Positively Pauly

When I read Dr. Pauly’s post on Monday announcing he was stepping away from Tao of Poker -- not necessarily for good, mind you, but likely for a good while -- I knew I’d want to say something here about it. Thought at first I’d take a day or two to think on it. Then I looked at the calendar and figured I’d wait until Friday. Don’t ask me why, but 4/20 just seemed like the right day for such a post.

The good doctor had been quiet over at Tao for the last three-and-a-half months or so, taking a much deserved break from the poker blogging grind. His last post of 2011 began with an admission he was “burned out beyond belief,” something we regular readers kept in mind as his early 2012 hiatus stretched all of the way into the spring.

In Monday’s post, Pauly writes “A Letter to Ndugu” in which he explains his recent silence while also ending with a suggestion that “this will probably be my last letter.” Textual evidence suggests Ndugu to be the overseer of a foster program in Tanzania which Pauly had supported with monetary donations in the past. However, knowing Pauly’s literary leanings, we know better than to take such statements literally.

“Ndugu” means “brother” or “comrade” or “friend.” Pauly goes on to say it has been 111 days since his last letter -- i.e., the span since his last new post on Tao. Doesn’t take a shamus to figure out who Pauly is really addressing. Us.

The themes emerging from what follows include self-loathing (“deep down we all know what we’re doing is complete bullshit anyway”), a lack of inspiration (“my schtick is nothing more than a derivative of something I already said much better years before”), and uncertainty about the worth of “promoting the genius of degenerate gambling” or “preaching salvation via online poker” or having “distracted the masses from the maelstrom of evil that has engulfed the world by churning out misogynist rhetoric about the glamorous rockstar lifestyle of a professional poker player.”

Pauly also discusses sin, and humans’ predilection toward such. In particular, greed. “Poker is a game of skill,” he writes, “but greed is a deadly drug.” From there, the hard-to-resist influences of capitalist thinking are explored, including the relentless nature of the quest to accumulate more, its lack of conclusion leading to thoughts of that other, inevitable conclusion -- death.

“What difference did I really make in this world? What have I contributed to this society?” Pauly asks Ndugu. He asks us. “Nothing,” he answers, not waiting for a reply. “I failed.”

Before signing off, though, Pauly admits to having enjoyed “the long strange trip,” noting that while it is hard -- maybe impossible -- to find meaning in what we do, that shouldn’t prevent us from enjoying ourselves while failing. He offers himself up as an object lesson to others not to be a “selfish tosser” like him but to “live a life of integrity” and “try to make a positive impact in this world.”

“Be good,” advises Pauly. “Do good. But most importantly... be yourself, Ndugu.”

If it is a goodbye, it is undoubtedly one in which Pauly has done precisely what he’s advising his reader. Been himself. Like most everything we’ve read on Tao of Poker since way back in early 2003, it’s unique. It’s inimitable. It’s Pauly.

I feel almost self-conscious using a word like “inimitable” here. After all, reading Tao of Poker essentially inspired me to start my own poker blog. As I’m sure it did others. To see if writing about poker might be as fun and interesting and maybe even enlightening as playing it. Or more so.

I think most of us reading “A Letter to Ndugu” also know better than to diminish Pauly’s poker writings as “bullshit” or “schtick” or a mere distraction from more important things. Good, solid, intelligent, reflective writing and storytelling about any aspect of human experience -- even the silly card games we play with each other -- is of value. And Dr. Pauly has generously supported us all with a plentiful supply.

I share many of the doubts Pauly expresses in his letter. Some of the cynicism, too. But I know there’s something worthwhile happening here. Something that matters.

I mentioned earlier this week how I’d found myself going back through Vladimir Nabokov’s books. I got distracted and wrote about something else, but the passage I was really searching for came from the opening to his 1966 memoir Speak, Memory, the first sentence of which goes “The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.”

From there Nabokov lyrically describes how we all fear death, but we often fail to consider with equal terror the time before our birth when the world existed without us. “Nature expects a full-grown man to accept two black voids, fore and aft, as stolidly as he accepts the extraordinary visions in between” he writes. “Imagination, the supreme delight of the immortal and the immature, should be limited. In order to enjoy life, we should not enjoy it too much.”

That is to say, it’s easy to think this business in between the beginning and the end -- this “brief crack of light” -- is not to be taken too seriously. But we do. We must. As does Nabokov. “I rebel against this state of affairs,” he says.

