Revelation Regarding the (Alleged) Moss-Dandolos Match

Busy days here on the farm of late, although like everyone I’ve been following all that has gone on at the World Series of Poker thus far. Hard to believe they are only about two weeks into the series, as they’ve already gotten up to the 30th event today.

Have been glad to track the updates on PokerNews once more, and am tuning in over at PokerGO now and then. Speaking of the latter, they finally did get PayPal working and so I got a monthly subscription. They have it on Roku now, too, although I never have been able to get anything to load over there (it seems to stick in a “Retrieving” cycle and never quite opens the live event).

I did want to touch base, though, and let visitors know about a recent “Poker & Pop Culture” column of mine that relates somewhat to the history of the WSOP.

A few weeks back I ran a revised and expanded version of a column focusing on a famous heads-up poker game between Johnny Moss and Nick “The Greek” Dandolos. If you’re reading this blog you’ve probably heard of that match before.

According to most accounts, the pair got together sometime around 1951 (or thereabouts) at Binion’s Horseshoe to play a high-stakes match that lasted several months, with Moss ultimately said to have come away a big winner ($2 million or more, say some). The game was open to the public, goes the story, and for that reason sometimes gets linked to the later idea of the WSOP first run at Binion’s in 1970.

That column, titled “Moss and Dandolos at the Horseshoe - Legend or Myth?” was really more about the many stories about the game than about the game itself.

I included in there how one of the most referenced sources for details regarding the match is Al Alvarez’s The Biggest Game in Town (1983), a favorite poker book of mine that I’ve written about here many, many times over the years.

I also included a bit from Jesse May regarding how some of those who talked to Alvarez for his book (including Moss) likely embellished their tales more than a little bit.

In any case, about a week after that column went up I had a nice surprise when I got a note from a person who works for Jack Binion. The note asked if I could get in touch, as Mr. Binion had some information to share about the Moss-Dandolos story that could help clear up a lot of the uncertainty surrounding it.

I called and after a couple more exchanges ended up getting some fairly remarkable memories from Jack Binion regarding the alleged match. I say “alleged” because one of the clarifications he made was to explain that the match never really happened! At least not at Binion’s, and not in public. And likely not for the super-high stakes often cited, either.

I won’t give away the rest of the story here, but instead point you over to the newer article that shares Jack Binion’s insight:

”Poker & Pop Culture: Jack Binion Sorts Fact From Fiction Regarding Moss-Dandolos Match.”

Jesse May Interview, April 2011 (Part 1 of 2)

The passing of Dave “Devilfish” Ulliott earlier this week brought to mind his significant role on the first series of Late Night Poker. That in turn reminded me of a lengthy interview I was able to do a while back with Jesse May, another person who was there at the start of the groundbreaking poker TV show in the late 1990s.

This was another of those Betfair Poker interviews that are no longer available online, and I realized now might be as good a time as any for me to repost the interview over here. Took me a while to find the sucker, actually, but thankfully I did.

I’ll repost it here in two parts, just as it originally appeared on Betfair Poker in early April 2011 -- right before Black Friday, actually, which is kind of interesting to consider when reading some of the discussion of the state of poker at that time. The first part primarily focuses on May’s 1998 novel, Shut Up and Deal, while the second (which I’ll post tomorrow) delves into the Late Night Poker story.

Thanks again, Jesse, for the interview!

* * * * * “The Betfair Poker Interview: Jesse May, Part 1”
[Originally published at Betfair Poker, 1 April 2011]

When it comes to poker-themed novels, Jesse May’s Shut Up and Deal (1998) stands out as an especially accomplished entry, a book that brings alive the unique and fascinating world of the cash-game grinder of the mid-1990s.

May’s narrator, a young poker pro named Mickey, relates in episodic fashion the story of his ongoing struggles both at the tables and elsewhere, exploring in detail the many challenges faced by himself and others as they all separately strive to “stay in action.” Full of memorable characters and set pieces, I highly recommend May’s novel as both an entertaining read and an insightful exploration of poker’s many highs and lows.

In addition to his poker writing, May is well known for his contributions as a commentator on numerous poker shows, a role that has earned him the nickname “the Voice of Poker.” For May that career began shortly after the publication of his novel with the first season of Late Night Poker (in 1999), a show that would come to have great influence on televised poker a few years later with the launching of the World Poker Tour and expansion of coverage of the World Series of Poker on ESPN.

I recently had the opportunity to talk with May about both Shut Up and Deal and the early years of Late Night Poker. This week I’ll share the first part of our conversation in which we focused on May’s novel, and next week will present the story of May’s involvement with Late Night Poker.

Short-Stacked Shamus: I know Shut Up and Deal is based somewhat on your own experiences playing poker in the late ’80s-early ’90s. To what extent is Mickey’s story comparable to your own?

Jesse May: First of all, the story is true in the sense that I think truth is stranger than fiction. When I was writing it, I wasn’t worried about it being true, but I think that when it comes to a lot of gambling stories, you find that you could never make this stuff up. That’s been the case, I think, for every moment I’ve been in the gambling world.

Like Mickey, I did start playing when I was in high school. With a couple of other guys we all got obsessed with poker at the same time, then went out to Las Vegas -- four of us, all underage, like 17 or 18 -- and there discovered Texas hold’em (limit). Soon after that it became kind of a more serious thing for me. I used to go to Las Vegas quite a bit back before I turned 21, spending summers there trying to play poker. I dropped out of college twice, and after I turned 21 I ended up in Vegas and really tried to make a go of it.

Obviously it was during that poker explosion, and so as far as the places in the book go, they did kind of coincide with where I was. I spent a lot of time in Las Vegas. I was in Foxwoods within a month after they opened up [in 1992] and stayed there the better part of a year. I was in Atlantic City the very day they opened poker [in 1993], and stayed there about a year-and-a-half. Those were really interesting times as far as poker goes, because it was so new. There was no internet, obviously, back then, and all the action was there. I think the world had never seen anything like those two major openings -- Atlantic City and Foxwoods.

SSS: In a way the novel kind of chronicles this interesting and important moment for poker. For a lot of people who only came into poker post-Moneymaker, they might not realize how significant that earlier “explosion” really was for poker.

JM: That’s true. Also, it was interesting... at the time there were some poker texts, but most people really didn’t have access to them. So it was a combination of there being so few people who played poker -- not even well but just marginally -- and there being so much money around.

It was incredible, because it required such a different skill set to become a poker player then -- a professional -- than it does today. The skill sets then were really about money management and surviving in that hustling type of world rather than sitting around talking about hands. People didn’t sit around and talk strategy then. You talked about who was cheating and who owed you money and that kind of stuff (laughs). And I loved that world, and so for me it was a great time.

SSS: It’s funny, the world your describing was really much more similar to what came before -- even stretching back to the 19th century -- than what the poker world has become over the decade.

JM: It’s true. I look at a guy like Amarillo Slim [Preston]. You know -- throw out all the personal controversies that he’s had -- people have been very critical of his game, saying that he’s essentially not a poker player. And to some extent that’s true, but the fact is that in his time, and even when I would play with him a little bit back in Foxwoods, he was representative of a guy who was a great professional as far as poker went. Because he knew everything else. He knew how to get a game together, how to get an edge... he knew all that stuff. And I always had a lot of respect for him.

It was people like that -- like the Bart Stone character [in Shut Up and Deal] -- who really were able to thrive back then, and who wouldn’t be thriving now. And it really was, as you’re saying, the tail end of that era where that sort of “road gambler” was able to succeed.

SSS: So what led to your decision to write the novel?

JM: The book itself was written as a catharsis, really. Back when I was playing, you got such a strong response from people when they found out you were playing poker. You kind of continually felt yourself defending your lifestyle to others and to yourself and trying to make order of it.

I used to take a lot of breaks when I played poker, and this particular time when I had the first crack at writing the novel, I had been playing in Atlantic City and took off nine months to travel in Asia. It was during that period I wrote the bones of the novel, writing every day.

