reaches of academe.” He feels special to have been invited to such gatherings. He enjoys fraternizing with his prof, but also recognizes that after a few drinks “you come to realize these fellows are a lot like you -- or is it that you are a lot like them?” The exalted view of the teacher clearly becomes diminished as the drinks continue to flow.

When Fariello speaks of the poker game, winning and losing are a greater concern to him than to Kittredge. He enjoys the game because “my favorite professor was also a lousy poker player, and I could cover the cost of tuition and books just sitting across the table from him once a week.” (It isn’t clear whether he’s talking about Kittredge here or not.) The game is also of value to him for the less tangible rewards that come from dialogue and debate with well-read elders.

Fariello ends his piece with a reference to the “darkest valleys of Poker Night,” namely that time when the profs are too sloshed to go on and they all head to the nearest tavern to drink and talk some more. That’s when the teachers utterly expose their innermost selves, offering “painful admissions of failed hopes and unwritten books; the rending laments of professional ennui and disillusionment.”

In the end, I find the student’s self-aware, insightful piece much more convincing than the professor’s self-indulgent, screed-like defense of less-than-commendable behavior. (Doesn’t surprise me a bit that the student wins at poker while the teacher loses.) I would’ve thought to have found such articles in an earlier issue than one from 1981, although it would still be some time before administrations of colleges and universities began taking a less forgiving view of such untoward student-professor interactions.

The New Vegas (2006)

In the October 5, 2006 issue, Rolling Stone offered a lengthy overview of the “new Vegas,” with several short, illustrated blurbs punctuating the analysis. The overall conclusion by the authors is that after an unsuccessful attempt to transform Vegas into a family-oriented vacation destination, the place has returned with renewed enthusiasm to its “Sin City” roots, now having become “bizarrely hip.”

Among these blurbs are several mentions of poker and its newly-prominant place in Vegas’ gambling culture. “Poker chic has made gambling cool again,” chirps the author of the lead-in piece. There’s another short piece celebrating Antonio “the Magician” Esfandiari, who at the time had already won over $2.4 million on the circuit, but “is just as famous for being a dedicated club-hopper.” One gets the sense that it is the latter trait that landed him the spotlight here.

There’s another brief description of the “Big Game” in Bobby’s Room. There is also a passing reference to poker in a story about the band The Killers (who are from Vegas). The interviewer meets the band in Binion’s, and so reference is made to the Horseshoe’s décor made up of pictures of famous poker players.

Despite poker’s prominence, it is pointed out in another piece that poker is hardly the motor driving the gambling scene in Vegas. “Poker might get all the buzz, but it truth, Vegas is all about the slots.”

The Young Guns (2005)

The last article I want to discuss is the only real “feature” that focuses on professional poker players that I found in the entire forty years of Rolling Stone, a four-pager in the June 16, 2005 issue titled “Poker’s New World Order.” The article by Ivan Solotaroff gets a teaser (“Poker’s Crazy Geniuses”) on that issue’s cover -- the only RS cover in its first forty years to mention poker at all -- and is accented by several photographs of those mentioned in the piece. (The first page of the article appears above at the start of this post.)

The focus of the article is “The Crew,” that group of young, bankroll-sharing players marshaled together by Russ “Dutch” Boyd following the 2003 World Series of Poker. The article discusses all seven members: Boyd, his brother Robert, Scott Fischman, David Smyth, Tony Lazar, Joe Bartholdi, and Brett Jungblut.

The piece starts out painting a somewhat glamorized portrait of the young men’s lifestyles, presenting us Robert Boyd cleaning up at the Borgata, Bartholdi killing at the Bellagio, and Smyth, Lazar, and Fischman all tearing up the games online. Bartholdi (for example) is described at “the tail end of a two-day binge that’s netted him a good week’s pay -- for a mid-cap CEO.” We read about Dutch Boyd having “stitched together this loosely knit crew of savants,” and how they all touch base at their “unofficial HQ,” a frat house-like condo on Rancho Drive about ten miles from the Strip.

The article then steps back to present the state of online poker circa mid-2005. Fischman is described as playing online poker “with 149,344 others” that night. We get a brief background on the founding of the World Poker Tour, mention is made of some of the more famous poker celebs (Negreanu, Lederer, Duke, Hansen, Laak), and Esfandiari chimes in to say of the burgeoning poker boom, “This story’s just beginning, believe me.”