Sure, we’re all trapped in this “prison of time” (as Nabokov calls it). But we do what we can to endure. We enjoy ourselves and each other. We can’t help but marvel at all of these “extraordinary visions in between” the two voids, and some of us are inspired from time to time to share what we’ve seen.

This Pauly has done. With integrity, and in a way that has made a positive impact. He’s done good.

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.

Tolstoy's Ivan Ilyich and the Meaning of Card Playing

I’ve written here before about a couple of my favorite Russian writers, Fyodor Dostoevsky and Vladimir Nabokov. Nabokov probably wouldn’t care all that much for me coupling the two of them together in a sentence like that. Of Dostoevsky, Nabokov said he was “not a great writer, but rather a mediocre one -- with flashes of excellent humor, but, alas, with wastelands of literary platitudes in between.” He especially disliked Dostoevsky’s penchant for pathos, and I can’t say I completely disagree with him there. Of course, those of us with an interest in existentialism nevertheless tend to appreciate the various little (and large) puzzles Dostoevsky presents. (We poker players tend to like him, too, if only for The Gambler.)

Nabokov preferred Leo Tolstoy, whom he ranked as the greatest of all Russian novelists. I like Tolstoy, though I have to admit I’m probably more attracted to the manic unpredictability of some of Dostoevsky’s characters and plots. I also tend not to go for the more obvious sorts of “messages” and “morals” in some of Tolstoy’s works (esp. the later stuff), but can’t deny how compelling his stories and novels can be.

The other day I happened to be reading back through Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich (one of his later works). Not the happiest of tales, that. There Tolstoy provides a fairly comprehensive criticism of modern materialism and self-interest, having Ivan pay a (literally) painful price for having wasted his life pursuing some false idea of what he thought he was supposed to be. Actually more than a little pathos here, too.

I bring it up because I’d forgotten about a few references to card playing that come up early in the story. The opening chapter shows Ivan’s colleagues discussing his death and fretting over having to miss that night’s card game in order to attend the ceremony. Then we go back to read about Ivan’s life, illness, and eventual death, and we discover he, too, was a card player.

Soon after Ivan gets his first job as an Examining Magistrate, we are told “he began to play vint, which he found added not a little to the pleasure of life, for he had a capacity for cards, played good-humouredly, and calculated rapidly and astutely, so that he usually won.”

Vint, by the way, is a variant of bridge, although there’s no “dummy” like in bridge. (Sometimes the translator refers to the game as bridge, actually.) Was big in Russia in the 19th century, and I suppose Tolstoy is presenting card playing as yet another meaningless time-waster illustrating how empty the lives of modern men really are.

Still, playing cards does have meaning for Ivan. After he becomes ill, and then eventually comes to realize his illness is quite serious, cards become a way for Ivan to escape having to confront the idea of his own mortality. We learn that “as soon as he had any unpleasantness with his wife, any lack of success in his official work, or held bad cards at bridge, he was at once acutely sensible of his disease.”

A key moment occurs later on when we find out even playing cards doesn’t have the meaning it once did for Ivan. One evening he and some friends “sat down to cards. They dealt, bending the new cards to soften them, and he sorted the diamonds in his hand and found he had seven. His partner said ‘No trumps’ and supported him with two diamonds. What more could be wished for? It ought to be jolly and lively. They would make a grand slam.”

His joy is short-lived, however, as “suddenly Ivan was conscious of that gnawing pain, that taste in his mouth, and it seemed ridiculous that in such circumstances he should be pleased to make a grand slam.” The idea of doing well at a card game no longer means very much to Ivan -- one of several realizations he is going to have before the end of the short novel that help add up to a deathbed realization that his whole life has been “a terrible and huge deception.” He ends up misplaying his hand, and notices that his partner is upset. But he also realizes how unmoved he is by his partner’s frustration. “And it was dreadful to realize why he did not care.”

I know Tolstoy is saying something here about the relative worthlessness of card playing, but clearly the value of the activity is connected to the place it holds in a person’s life. For Ivan, it is an escape from what really matters -- i.e., his soul-crushing job, his loveless marriage, his illness. But for a lot of us, playing cards isn’t always an escape from life or the “real world” -- it is life, reality, a source of meaning and significance.

Probably wouldn’t be so good if it were the sole source of such meaning. But it ain’t so hot, either, if card playing only exists as an activity that allows us to evade the question of what our lives mean.