SSS: So the places and chronology of the novel roughly correspond to your own experiences. The characters -- Bart Stone, John Smiley, Uptown Raoul -- I assume they, too, are somewhat based on people you knew and with whom you played?

JM: Yes. Actually there were some liability issues with the publisher that made it very important for me to go through and change certain things -- ethnicities, physical qualities, names, things like that. But a lot of times [with a given character] there was some person I had in mind, and sometimes characters were compilations of different people.

The Bart Stone character, for example, was probably as close to real as you could get [i.e., the person on whom he was based]. He was such a strong personality, you couldn’t exaggerate him. His life was so amazing... he really was one of the true road gamblers. He was a guy who had a church-going wife and completely lived this sort of “picket fence” existence for three weeks out of every month, then for one week he’d get into his car to some town -- just start driving -- and find a town, find a game, and find a way to get the money.

He had this saying. He said he’d go into a town and first he’d try and beat people on the square. If that didn’t work, he’d try and cheat them. And if that didn’t work, he’d just pull out a gun and rob the motherf*ckers. That was his philosophy of life!

SSS: You actually start the novel with Bart Stone -- with a sketch of his character and telling the story of him cheating others. It’s interesting, because I think by starting the book that way you kind of indirectly introduce Mickey as a contrasting figure -- a “good” guy, that is, who looks at Bart and expresses a kind of awe because he could never live that way. But then he weirdly admires Bart, too. And Mickey, as we come to find out, isn’t without flaws himself.

JM: I guess it’s kind of flattering to hear you say that. You know, I recently just read Vicky Coren’s book. I don’t know if you’ve read that.

SSS: Oh, yes -- For Richer, For Poorer. It’s terrific.

JM: Yes, I quite like it, too. And I think the reason I like it so much is that unlike a lot of these “tell-all” poker books or whatever they are, Vicky never tries to make herself into sort of an elite. She throws herself in with the poker players -- they are her peers, and she’s not trying to pretend that she’s not as bad or as good or as sick or as addicted or anything as any of them. And I always thought that was kind of important in the poker world as far as keeping your own order together was concerned -- that if you do think you’re different or better than everyone else, at least recognize that you’re a hypocrite (laughs)!

One of the things about poker, especially back then, is that you are faced with so many moral choices. I think that’s what excited me about the story more than anything else. Just because of poker’s nature, the decisions that you have to make every day... you are constantly testing out your own morality. And other people’s, too. You find out a lot about what lengths they’ll go to, what depths they’ll sink to, really who they are as a person. Poker reveals so much about people’s personalities because the ethical dilemmas -- the gray areas -- they come so fast and furious.

SSS: There are several themes present in the novel. One seems to be the way people tend to view poker either realistically or they romanticize it -- that there’s a “reality” of poker that some get, and there’s a “romance” about the game that others prefer to see.

JM: I’ll buy that.

SSS: A related theme in the book -- and this is interesting because you’ve already used this phrase a couple of times with regard to the writing of the novel -- is this idea of “making order” of your life. Mickey is constantly trying to do that himself in the book, and struggling, at times, between being “realistic” and being “romantic” about his life as a full-time poker player.

JM: I think that for people who play poker professionally today, that “order” is so much more readily available. And it’s an order that is very similar for all of them. They’ve identified profitable ways to play, mistakes their opponents make, and all of the numbers involved that they can see with the tracking software and things like that -- the order is there. I think it was much harder before, but believe me, they still have a lot of chaos in their lives, because the nature of poker and gambling is obviously based on the streaks of winning and losing. That stuff throws off your sense of balance.

Then there’s the “moral” order of setting up rules for yourself, which obviously is a whole other thing. The order of believing that what you’re doing is the right thing to be doing. To me that’s always been the major theme of gambling -- not just poker -- that you’re always making up new rules for yourself. Maybe it’s like that in life, too, you know, something works for a while and then something throws it off and you have to go back to the drawing board. But it’s very important for people to have a sense of order, and I agree that’s something that Mickey struggles with in the book. As everybody in the poker world does.

I think everyone takes this little, sort of vicarious pleasure in seeing someone who’s completely on top of the poker world run bad. You know, when somebody like Brian Townsend is writing that he’s questioning everything and going back to the drawing board. You recognize that the poker world can be as chaotic for them as it is for the rest of us.

SSS: I think you’re right about it being a different situation today than for players in the ’90s, not just in terms of being able to track results and see “order” that way, but when it comes to the moral questions, too. Poker still isn’t completely accepted today, but -- to go back to what you were saying earlier -- poker pros aren’t necessarily having to defend what they do as much today as before.

Okay, one last question about the novel. What writers -- poker and otherwise -- would you list as ones you admire and might consider as having influenced you when writing Shut Up and Deal?

JM: As far as poker writers are concerned, I love Al Alvarez (The Biggest Game in Town), of course. And Jon Bradshaw, I love the way he profiles people in Fast Company. Also, Damon Runyon, to me, is one of the great writers of all time when it comes to creating the characters of gambling. I feel like he is so underappreciated, although now that I think about it I probably never read any Runyon before I wrote the book. And Mario Puzo’s Fools Die...

SSS: You allude to that one in Shut Up and Deal.

JM: Oh, that’s right. You know Puzo was a big gambler. To me, Fools Die was the greatest book on Vegas that had ever been written. There are a couple of scenes in there in which he describes Vegas that I think heavily influenced me.

For other [non-gambling] stories, I used to read Somerset Maugham quite a bit. I love storytellers who are happy to tell the details they want to tell, you know? Writers like Hemingway or Djuna Barnes... who show that it doesn’t have to be a [linear] sort of narrative where you say “he said” and then “she said” but that you can just relate what strikes you about people. I always felt like that at the poker table, but essentially there you are just watching people, which I love to do.

Come back tomorrow for Part 2, covering the early years of Late Night Poker.

Obvious Tells Are Obvious

I think some of you have probably seen this already, but I wanted to share it here for those who hadn’t -- a recent post by Reading Poker Tells author Zach Elwood for the popular site Deadspin called “Five of the Most Obvious Poker Tells Ever Televised.”

It’s a cool article for a number of reasons, including the fact that Zach includes YouTube clips of the hands to go along with his commentary explaining the tells on display. I also dig the inclusion of an Oreo cookie in the accompanying illustration which is even funnier when you realize Zach doesn’t even talk about Teddy KGB in the piece.

All five of the featured hands kind of fit in a similar category filled by players with huge holdings trying to mask their strength. But Zach does a neat job with each hand breaking down the different kinds of behaviors being demonstrated, adding a useful caveat that while the tells in the clips are all fairly obvious, many “are seen in much more subtle forms in more experienced players.”

I’ll let you click through to enjoy the clips and the analyses yourself, but I wanted also to mention how I like the way Zach begins the article.

Writing for the wide audience that reads Deadspin, Zach starts out noting the fact that “the poker tell is one of the most romanticized ideas in gambling.” He then points out how “in reality” tells often work differently -- “usually more subtle than they are in the movies.”

That distinction between a romantic version of poker (such as is often presented in film) and a realistic one is something I find myself going back to time and again in my “Poker in American Film and Culture” class.

We watch a lot of clips in the class and thus see over and over again what Zach is talking about with regard to the exaggerated tells. But we also address the same romance-versus-reality debate in a number of other contexts, too, such as when we read Al Alvarez’s The Biggest Game in Town and talk about the difference as representing different approaches to the game.

That’s a discussion I’ve had here before amid a long exegesis of one chapter of Alvarez’s book, if you’re curious.

Save reading my old post for later, though, and go enjoy Zach’s new one now if you haven’t already.

On Winners and the Image of Poker

Was somewhat diverting last week to see how that $25K World Poker Tour World Championship played out and all of the surrounding hubbub concerning the deep runs of Erick Lindgren (the eventual runner-up) and David “Chino” Rheem (who won the sucker). I actually barely followed the tournament itself, to be honest, but I couldn’t help but overhear some of the hooting and hollering that resulted from that particular pair making it to heads-up.