Then the focus turns to Dutch Boyd. We get a detailed recounting of the PokerSpot debacle. Boyd helped start the online poker site in May 2000. By early 2001, the site was earning $160,000 a month, and “in the online poker forums, Boyd was predicting $50 million yearly profits for the top Internet card rooms.” Then comes the fall, which the author of the article tenuously ties to the dot-com crash, though does clarify how PokerSpot had its assets frozen by its credit card processor (Barclay Banks of London), and how Boyd continued to solicit new accounts, a move that could be interpreted as him having “turned pokerspot.com into a Ponzi scheme.”

PokerSpot finally ceased operations in late 2001, and the article leaves the PokerSpot story in the ambigous state in which it remains today. (Cashouts for many PokerSpot players remain “pending.”) We then read about Boyd’s bipolar disorder, his unrealized vision to create a rake-free online poker site, his stay at a mental hospital in Antigua, and his 12th place finish in the 2003 WSOP Main Event, after which he formed The Crew, infamously stating they would soon “take over the poker world” and thus giving the author a title for his article.

The dissolution of The Crew is then chronicled, with Bartholdi and Jungblut leaving first, and the others kind of drifting away by 2004. We’re left with an impression of Fischman as the true star of the group -- he was certainly the most successful member at the time, having won two WSOP bracelets and the WPT Young Guns title in ’04 -- and Boyd as a crazy schemer. Indeed, mention is made along the way of the over 1,000 domain names Boyd had registered. (If you haven’t noticed, over the last couple of weeks Boyd has begun trying to sell some of those domains on eBay and via his blog.)

Conclusion

Although everyone reads Rolling Stone, the magazine -- like the popular music industry it primarily covers -- does mostly target a younger demographic, and I think that, more than anything, explains why one doesn’t find a lot of references to poker in its first forty years of publication. During most of those forty years, poker was a game for older people (primarily men), folks whose interests rarely intersected with those looking for the latest about David Bowie, Madonna, the Spin Doctors, ‘N Sync, or Coldplay.

Indeed, all three of these more detailed looks at poker would have particular appeal to younger readers (i.e., those in their late teens or early twenties). Given that poker has recently become a game dominated by that very age group, perhaps Rolling Stone will find more reason to discuss the game in its pages in the coming years. In any event, I do think this little research project does tell us something about how poker has rated in the popular culture over the last forty years.

Poker & Pop Culture: Rolling Stone (1967-2007) (1 of 2)

I mentioned last post that my brother gave me this nifty birthday present, a DVD set collecting the first forty years of Rolling Stone magazine. Every page of every issue is scanned and readable on the computer screen, and, of course, one can perform the usual searches (by keywords, date, etc.) to track down that article you remember reading long ago but can’t quite put your finger on today.

Was curious to see what Rolling Stone might have written about poker over the last forty years (or, to be more precise, between 1967 and 2007). While the magazine obviously focuses on music, it has always provided commentary on other aspects of popular culture, too. I figured simply searching the archives for the word “poker” might reveal a little something about the cultural impact of the game over the last four decades. (If not that, perhaps I’d find some article or two of interest to share with you here.)

The whole exercise made me think of what Kevmath did back in March when Sports Illustrated made their entire archive available online. He searched through and found a number of interesting poker-related articles, then began a 2+2 thread with links to several of them.

My search of Rolling Stone was much, much less fruitful, I’m afraid. In fact, as far as so-called “professional” poker and the WSOP are concerned, neither really existed for Rolling Stone prior to 2005. Well, there was one mention of the WSOP in Peter Travers’ 1998 review of Rounders, but no articles about the event itself until the summer of ’05. That’s right -- it would take two full years after his Main Event triumph for Chris Moneymaker even to be mentioned in RS, and then only in passing.

The generic search for the word “poker” revealed a total of 59 “articles,” although some of these aren’t really articles at all, but simply appearances of the word in the Table of Contents or in blurb-like insets appearing within other articles.

In our analysis, we can toss out several of the references as largely extraneous to whatever conclusions we might want to draw here. For example, three were not to the game at all, but to the metal rod with which one stirs a fire.