(For more on the topic, check out this interesting post by an online player who says he has decided to quit poker precisely because he no longer finds the game "meaningful" -- just saw this one thanks to a link from Foucault.)

Poker “Reality”

About a year after publishing Lolita in 1955, Vladimir Nabokov wrote a short afterword “On a Book Entitled Lolita” in which he offers a few remarks regarding the furor caused by his novel. While that piece is primarily concerned with responding to some of those reactions to the novel’s controversial subject matter, Nabokov also takes the opportunity there to share some details about the circumstances under which Lolita was composed.

Nabokov had emigrated to America in 1940 and shortly thereafter began writing in English. By that time he’d already written nine terrific novels in his native Russian. My favorite of those is probably Despair, although I have a soft spot for The Defense (about a mentally-troubled chess player). (Most rank his last Russian novel, The Gift, as the best of his Russian works.)

Lolita was Nabokov’s third novel in English -- stunning, really, to think such a verbal tour de force could be written by someone composing in a language other than his native tongue. It is also his first novel to be set in the United States, and in that afterword Nabokov talks about how he had to play catch-up to research the novel sufficiently. “It had taken me some forty years to invent Russia and Western Europe,” he says (referring to his earlier novels), “and now I was faced with the task of inventing America.”

Then comes one of my favorite quotes in all of Nabokov. Speaking of what it took to gather enough information to write Lolita, Nabokov admits that “obtaining of such local ingredients as would allow me to inject a modicum of average ‘reality’ (one of the few words which mean nothing without quotes) into the brew of individual fancy, proved at fifty a much more difficult process than it had been in the Europe of my youth when receptiveness and retention were at their automatic best.”

The contrast between youth and middle age is in itself a good point (and one I’m paying more attention to now than I did when I first read it as a naïve, fresh-faced frosh). But what I like most here is that observation about the word “reality” requiring quotation marks around it. Nabokov tucks that point inside parentheses as if it weren’t all that important, but conceptually-speaking you can’t get much heavier than that.

People sometimes speak of poker as a game especially grounded in “reality.” The observation usually has something to do with the definitive way the cards “speak” (so to speak). That is, no matter how we might later characterize a hand, a session, a career, the “reality” of the cards persists through whatever elaborations, embellishments, or enhancements we might try to give to them. (Sorry for the alliteration -- thinking about Nabokov has temporarily infected my prose, I think.)

This so-called “realistic” nature of poker is a commonly-struck theme in Al Alvarez’s The Biggest Game in Town. According to Alvarez, poker is “one of the most realistic of all disciplines.”

Illustrating the point, Alvarez tells the story of a losing player, referred to only as Joel, whose primary flaw is his inability to assess “realistically” what happens when he’s at the tables. Joel “was cursed with a childish imagination and the inability to distinguish its workings from reality.” As a result, Joel “invariably reported large poker losses as small wins, small wins as fortunes,” thereby dooming himself to be one of the game’s “providers.” He even goes so far as to make up stories about the mob setting him up as a way of explaining his repeated misfortunes. Eventually he hightails it out of Vegas, “trailing bad debts” behind him.

After the Joel story, Alvarez quotes Mickey Appelman explaining how “There can be no self-deception for a poker player” if he or she wants to win. “You have to be a realist to be successful,” says Appelman. By which it is understood that one simply must accept the “reality” of whatever the cards happen to say when one sits at the table.

But so many of us don’t. Most of us. Maybe all of us.

Dr. Alan Schoonmaker discusses this phenomenon at length in Your Worst Poker Enemy. “The gambling industry is based on a denial of reality,” says Schoonmaker. “Without it the entire industry would collapse immediately.” As the example of Joel suggests, players with less skill tend to have a less “realistic” idea of their own abilities. “The worse people play,” writes Schoonmaker, “the more likely they are to deny reality about themselves.” He quotes an article from the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in which a study confirms “the less skilled people are, the less aware they are of their own limitations.”

Those less-skilled players also tend to misunderstand their opponents’ abilities and/or limitations, thus denying the “reality” of the game situation when they sit down to play. Or -- another way of saying the same thing -- they create a “reality” for themselves that is different from the one created by the better players.

But think about it. No matter how good poker players are, each of those sitting at the table has his or her own idea what the “reality” of the game is. Such is one of the game’s paradoxes. Poker might well be “one of the most realistic of all disciplines,” yet poker also relentlessly challenges our ideas of “reality” at every turn (or flop or river).

See how those scare quotes come in handy?