Both obviously occupy interesting, similar places in the poker community at present. Lindgren’s story is perhaps somewhat better known thanks to a recent BLUFF feature discussing his significant gambling debts and even a stint in rehab, as well as the openness with which his many creditors have reported on sums owed.

Rheem’s story might be a little less well known, although that absurd-in-retrospect judgment placed upon him by Epic Poker’s Standards and Conduct Committee back in August 2011 broadcast his reputation for failing to pay back debts a little more widely than had been the case previously.

Recall how the EPL placed its first Main Event winner on probation “in order to effectively monitor the personal conduct of Mr. Rheem as he works to meet his personal financial obligations as required under the Players’ Code of Conduct”? Provides a chuckle today, that, as we now understand the extent of Epic Poker’s own significant financial obligations, and the way Federated Sports + Gaming weaseled out of those obligations by taking the bankruptcy route. Heck, some of us are still receiving legal notices helping us monitor that, too.

Both Lindgren and Rheem provide a lot of forum fodder, obviously, and their performances in the WPT World Championship created another occasion for further judgments, jokes, and conjecture about the players’ backing arrangments as well as the possibility of certain debts getting settled thanks to their large scores ($1,150,297 for Rheem and $650,275 for Lindgren).

My initial reaction upon seeing those two in the top spots heading into the final table and then learning they had finished 1-2 was to think back to what I was writing about a week ago regarding “The Shifting Place of the WPT World Championship.” There I was noting how the event has become much less central on the poker calendar over the last several years, both for players and for fans.

One idea I had in mind when writing that post that I didn’t really discuss explicitly was the way the $25K WPT World Championship seems to have evolved into an event reserved for only a select few -- namely, those who can afford and/or be backed for the $25K buy-in. Thus my initial thought about Lindgren and Rheem both playing and coming away with the top two prizes was to think how that result seemed to confirm such an idea that the tournament is kind of segregated from others on the schedule, something only for those like Lindgren and Rheem who even with their debts (or perhaps because of their debts, and, of course, their skills as players) can get backers and play.

But then I had a different thought about it all, partly inspired by the EPL’s fretting over its image once Rheem won that first Main Event. I thought about how curious it is that people place so much importance on who wins a poker tournament and the way the story of that person’s triumph might reflect on the game itself.

The NBA playoffs are currently down to four teams -- Miami, Indiana, San Antonio, and Memphis -- and some commentators are already talking about how the upcoming finals will probably fail to earn high television ratings because of the absence of “big market” teams (e.g., from New York or Los Angeles). But no one is worried about the state of the game itself being negatively affected by who ends up winning in the end. Or affected at all, really.

Meanwhile in poker, discussion about how winners are perceived both within the community and beyond often forms part of the post-tourney response, particularly in the case of the highest-profile tournaments.

Such discussion always surrounds the WSOP Main Event, of course. Remember the first year of the “November Nine” (2008), when all of the talk was about how the final nine featured a bunch of nobodies? Coincidentally -- or ironically -- it was Rheem alone who initially stood out among that group as the only “pro” among them, thus causing a lot of uncertainty about whether or not the whole delayed-final table experiment was ultimately going to be “good for poker” if no one knew the players involved.

Such has been the case ever since the WSOP Main Event started to attract notice by those outside of poker. I’m thinking of the end of The Biggest Game in Town by Al Alvarez in which he reports on the 1981 WSOP. Alvarez describes one player, Bill Smith, drinking heavily throughout the tourney on his way to the final table, and quotes an unnamed poker pro worrying “If Bill ends up beating all of the nice guys, like Bobby [Baldwin], it’s going to set the image of poker back ten years.”

Smith ended up busting in fifth, leading Alvarez to say (with tongue clearly in cheek) that “the new, clean-living image of poker had been spared for another year.” That Stu Ungar would go on to win that year -- an amazing character, to be sure, though obviously not exactly a wholesome representative of the game -- perhaps provides yet another one of those hindsight-producing ironies here.

In any case, this whole idea of assigning such significance to the winner’s character or identity and its ultimate effect on the “image of poker” is curious to say the least. After all, the game attracts such a wide variety of people, and the very nature of the game -- with chance a significant element -- makes it impossible to exert any sort of control over who is going to win and thus be perceived as representing the game going forward.

Looking back, I’d say that was one of a few impossible goals the EPL was striving for during its brief, quixotic existence, i.e., to try to exert some sort of control over who the winners in poker were going to be, ensuring they be both skillful and of acceptable character. (Wrote a little on that idea way back in early 2011 when the EPL was first announced in a post titled “A League of Their Own.”) But in truth, it is foolhardy to suggest the fate of the game depends so heavily on outcomes.

So Rheem wins and Lindgren almost does. So what? Poker endures.

Sports Talk: Reality and Romance

Yesterday in my “Poker in American Film and Culture” class we had once again reached the point in the semester where it was time to discuss Al Alvarez’ The Biggest Game in Town.

Last year around this time I wrote a series of posts here about one chapter of Alvarez’ book (chapter 3), focusing on different themes that come up. One of those themes is the tension or conflict between a “realistic” and a “romantic” view of poker, the kind of thing anyone who has played the game and thought about it at all seriously has probably been inspired to contemplate.

In the chapter one finds Mickey Appleman talking about how “there can be no self-deception for a poker player” and how “you have to be a realist to be successful.” Interestingly, before the same long quote is over Appelman describes himself as a “romantic” and how for him “gambling is a romance.” He goes on to talk about how when he is at the table he doesn’t think about how he plays for “real money.”

It’s a curious passage, and fun to talk about with students as I ask them to try to reconcile what appears to be a kind of contradiction. I wrote at length about this in one of those posts from last year, and so won’t repeat the discussion other than to say I believed it was possible for poker pros to be “realistic” about what they were doing while also enjoying the “romantic” freedom from the “straight world” or “system” the life can provide (for some).

Anyhow, I bring up this “reality vs. romance” idea again because when I was driving into school yesterday I dialed up the local sports talk radio station to hear the discussion of the NCAA games from the weekend. Most of the talk was about UNC failing to overcome the injury to their point guard, Kendall Marshall, and thus losing to Kansas in the regional final.

It was a close game until the final few minutes when Kansas went on a run and UNC went cold, kind of a classic example of a team collectively falling apart just when things became most stressful. During the game’s most crucial moments when the team most needed to focus and execute, the Heels had failed to do so, the Jayhawks had made plays, and thus Kansas had prevailed.

I realized listening to the sports talk guys that almost everything they were saying concerned intangibles like “heart” and “desire” and “believing” and so forth. No UNC player had stepped up to “put the team on his shoulders” at the end, they explained, and thus they lost. I realized it was an entirely vague discussion of what had happened, full of clichés and faux analysis, the kind of stuff any non-expert could come up with if forced to discuss a given game.

Let’s say you knew nothing at all about poker but were forced to write a report on the final table of a tournament in which one of your assigned tasks was to analyze the strategy employed by each player. How would you do it?

Well, you could talk about “heart” and “desire” and how one player just really, really wanted it more than the others and “believed” in himself and as a result ended up winning. Right? Of course, such a report would immediately be dismissed as useless by most who read it, a group I’m assuming would consist of people with at least a marginal understanding of poker.

Those readers would know that a more informed analysis would look at what actually happened in the hands the players played, noting the approaches they’d taken with various holdings, how they’d sized their bets and raises, used position, interpreted the betting patterns and other information gleaned from opponents, and so forth as having led to the actions they took. The luck element would be addressed, too -- e.g., a suckout on the river coming to snatch reward away from a well considered play. In other words, a real analysis of how players performed would necessarily deal with concrete evidence, smartly weighed.

But when it comes to basketball and a lot of sports reporting, this sort of non-specific applesauce about “desire” and such seems not only to be tolerated, but makes up most of what passes for commentators “breaking down” a game.