There were about fifteen instances in which a person -- usually a musician or actor -- was described as “poker-faced.” The musicians included the Animals, Willie Nelson, the Rolling Stones’ drummer Charlie Watts, Dinosaur Jr. front man J Mascis, and Devo (twice), among others. The actors included John Huston, Dan Akyroyd (in Dragnet), Gary Oldman, and a few other, lesser known folks. (Oh, Stephen Colbert gets the descriptor, too.) There were also references to certain individuals not being “poker-faced,” such as Prince in his video for “Kiss.” Then certain groups, like the Flaming Lips, A Tribe Called Quest, Modest Mouse, were congratulated for their “poker-faced humor.”

That left just under forty actual references to the game of poker, although some of these references were also made simply by way of analogy, such as in a review of the 1993 documentary The War Room, where James Carville is shown playing politics “like a raucous game of high-stakes poker.”

Then there are the movie reviews of films which feature poker, such as Milos Forman’s 1971 film Taking Off in which characters play strip poker. Poker also comes up in the plot synopses of Honeymoon in Vegas (1992), Maverick (1994), Rounders (1998), Dickie Roberts: Former Child Star (2003), The 40-Year Old Virgin (2005), and Casino Royale (2006).

Travers’ review of Rounders, by the way, is mostly positive, although he did find the film derivative of both The Cincinnati Kid and Good Will Hunting. He likes Matt Damon’s performance as Mike McDermott (he’s “a winner”), calls Ed Norton “riveting,” and finds John Malkovich “over the top.” Travers ultimately characterizes the film as “stylish entertainment and smartass fun,” pointing out that it limits itself somewhat because it does become a “crowd pleaser” (“the movie stacks the deck in favor of Mike”).

That leaves us just two dozen or so references to poker. Again, a couple of these are just incidental, such as an article in which Willie Nelson talks about his ownership of a truck stop in Texas which he jokingly says he won in a poker game (he didn’t).

There are a small number of instances where bands recorded songs about poker which get mentioned in reviews. The Everly Brothers had a song called “Three-Armed Poker-Playing River Rat” on their 1972 album Stories We Could Tell, but the reviewer wasn’t impressed. The Electric Light Orchestra has a song called “Poker” on Face the Music (1972) -- the reviewer likes that one. And in 2007 there was a quick blurb about magician Ricky Jay’s compilation of poker-related songs, Ricky Jay Plays Poker.

When the Beatles came to America in 1964, they played poker with photographer Curt Gunther -- not very well, apparently (Gunther made a couple hundy off the Fab Four). Marty Balin of Jefferson Airplane talks about playing poker during Woodstock. In a late 2004 interview with Kanye West, he talks about his love for video games, then the interviewer strangely asks him “What’s the most money you bet on a poker hand this year?” His answer is he doesn’t play poker, although he did lose a little at blackjack. And a 2001 feature on Jay-Z also tells of his love for the game Guts, described in the article as a “high-stakes poker game that’s all about balls.”

There’s a passing reference to poker in a creepy Stephen King short story that appeared in the magazine in 1984. I remember reading this story when it came out. It starts with a woman accidentally shooting herself in the head, yet weirdly surviving. She goes on to have a bunch of hallucinations and ultimately kill her husband (who, by the way, plays poker) and herself. I reread it and can’t say it strikes me as one of King’s finer moments.

There’s also an article about the rise of online gambling sites from September 1999, although it doesn’t mention online poker at all. (Just a passing reference to video poker.)

That brings us down to just ten or so mentions, although really we are just talking about three different “articles” per se. One involves a pair of articles about college students partying with their professors that appeared in the April 16, 1981 issue. Then there were a series of short pieces appearing in the October 5, 2006 issue about the “Best of Vegas,” several of which mention poker. And in the June 16, 2005 issue there was a feature article about “The Crew” -- that group of young poker players that included Joe Bartholdi, David Smyth, Scott Fischman, Tony Lazar, Brett Jungblut, and Dutch and Robert Boyd. Indeed, in the entire forty-year run, this one four-page article about “The Crew” is easily the most studied look at professional poker that appears in Rolling Stone.

Since this post has already run on to a decent length, I’m going to save the discussion of these latter three pieces for tomorrow. Suffice it to say, my scan of the archives demonstrates Rolling Stone’s ambivalence toward poker fairly unambiguously, I think. Not that we’d necessarily expect a music mag to care much about poker, but it still might be surprising to those who might (rightly or wrongly) think of Stu Ungar as a “rock star” to discover he’s never been mentioned in Rolling Stone a single time.