As I listened further to the sports talk guys repeating each other with their fuzzy back-and-forthing, I realized they were adding precious little to the understanding of anyone who’d actually watched the game. Nor would what they were saying be that meaningful to someone who hadn’t watched it, either, other than to indicate in a very general way that the winning team had somehow tried harder than the one that lost.

At one point one of them actually started going on about “it” and how a certain player just didn’t have “it.” You know, that purposefully ambiguous pronoun that is supposed to represent some quality that cannot be named, yet is necessary to succeed. “I mean you look at him on the court and you can see right away he just doesn’t have it,” went the commentary.

Some insight, there. I finally said “sh” to the talk of “it” and put on some tunes.

Since I was already thinking about the whole “reality vs. romance” idea from Alvarez’ book, I found myself characterizing this way of talking about a sporting event as essentially romantic, not giving much attention at all to the reality of how plays were run, shots were made or missed, defenses were effective or failed, and the like.

I don't mean to suggest these “romantic” ways of looking at sports aren't meaningful, nor that there isn't a place for talking about a player's “heart” or “will to win” or whatever. But one has to understand how limited that sort of discussion necessarily is, depending largely on evidence one cannot really support with observable facts.

The truth is, real analysis is hard. It takes effort and understanding to break down how a game was won or lost -- I mean really break it down. Just like it takes effort and understanding to play a game well. And without such hard work, a lot of these so-called analysts are doomed to fill the air with a lot redundant-sounding noise.

No matter how much heart and desire they pour into it.

A. Alvarez and America

I’ve written here many times about the English writer Al Alvarez, in particular regarding his 1983 book The Biggest Game in Town. Just click that “Al Alvarez” tag at the bottom of this post to see a number of examples.

In fact, last spring I wrote a half-dozen posts that focusing on a single chapter of The Biggest Game in Town, a kind of extended close reading intended to highlight some of the book’s themes as well as to demonstrate how packed full of great stories and ideas the book is. (Those posts begin here.)

Alvarez is not just a “poker writer,” of course, having had a lengthy career writing poetry, literary criticism, and other nonfiction on a host of different topics. However, his contributions to our little subgenre of nonfiction or sports journalism or whatever you want to call it are especially noteworthy. Inspiring, even.

In The Biggest Game in Town, Alvarez reports from the 1981 World Series of Poker (won by Stu Ungar), ultimately providing an especially insightful, thorough portrait not just of the WSOP and Vegas but American culture as a whole and poker’s significant status within it.

Years later Alvarez penned a second book about poker titled Poker: Bets, Bluffs, and Bad Beats (first published in 2001). At first glance that book’s extensive (and very cool) collection of illustrations and photographs might cause one to consider it a “coffee table book,” but it, too, includes a number of smart, entertaining, and revealing discussions about our favorite card game. The book provides a nice supplement to The Biggest Game in Town, exploring various facets of the game and culminating with a chapter recounting Alvarez’ own participation in the 1994 WSOP Main Event.

Like The Biggest Game in Town, the more recent book also finds Alvarez making some astute observations about American culture and the many ways poker reflects it, especially in the first chapter, titled “The American Game.”

For my “Community Cards” column this week on the Epic Poker blog, I shared some of what Alvarez talks about in that first chapter of Poker: Bets, Bluffs, and Bad Beats as well as in the initial chapter of The Biggest Game in Town. Obviously there was a lot more to be said about the two books and Alvarez’ significant contributions to poker writing, but in the column I mainly focused on some of the Londoner’s observations about poker and American culture.

Check out the column for more, and as I say at the end, if you aren’t familiar with Alvarez’ poker writings, you could do a lot worse than to pick up The Biggest Game in Town, Poker: Bets, Bluffs, and Bad Beats, or both.

True Story

Last week I had the chance to chat with Jesse May, author of the poker novel Shut Up and Deal (1998) and much-traveled poker commentator. Great fun, that.

Our paths had intersected a couple of times before on the tourney circuit, and I always enjoyed talking with him as someone very knowledgeable both about the world of poker today as well as the history of the game. I am also a big fan of May’s podcast, The Poker Show, which is always entertaining and informative.

I decided to include Shut Up and Deal on the syllabus in my “Poker and American Film and Culture” class -- part of the literature unit -- and we read and discussed the book over the last few classes. I thought this would be a good time to speak with May, especially about Shut Up and Deal since my students and I were in the middle of discussing it.

May and I talked about a number of topics, but mostly concentrated on his novel as well as his involvement with the early years of the historically-important U.K. poker show “Late Night Poker.” Today on Betfair I posted the first part of our interview, focusing mainly on Shut Up and Deal, and next week I’ll be sharing his memories of “Late Night Poker.”

Many times when I interview someone there will be material that doesn’t make it into the final product -- “outtakes” that might be interesting but have to be cut out, usually as part of the effort to keep the interview a reasonable length. I thought I’d pass along one such item from the first part of my interview with May, something that I didn’t include over on Betfair but which I thought for a couple of reasons would be appropriate to share here.

One reason is that it relates to Al Alvarez’s The Biggest Game in Town, a book to which I not long ago devoted a series of posts. The other is it has to do with how difficult it can be sometimes to tell the difference between truth and fiction, a topic which somehow seems appropriate to write about on April Fool’s Day.

We’d gotten to the part of the conversation where I mention some of the themes I see present in Shut Up and Deal. One such theme is this struggle between “reality” and “romance” that occurs in the book -- how some characters seem to view poker “realistically” while others have a more “romantic” idea of the game. And a couple of characters seem to be going back and forth between the two points of view, including Mickey, the narrator and central protagonist.

Anyhow, when I mentioned that theme I noted how it also comes up a lot in The Biggest Game in Town. (In fact, one of my posts a few weeks ago about the book -- titled “Reality and Romance” -- focused squarely on that very topic.) I said something to May about how Alvarez's book addresses this same struggle in poker to be “realistic,” and May had what I thought was a very interesting response.

“Listen, I love The Biggest Game in Town... it’s one of my favorite books,” said May. “But it’s a funny thing... [Alvarez] went out to Vegas and sat around and met Benny Binion and Moss and Amarillo Slim and Puggy and basically whatever they told him, he just accepted as gospel as [though] that’s the way it happened... [when in fact a lot of it] is about as far from the truth as possible!”

May noted how he’d researched a lot of the stories told in the book, coming to find that many aren’t quite as “realistic” -- and are more embellished or “romanticized” -- than we might realize.

“The amazing thing about those guys is that they basically [all] got their stories straight.... They knew that the reality was not for mass consumption. And [so] these stories were created and repeated with enough detail and by enough of them that they just became accepted as the truth. And maybe some of them even believe now that that’s what actually happened, but it’s not.”

May added that he’d talked with Alvarez about this a couple of times, and his response was that it was “incredible” how all of those whom he interviewed could have agreed upon all of the details of some of the stories, “especially stuff about Johnny Moss and Nick ‘the Greek.’” Indeed, I knew already that Alvarez’s account of that big heads-up match between Moss and Dandalos at Binion’s that took place somewhere around 1951 includes details many have since disputed, and that a great deal regarding that event is highly uncertain.

“Those guys know that to survive they have to be aware of their own reality,” added May, “but they certainly are not going to tell anybody about it!”

I told May how interesting it was to consider how Alvarez’s book talks so much about being “realistic” -- with quotes from several players furthering the exploration of that topic -- yet the book itself perhaps reports things as true that are in fact embellished or at least “romanticized” somewhat.

Like I say, I thought that was an interesting enough item to share here. Especially on a day devoted to trying to fool each other into second-guessing what’s “real” and what’s not.

Have a good weekend, all. And -- today, particularly -- don’t believe everything you read!

Rereading The Biggest Game in Town: America, Where Gambling is a Form of Patriotism (6 of 6)

Returning one final time to Chapter 3 of the The Biggest Game in Town by Al Alvarez...

Just after that bit from Mickey Appleman about the “romance” of poker, the author elaborates further on the point and how he interprets it as a “romance of personal liberty” the life of a gambler can provide.

It is this sense of freedom from the “straight” world “that mesmerizes all the high rollers,” Alvarez insists. “They pride themselves on the fact that they survive spectacularly well outside the system.”

No bosses. Even the government has limited (or no) influence, given the way the money changing hands is rarely if ever reported as taxable income or expenses. In other words, complete independence -- or at least the belief one enjoys such -- with one’s success and/or failure directly consequent to one’s “own unaided talents.”

Alvarez concludes the chapter with an exchange he had with Jack Binion regarding this business of “personal liberty” and living “outside the system.” Binion tells Alvarez a story about an older gambler who -- like many of the high rollers -- had gone busto several times. Finally, at age 73, he hits a hot streak and finds himself up $700,000. Ignoring others’ advice, he saves none of it and ends up broke once more. The story could be said to symbolize various things, I suppose, but here it mainly functions as yet another example of personal freedom.

That’s when Binion brings up America. Where freedom rings and rings, dontcha know.

Speaking of the old fellow losing his roll yet again, Binion notes how “‘If you go broke here in America, you don’t really starve to death.’” His point isn’t really to refer to the various programs in place to aid the needy, but rather to argue that class differences in the U.S. aren’t as significant as they are in other countries. “‘Once you reach the lower middle class in United States,’” says Binion, “‘there’s no great difference between the top and bottom.’”

Alvarez isn’t so sure about this point of view, particularly when Binion insists that “‘if these guys [the high rollers] go broke they are going to have to play cheaper. That’s the only difference.’” Alvarez responds with incredulity at such nonchalance. “‘Cheaper?’” he says to Binion. “‘There are fortunes changing hands every day.’”

Alvarez notes how Binion shakes his head in apparent disappointment at his having failed to understand. Again we’re back to that disconnect between the “different ordering of reality” the high-stakes gamblers recognize and the world in which the rest of us live -- a world where the difference between $700,000 and $700 means a whole heckuva lot.

Binion tries to explain the “free enterprise system” and how it allows each individual to spend his or her money however he or she wishes. Such a system also allows each person to assign value with freedom, too, e.g., to pay $100 for a bottle of wine. “‘To me that’s not worth it,’” says Binion, “‘but I’m not going to say it is foolish or wrong to spend that kind of money’” on a bottle of wine.

“‘That’s America,’” he adds, as if to provide a succinct explanation for what appears to be a highly complicated -- even paradoxical -- “system.” It’s all a bit of a head-scratcher for Alvarez -- “the uncomprehending foreigner,” as he imagines himself to appear to Binion.

America, land of the free. Where it is possible, if one desires, to exchange hundreds of thousands of dollars for small, round, clay chips, then utterly disregard all of the other goods for which that money might have been exchanged. Binion says “That’s America.” Alvarez adds “that, too, is Las Vegas -- the only place on earth where they justify gambling as a form of patriotism.”

These are passages I find most interesting to discuss with my “Poker in American Film and Culture” class. They seem to help support the course’s thesis, namely, that poker can serve as a “lens” through which to examine and learn about American culture. In a way that’s kind of what Alvarez is doing throughout his entire book -- looking at poker while learning about the U.S.

That said, I admit I feel a little like Alvarez here at the end of Chapter 3, finding the “lesson” Binion is trying teach to be less than obvious. Nevertheless, the exchange readily shows how poker provides a context for all sorts of so-called “American” ideas and values (freedom, liberty, independence, the “pursuit of happiness,” etc.). And Alvarez’s conclusion does somehow ring true. Somehow it makes sense to regard “gambling as a form of patriotism” in America -- a country founded, expanded, governed, and populated by gamblers throughout its history.

Thanks for indulging me for this little sequence of posts. (Will return to the usual programming tomorrow.) If you haven’t read The Biggest Game in Town before, I do hope I’ve intrigued you to pick it up. Not only will you learn a lot about the history of poker, the WSOP, and the culture of Vegas circa early 1980s, but a lot else, too, about the U.S., questions of “reality,” and human nature, generally speaking.

Rereading The Biggest Game in Town: Reality and Romance (5 of 6)

“Poker is a skill, it’s an art, it’s a science. You have to improve yourself continually and know your weaknesses. To be successful, you must be realistic.”

So said Mickey Appleman to Al Alvarez, as quoted in Chapter 3 in The Biggest Game in Town. In fact, talk about the need to “be realistic” with oneself in poker comes up quite frequently in the book.

For Appleman, the point primarily concerns understanding as well as possible one’s own abilities. As Appleman puts it in a later chapter when the topic arises once more, “There can be no self-deception for a poker player.... You have to be a realist to be successful. You can’t think you’ve played well if you lose consistently. Unless you can judge how well you play relative to the others, you have no chance.”

Perhaps influenced by what Appleman and others are telling him, later on Alvarez refers to poker as “one of the most realistic of all disciplines.” Here again the emphasis is on the way the game requires one to think clearly, to see things for what they are, to know oneself and to know others.

Of course, as has already been noted in these posts about The Biggest Game in Town, the whole idea of “reality” can get skewed rather quickly in poker. Especially when the game is being played for the highest stakes.

That proclamation about poker being a “realistic discipline” is made amid a brief biographical sketch of Doyle Brunson in which Alvarez describes some of the health-related wonders that have occurred during Texas Dolly’s long and interesting life.

Those familiar with Brunson’s story know about his having unexpectedly beaten cancer when a young man, as well as some of the other, similarly-surprising life turns he has experienced and which he’ll sometimes correlate with his faith. Thus does Alvarez note the irony of someone who regards his own life as having been punctuated by “miracles” having committed himself to the “realistic” world of poker.

(For more on Brunson and faith, see this post about The Godfather of Poker in which I suggest a comparison between the poker player’s autobiography and St. Augustine’s Confessions.)

Getting back to Appleman and what he’s telling Alvarez back in Chapter 3, on this rereading I found it interesting to see where the veteran of the Mayfair Club and (now) four-time WSOP bracelet winner’s observations ended up going -- most particularly how after starting out talking about being “realistic” he ends up acknowledging that he is, in fact, a “romantic.”

In literary studies, scholars often speak of “reality” and “romance” as indicating contrasting perspectives, manifested in poems, stories, and novels as “realism” and “romanticism.” Perhaps it is that contrast that caused me to find Appleman’s seemingly effortless shift from espousing realism to talking about romance somewhat curious.

“I’m a romantic, and for me gambling is a romance,” explains Appleman, who in addition to being a poker player has always been a big-time sports bettor, too. “That’s what I enjoy; the rest is by the way. I play and I play and I play; then I pick up the pieces and see how I did. It’s only at that moment that I realize I was playing for real money.”

See the apparent contradiction? One has to be “realistic” in order to play well, says Appleman. But then he says that when he plays he explicitly denies “reality,” losing himself (so to speak) in the “romance” of the game as though the period spent at the table affords an opportunity to escape the “real” world.

Afterwards, Alvarez offers his own interpretation of Appleman’s thesis: “When he said, ‘Gambling is a romance,’ he was not referring to the smoke-filled rooms, the sullen tribal faces, or the stilted backchat that passes for conversation; he meant the art of the game at its highest level and the romance of personal liberty.”

In other words, it doesn’t have to be a contradiction to speak of poker as being a “realistic discipline” while also saying it provides a kind of “romantic” freedom from the so-called “real” world. Describing another, less successful player, Alvarez uses the term “fantasist” to describe his lack of self-knowledge, thus providing us a useful distinction here.

Appleman is no fantasist. He enjoys the “romance” of the game, but understands the difference between “reality” (self-knowledge) and fantasy (self-deception). Including how -- as discussed in that post about “reality” last week -- it is needful to think of “real money” differently while the cards are in the air.

Indeed, it’s even “realistic” to do so -- to think of the chips not as a steak dinner or the gas bill or next month’s rent or an automobile or a house, but as what they really are.

Chips.

Rereading The Biggest Game in Town: Playing Jimmy Chagra (4 of 6)

Amid discussing the seeming disregard for money exhibited by most high-stakes poker players in chapter 3 of The Biggest Game in Town, Al Alvarez briefly relates a few details of the story of Jimmy Chagra, the notorious drug trafficker who spent his last months of freedom gambling it up in Las Vegas in 1979.

I’ve mentioned Chagra here at least a couple of times before. After returning from covering the 2008 WSOP, I wrote a post about the coverage of the 1979 World Series of Poker in Gambling Times magazine. There I shared details of John Hill’s feature story on that year’s Series, including his reference to Chagra winning millions playing blackjack and craps during that spring’s WSOP.

Shortly after that post appeared, the author Hill came around to comment, noting that “Chagra was affable and friendly” in his recollection, “but one it would be best to put large distances between.” Hill notes how it wasn’t long after that year’s Series that Chagra would be arrested for the murder of the judge presiding over his impending trial for drug trafficking.

During the 1970s Chagra had built up a dope-dealing empire based primarily in Las Vegas and El Paso, Texas. He was finally arrested in 1978, then indicted in February 1979 on federal charges, with U.S. District Court Judge John H. Wood, Jr. of San Antonio scheduled to preside over his trial. Nicknamed “Maximum John,” Wood was known as a judge who tended to give the maximum for drug-related crimes, which for Chagra meant a possible life sentence.

On May 29, 1979 -- the day Chagra’s trial was to begin, I believe -- Wood was shot and killed outside of his home. Later it would be discovered that Chagra had hired a hit man, Charles Harrelson, to kill Wood. (Harrelson, incidentally, was the actor Woody Harrelson’s father, although he abandoned the family when Woody was still a child.)

A couple of months later Chagra would be convicted of the drug-related crimes. He’d remain a fugitive for a few months before being tracked down and imprisoned. Chagra would end up confessing to another conspiracy charge, a failed attempt to assassinate a U.S. attorney. He served until 2003 when he was freed on parole and entered the witness protection program. He died in Arizona during the summer of 2008 (coincidentally just a day after my post about the 1979 WSOP).

Chagra would actually be acquitted of the conspiracy charges to kill Wood in a trial during which Oscar Goodman, currently mayor of Las Vegas, represented Chagra as his attorney. Meanwhile Harrelson and Chagra’s brother and wife were all convicted. (Later Chagra would admit to his involvement in the conspiracy in order to try to lessen punishment for his wife.)

Obviously there’s a lot more to Chagra’s story. Author Jack Sheehan interviewed Chagra just before his death in 2008 and is working on a book while also shopping around a screenplay in Hollywood. (More on that here.)

Starting around the mid-1970s, Chagra became very well known among the high-stakes players in Vegas as a “whale” with tons of cash who loved to gamble. Indeed, in his autobiography, The Godfather of Poker, Doyle Brunson refers to Chagra as “Moby Dick.” While only an average player, he always insisted on playing for the highest stakes possible, thereby attracting the attention of Brunson and the other players who it appears even developed a kind of cautious friendship with Chagra.

During those last months in 1979, then, one imagines that Chagra was especially eager to gamble it up with the millions’ worth of criminally-derived profit he’d accrued, knowing that his days of freedom were likely numbered. Alvarez calls it his “final fling,” characterizing Chagra as viewed from the perspective of Brunson and the others as “a Platonic ideal incarnate, a high roller with no tomorrow, backed by the virtually unlimited and untaxed resources of the narcotics business.”

Arriving in Vegas a couple of years later, Alvarez asks around about how Chagra’s money got divided up among the high-stakes crowd. Unsurprisingly, no one gives up much in the way of specifics.

“‘The cash got distributed pretty good’” is all he can get out of most, with Jack “Treetop” Straus adding “‘It was like that TV program Fantasy Island. I kept waiting for Tattoo to come up and say it was all a dream: “Look boss! The plane! The plane!”’”

One part of the story I’d forgotten about and found most interesting on rereading this time was how after he’d been sent away to the U.S. Penitentiary in Leavenworth, Chagra still functioned as a “whale” of sorts from within the prison walls. Alvarez talks to someone who had a friend named Travis who was also serving time in Leavenworth and who happened to be an expert gin rummy player. This fellow would stake Travis to play against Chagra, also staked from without.

“‘While everyone was reminiscing about the good old days when Jimmy was in town, I was actually playing him,’” the man explains to Alvarez. Travis won a lot initially, and payments from Chagra’s connections arrived without fail. The story ends abruptly, however, when Travis dies of a heart attack, an ending that perhaps seems more sinister than Alvarez makes it out to be thanks to the dangerous Chagra’s involvement.

Alvarez sums up the prison game as exemplifying “the imaginative coup of scoring in impossible circumstances.” Kind of punctuates the larger-than-life, mythical status Chagra possessed amid this already unreal-seeming world Alvarez was visiting.

Much like Moby Dick, Chagra was a complicated symbol -- an “inexplicable natural phenomenon” (as Alvarez characterizes Jack Binion’s references to him) -- perhaps indicating something significant about poker and gambling and how those pursuits provide a context for human ambition. As well as other, less estimable traits.

Rereading The Biggest Game in Town: Losing (3 of 6)

Returning to chapter 3 of The Biggest Game in Town by Al Alvarez, I wanted to say a few words about something Bobby Baldwin tells the author regarding what it takes to survive amid the high-stakes games frequented by him and some of the others to whom the author speaks.

Baldwin won the WSOP Main Event in 1978 at the young age of 28, at the time the youngest-ever to win the big one. That record would be broken in 1980 when the then 26-year-old Stuey “The Kid” Ungar won his first title. (Phil Hellmuth in 1989 would break Ungar’s record, to be broken again later by Peter Eastgate in 2008 and Joe Cada in 2009.)

By 1981 Baldwin had won all four of his WSOP bracelets as well as a great deal of respect from his fellow players. He would soon become a consultant for the Golden Nugget, then later would hold executive positions at the Mirage, the Bellagio, and eventually the City Center project. That small room in the center of the Bellagio poker room that has been home to many high-stakes games during the last decade -- “Bobby's Room” -- is named for Baldwin.

That path Baldwin took from the world of high-stakes gambling and poker and into business probably suggests something of his personality and/or acumen. He continues to play poker and participate in the WSOP from time to time. I’ve seen him in a few events I’ve covered over recent years, such as the 2009 WSOP ME during which that photo was taken by FlipChip. But while he still can be found at the tables, over the years Baldwin has obviously found himself a more secure (or fitting) place behind the scenes in Vegas.

Back in 1981, though, when Alvarez spoke with him, Baldwin was still one of that core group of top poker pros whose brains the author was looking to pick in order to understand the “different ordering of reality” they seem to acknowledge (discussed last post).

Baldwin explains to Alvarez that in order to survive in the high-stakes games, it is necessary to possess “that intangible quality we call heart.” Confirming something David Mamet writes in “The Things Poker Teaches” (also from the early 1980s), Baldwin describes poker as a “character builder,” insisting that especially in the big games, “the mark of a top player is not how much he wins when he is winning but how he handles his losses.”

“You have to be able to live with adversity,” he adds, implying that adversity should be expected in the context of these games. Indeed, the act of taking a seat at the table means one is willingly inviting adversity into one’s life -- something every player should understand fully before sitting down.

Again, we’ve heard a lot of this before about how the best players are best at handling losing and accepting losing as a necessary part of the game. However, there was one statement by Baldwin that kind of stood out for me when rereading this passage again, something that struck me as perhaps further underscoring the profound difference between the top performers and the rest of us.

“I’ve lost several hundred thousand in one evening,” confesses Baldwin. “But I didn’t go up to my room and shoot myself; instead, I went to bed and slept like a baby.” He goes on to make the joke about other players also losing and sleeping like babies -- that is, “they sleep an hour and cry an hour, sleep an hour and cry an hour.” But Baldwin is saying he sleeps well. No crying. No worries.

“I myself find it easier to sleep when I lose than when I win,” he says. “That may sound odd, but it’s true. I think the reason is that when I have an extremely bad night I go to bed and escape from it in sleep. But when I’ve won I’m all pumped up and excited; I can’t unwind as quickly as I can when I’m down and semidepressed.”

A curious statement, I think, although I’ll admit I probably find it curious because I have so much difficulty identifying with it. I’m tempted to say that the statement indicates something significantly wrong -- that it somehow seems unhealthy to be able to “escape” so easily from being “down and semidepressed” into tranquil, untroubled sleep, as if doing so represents a failure to accept the “reality” of losing.

But then I remember the “different ordering of reality” acknowledged and experienced by Baldwin and his colleagues, thus making me less ready to deliver such a judgment.

While I imagine not a single reader of this blog will ever have experienced swings as large as Baldwin is describing, we’ve all won or lost amounts which are relatively significant to us, I’m guessing. And we’ve all been affected emotionally by those wins and losses.

What has been your experience? Do you sleep better after a big win or after a big loss?

Rereading The Biggest Game in Town: Poker’s Challenge to “Reality” (2 of 6)

“Reality,” as Vladimir Nabokov once advised, is a word that should always appear inside quotation marks. The recommendation concerns the subjective nature of our experience and how that often causes each of us to consider “reality” differently. Putting the word inside quotes underscores that idea, reminding us both that what I see as “reality” might not jibe with what you do.

I’ve written about Nabokov’s suggestion before, actually, in a post addressing how poker, like those quotation marks, also often reminds us that our ideas about what is “real” can be so wildly different. In fact, in that very post I also make passing reference to chapter 3 of Al Alvarez’s The Biggest Game in Town, the chapter on which I’m going to be focusing for the next several posts.

The first half of the chapter finds Alvarez talking to a few different players about how playing for high stakes affects not just how they think about money, but “reality” itself. Among those to whom he speaks about the subject is a fellow named A.J. Myers, a successful player who won a couple of WSOP bracelets in the early 1980s, including one in the $5,000 stud event in 1981, the year Alvarez visited the WSOP.

“‘The sums involved are beyond reason,’” Myers tells Alvarez, noting how even though he participates in those high-stakes games, he doesn’t quite share “the professional gamblers’ indifference to money” demonstrated by guys like Chip Reese, Doyle Brunson, Jack Straus, and others Alvarez talks to in the chapter.

“‘They look at me and there’s absolutely no understanding between us,’” explains Myers, highlighting the “different ordering of reality” (as Alvarez puts it) the high rollers experience when compared to most of the rest of us.

Myers thoughtfully reflects on the difficulties he sometimes had dealing with this constant challenge to his own sense of value and meaning, confessing that at one point he found it necessary to stop playing craps and other gambling games when doing so become too much to bear. “His dream life in Vegas was endangering his real life home,” says Alvarez as a way of summing up Myers’s struggle.

From there Alvarez talks to Reese and learns how he, too, experiences money -- and everything else -- quite differently than do most of us. Among his observations, Reese makes that point we’ve heard many times with regard to poker about how in order to play well one needs to be able to stop thinking about the money in “real” terms -- or at the very least to divorce money’s relationship to the “real” world while at the table.

Reese’s experience playing for such big sums, Alvarez suggests, has contributed to a “fractured sense of reality,” a judgment Reese himself admits is not altogether inaccurate. “‘Big-limit poker is a separate world,’” he says, “‘and makes it hard to relate to other aspects of what’s going on.’”

Alvarez adds some funny examples of Reese failing to appreciate “real” world issues associated with the cost of living. For example, for several months Reese paid a $2,000 water bill. Apparently a pipe leading to his house was broken and was leaking, thereby causing the exorbitantly-high cost. However, Reese unthinkingly paid the bill each month, never realizing it was many times what it should have been until the water company told him of the problem.

The implication is that since Reese and others have to forget about the “real” world -- most particularly with regard to money and what it can buy -- in order to play successfully, such prolonged periods of denying “reality” have an affect once they leave the table and rejoin the so-called “real” world.

These points about money (and chips representing money) being an “instrument” or “tool” or the “very language of the game” are all pretty familiar, probably, even if you haven’t read The Biggest Game in Town. Indeed, these are the passages from the book that are probably the most-often quoted, including by me here on Hard-Boiled Poker. (See, for example, this post from long ago about what Reese is talking about here titled “Money Is Nothing, Money Is Everything.”)

Upon rereading the chapter this time, though, another, separate issue concerning “reality” stood out for me, namely, how poker itself is a game that is all about people competing with one another over what is “real” and what is not. We battle for chips and money when we play, but we are also constantly challenging each other’s ideas of “reality,” too, via bluffs and other machinations that are purposely intended to induce doubt and uncertainty.

It was a statement by Brunson -- essentially a description of how players will eventually break down and go on tilt -- that caused me to think about this particular challenge to “reality” poker sometimes presents. Playing for long periods is like being in a “‘pressure cooker,’” explains Texas Dolly. “‘If you are not careful, you reach a boiling point and explode.’”

And that’s when “reality” can become especially tricky to pin down.

“‘Then you just throw your money away,’” he continues, adding how one’s opponents aren’t going to help you out of your duress. In fact, they’ll do all they can to worsen it. “‘They keep hammering and hammering at you, until you lose touch with reality about everything. That’s when people go off and lose large sums.’”

Rereading that again, it struck me that this effort to cause one’s opponents to “lose touch with reality” really is a significant part of the game. Sure, the poor fellow tilting off his bankroll is kind of an extreme example, but you could say such challenges to our perceptions of “reality” happen on a smaller scale many times when we play, even in a single hand.

Kind of funny to think that we willingly engage in such an activity -- that we actually consciously invite such challenges to our sense of what is “real.”

And that we like it. A lot.

Rereading The Biggest Game in Town: Prelude (1 of 6)

About a month ago I wrote a post titled “The Test of Time” in which I talked a bit about blogs and writing and this desire I have to write something “meaningful and lasting about poker.” As we all know, poker can inspire in so many different ways, and over the years the game has encouraged a number of gifted writers to dedicate time and effort to producing some genuinely enduring works, having been moved to do so by their experiences with poker as well as by its history and culture.

One of the great benefits of teaching this “Poker in American Film and Culture” class this spring has been getting to assign some of these great writers’ works and reread them along with my students. It is fun and informative to hear their responses to the stories and ideas we’re reading together. It is also interesting to reread these works with an eye toward leading discussions about them, which necessarily requires that I read much more attentively and critically than I might have previously.

We’ve reached the midpoint of the semester and are now in the middle of The Biggest Game in Town by Al Alvarez (first published in 1983). I’m having the students read the entire book, which for us is serving as a kind of bridge between the historical material on which we’ve mostly been concentrating thus far and the fictional stories, novel, and films we’re about to encounter.

Alvarez is a literary critic and poet. Thus it isn’t surprising that his book -- a nonfictional, journalistic account of the 1981 WSOP -- is also quite “literary” in many ways, with a great deal of description, the exploration of various symbols and themes, characterization and dramatic plotting, and other such elements. Sure it’s history, but it often reads like an episodic novel, too, and therefore fits neatly into this little space I’ve carved out for it in the course.

The Biggest Game in Town is also about a lot more than just the 1981 WSOP. A slim volume of 55,000 words or so, the book includes many, many insights about poker, gambling, human nature, Las Vegas, American culture, and more, delivered both by Alvarez -- the visiting Englishman -- and by the dozens of players and others he interviewed for the book.

I’d read the book at least twice before, and had gone back to look at several sections again for various reasons, including when alluding to The Biggest Game in Town for posts I’ve written here and for other articles I’ve written elsewhere. However, rereading with my class has further proven to me how deserving it is to be accorded such a high place in most folks’ “best poker writing” lists.

Having been inspired somewhat during this most recent trip back through Alvarez’s narrative, I had an idea that I would devote a short series of posts to the book here both to respond to some of the stories and insights Alvarez is sharing and perhaps also to encourage others who haven’t read The Biggest Game in Town to pick it up.

In fact, in these posts I’m actually going to focus most of my attention on a single chapter (Chapter 3). At just over 20 pages, it is one of the longer chapters in the book, containing numerous anecdotes and brief interviews as it pursues a number of different themes already suggested in the first two chapters. Over the next week, I’m going to pull out five different topics from this chapter, do a little close reading of what is written, and then offer my own responses to issues raised.

Those five topics are as follows: (1) the way poker, especially when played for high stakes, challenges traditional ideas of “reality”; (2) living with adversity, most particularly dealing with losing; (3) the Jimmy Chagra story; (4) Mickey Appelman on the “romance” of poker and gambling; and (5) how in America gambling can be viewed as a form of patriotism.

This little excursion will necessarily carry us away from the news of the day over the next little while. But I trust you’ll be able to find plenty of information elsewhere on things like the NBC National Heads-Up Poker Championship happening this weekend, the latest developments and revelations in the UB insider cheating scandal, the conclusion of the WPT L.A. Poker Classic and the start of the don’t-call-it-NAPT-anymore event at the Bike, and/or whatever Charlie Sheen tweets next.

Most of that stuff will hold our attention for a little while before evaporating soon enough, I’m going to guess. Meanwhile, starting tomorrow, I’m going to see if I can successfully address (with the help of Alvarez) a few relatively more “timeless” topics inspired by poker.

The Not-So-Super System

In The Biggest Game in Town, Al Alvarez often refers to the high rollers he encounters there in Vegas in 1981 as living outside “the system.” The desire to get to that place where the various worries and concerns that plague the rest of us don’t exist is presented as a primary motivator for many of the players Alvarez sketches for us.

For example, Alvarez speaks to Jack Straus, who’d go on to win the World Series of Poker Main Event in 1982. Straus talks about his father who managed a packing plant, and spells out to Alvarez how life was presented to his father. Back in the 30s when his father began his career, Straus explains, “‘you were told you should work until you were sixty-five, then retire on two hundred a month.’” Unfortunately for Straus’s dad, he died at age 58 and thus never got the chance to enjoy the (modest) fruits of his labor.

Alvarez adds “Straus took that lesson to heart and ordered his life according to two principles: to stay outside the system and to use his talents to enjoy life while he could.”

To live outside of “system” or the “straight world” is an ideal Alvarez connects with the American “romance of personal liberty.” Ever since Jefferson et al. put down in words that bit about “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” the yearning to declare anew one’s independence has been an essential part of the American mindset.

Such is further evidenced by the more successful players Alvarez encounters, those who “pride themselves on the fact that they survive spectacularly well outside the system: no bosses or government bureaucrats on their backs telling them what they should do and how they should do it, no routine that is not of their own choosing, no success that is not the result of their own unaided talents. Also no failure.”

The latter point refers to that “different ordering of reality” Alvarez attributes to the high roller. As long as one remains outside of the “system,” one cannot fail. One could call it a different kind of “system,” I suppose, and indeed there are those in the book -- like Jack Binion -- who characterize high-stakes gambling with “straight world” analogies, saying it’s like “a high-risk, high-return investment that is also fun to do.” But that’s just a way to make it make sense to those of us still in the “system,” I think.

Writing here following this incredible stretch of days for the American economy (and the world markets, generally speaking), it is hard not to imagine any of us being able to think we’re fully “outside the system.” The Dow Jones’ 2,000-point tumble over the last week (a precipitous drop of 20%) affects us all. Like most of you, I’m fairly clueless about the byzantine machinations of how exactly the relative health of the stock market and banking system affects the various accounts in which my moneys reside.

But I know I’m affected. I’m in the “system.”

And with the signing into law last week of the ominously-titled Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 -- giving the Treasury Dept. the ability to purchase troubled assets from financial institutions -- it appears as though whatever happens next we’re all destined to become even further ensnared in the “system.” A place where not only is it impossible to pretend there is “no failure,” but where failure seems to be an accepted premise.

Best of luck to us all.

Worlds Within Worlds

Finally got over to the barbershop to get that haircut. Way, way overdue, I was.

The woman who regularly handles the task is a friendly, sociable person with whom I usually engage in animated conversation about the previous few months’ highlights. Funny how people like that -- our lives’ “supporting cast” whom we only see intermittently -- can sometimes offer us a different perspective on our own fleeting existence.

Having been caught up in the day-to-day, you’ve missed the changes that occur over the course of a couple of months (or more). Hell, you didn’t even realize how shaggy yr hair had gotten until just a day or two before. Try to chronicle those last couple of months to someone who hasn’t been there, and you’ll sometimes see differences you hadn’t even realized.

During these little reunions, she and I will often get around to talking about poker at some point. I’ve written before about how I don’t generally introduce the subject in certain circles. But somewhere along the way she found out about my interest in the game. I think I told her about it last summer when I had been putting in a lot of late nights doing some back-end work during PokerNews’ coverage of the WSOP. Had a good stretch there where my life had been basically turned upside down (up all night, sleep all day), and so in what was probably a semi-somnambulant state I had explained it all to her as she clipped away in the mirror.

This time I told her about the plan for me to head out to Vegas next month to help cover the Series. Although not a poker player or gambler herself, she asked smart questions about the WSOP, the professional circuit, as well as the whole “skill-vs.-luck” debate.

“You’re telling me there are people who do nothing but go around playing poker tournaments over and over again?” she asked. “Can they really make a living?”

“Some do,” I explained. I defended poker as a form of gambling that does, in fact, reward skill over time, and she demonstrated her understanding of the concept with reference to the lottery, the only form of gambling our state technically allows. Like us, she doesn’t see why poker shouldn’t be legal if the lottery is.

Then she asked what I thought was a particularly revealing question for those of us who sometimes find ourselves overly immersed in the poker world.

“So are any of these poker players really famous? Like would I have heard of any of them . . . ?”

The usual names popped into my head, but I realized immediately there was no way she would recognize any of them. Sure, we all spotted Negreanu, Hellmuth, and Nguyen in that Pepsi commercial, but would anyone who doesn’t follow poker know their names? Indeed, where in the “mainstream” do we really find these poker celebrities upon whom those of us reading the forums, blogs, magazines, and books focus so intently? Where could she have encountered Doyle Brunson? Chris Ferguson . . . ?

I didn’t even try. “Yeah, some are pretty famous,” I answered half-heartedly. “In the poker world, anyway.”

Amid all the speculation about the relative status of poker’s popularity (has it peaked? is the “boom” over? is it as popular as ever?), I think many of us tend to forget just how small the “poker world” really is. Relatively speaking, anyway.

The phenomenon is partly a function of the game itself, I’d venture. I’ve mentioned before here that anecdote in Al Alvarez’s The Biggest Game in Town in which he demonstrates how severely poker players tend to isolate themselves from the outside world. Alvarez tells the story of a man who had been playing in the Golden Nugget the night Jimmy Carter was elected president. It was after midnight, and the fellow decided to take a break from the game and run up to his room to see who had won the election.

Alvarez explains: “When he returned, he announced to the table at large, ‘We’ve got a new president -- Jimmy Carter.’ The dealer stared at him coldly, as if he had broken some obscure house rule, and the man sitting next to him said, ‘The bet is three dollars.’ There was no other comment.”

Kind of the same deal in reverse, really. While poker players (sometimes) cannot seem to fathom there’s a world where poker is not front and center, there’s also that non-poker part of the world that can’t fathom poker could possibly matter that much at all.

I think I’ll try to get back over there to the barbershop for one last trim before I head Vegas-ward. Might prevent me from becoming too shaggy by mid-July. Might also help to get that one last dose of perspective before leaving the non-poker world altogether for seven-plus weeks.