The Matthau Line About Poker and America

There’s a much shared quote about poker attributed to the comic actor Walter Matthau that you’ve probably come across somewhere before.

Matthau’s career spanned nearly the entire second half of the 20th century. He appeared in 80 or so films along with dozens of stage and television credits. Among all those roles are relatively serious turns in a couple of my faves, Dr. Strangelove and The Taking of Pelham One Two Three. He also starred in one of my top ten films of all time, The Bad News Bears.

Probably his most famous role was as the slovenly sportswriter Oscar Madison in Neil Simon’s The Odd Couple, both the play and the 1968 film (though not the subsequent TV series). That whole story is anchored by a weekly poker game, which is from where that image of him holding a hand up above comes.

Here’s the quote, which like I say you’ve probably heard:

“Poker exemplifies the worst aspects of capitalism that have made our country so great.”

I was thinking about that line a little today, one that often gets brought up without too much commentary as a quick reference to the idea that poker uncannily reflects American culture and society -- both the good and the bad. In particular the observation highlights how both poker and our economic system necessarily make us rely on each other while also (paradoxically) forcing us to compete with one another.

Matthau’s line gets quoted everywhere. For example, James McManus appropriately includes it in his history of poker, Cowboys Full, as meaningful support to his point “that poker and the United States grew up together” and that “the game is often said to epitomize American values” like independence, liberty, equality, freedom, work, entrepreneurial love of risk, and, of course, the central importance of money.

In his collection of essays Risky Business: People, Pastimes, Poker and Books, Al Alvarez offers to explain what Matthau means.

“Poker, he meant, is social Darwinism in its purest, most brutal form,” writes Alvarez regarding the line. “The weak go under and the fittest survive through calculation, insight, self-control, deception, plus an unwavering determination never to give a sucker an even break,” he concludes, evoking the 1941 comedy by W.C. Fields (another actor often captured on the silver screen holding a poker hand).

Anthony Holden likewise quotes it in his sequel Bigger Deal as a kind of punctuation mark to a lament about the post-“boom” commercialization of poker.

There Holden summarizes the scene at the Rio All-Suite Hotel and Casino back in 2005, where, suddenly, a whopping 5,619 were playing in the Main Event when just 839 did two years before. Referring to the Gaming Lifestyle Expo with all of its poker-related products, Holden decides “the whole jamboree strikes me as acutely depressing: visual confirmation that the maverick, bohemian, once backroom game I have loved for so long has now turned into just another branch, logos and all, of corporate American capitalism.”

Then comes Matthau’s line, in this case positioned as a kind of judgment on poker having become something other than the game Holden had written about much more enthusiastically in his earlier Big Deal.

These are mostly serious reflections on the quote, though in each case the author is obviously aware of the humor it injects into the discussion. It’s very W.C. Fields-like, in fact, the way the quote kind of sneaks up on you -- beginning like some sort of sober truism and ending with an absurdist rim-shot (e.g., “The world is getting to be such a dangerous place, a man is lucky to get out of it alive.”).

The line acknowledges there’s something bad about the way both poker and capitalism pit us against one another. But it also celebrates such a flawed system (or set of rules) as having somehow, maybe even despite itself, produced something “great.”

The line also evokes both the love-hate relationship I think some (perhaps most?) players have with poker and the similarly mixed feelings a decent percentage of Americans often have about their country.

After all, whether we’re talking about poker or America, we find ourselves often having to acknowledge both the good and the bad. If we’re offering praise, we acknowledge shortfalls (even if we don’t articulate them). Similarly, if we’re being critical, we know there are positives, too (whether or not we include them in our commentary).

Image: The Odd Couple (1968), Amazon.

W.C. Fields Forever

Early in my “Poker in American Film and Culture” course I show the students what I believe must be the oldest poker movie ever made, A Cure for Pokeritis (1912). I’ve written here about that short silent film starring John Bunny more than once -- click here for the most involved discussion of it (including clips of the entire film).

Soon after showing Pokeritis I usually share with them a clip from Tillie and Gus, a 1933 film starring W.C. Fields. Fields is one of my all-time favorites from the early era of cinema. He plays poker in several of his films, and even in ones where he doesn’t, many have titles that sound like they were somehow derived from poker (Six of a Kind, You Can’t Cheat an Honest Man, Never Give a Sucker an Even Break).

Fields actually wasn’t that big of a poker player himself, I believe, but the game nonetheless became intertwined in some respects with the trickster persona that tied together many of his crazily-named characters like Augustus Winterbottom in Tille and Gus.

I once wrote a lengthy “Poker & Pop Culture” piece for PokerNews about W.C. Fields in which I summarized some of the poker-playing scenes in his films, including Tillie and Gus. Click and read for a more thorough discussion.

Unfortunately most W.C. Fields stuff has been scrubbed away from YouTube, or I’d include the clip from Tillie and Gus here for you to enjoy. Instead I’ll just share a few screen shots with some dialogue from the scene in which some passengers on a train invite Augustus Winterbottom to join their poker game.

“Pardon me, folks. We have a poker game going. Would you care to play?” asks a man whom we come to learn is named Mr. White.

“Poker?” answers Winterbottom. “Is that the game where one receives five cards and if there’s two alike that’s pretty good, but if there’s three alike that’s much better?”

“Oh, you’ll learn the game in no time,” assures White, not realizing he’s the one about to be hustled.

Winterbottom joins three others and they cut for the deal. They explain to him that the ace is high. “You must forgive the ignorance of a novice,” he says. The others successively draw a queen, a ten, and a king. Then Winterbottom makes his cut. “Ace,” he says, showing his card so that we can see it but his opponents cannot.

When the others note they weren’t able to see his ace, he apologizes, sorts through the deck to find an ace, and shows it around.

He begins to deal a hand of five-card draw while his ex-wife Tillie (played by Alison Skipworth) -- a fellow con artist -- positions herself behind White so she can see his cards as well as those of his neighbor.

“By the way, I saw those two sailors off the ship today,” she says casually after spotting two jacks in White’s hand.

“See anybody else?” asks Winterbottom, and she looks at the other player’s nine-high hand. “Not a soul,” she replies.

They chat about other games. “I prefer Pinochle,” says White. “Pinochle?” asks Winterbottom. “That’s the top of something, isn’t it? The pinochle of a hill, for instance?”

When Winterbottom looks at his hand, he sees he’s dealt himself four aces and a deuce. “Shucks,” he says at the sight of the deuce, rapping the table with his fist as though it disappoints him.

They draw. “What happened to the two sailors?” asks Winterbottom of Tillie. “Three more sailors joined them,” she says. “Three more sailors?” asks Winterbottom, eyebrows raised. “I mean two,” she corrects herself.

There are bets and raises, with all four players staying in to the showdown. White has four jacks, the player to his left four queens, and the third player four kings. Winterbottom then turns over his four aces.

It’s a fun, goofy scene, with Fields singing “Bringing in the Sheaves” as he leaves the befuddled players adding a satisfying touch of lunacy to the proceedings.

Tillie and Gus isn’t as consistently funny as some of Fields’s other features. My faves are his great quartet of later titles You Can’t Cheat an Honest Man, My Little Chickadee, The Bank Dick, and Never Give a Sucker an Even Break, which verge on the surreal sometimes with the all-out wackiness of their loosely-connected, howlingly-hilarious set pieces. But Tillie and Gus still has plenty of grins throughout its short running time.

Like I say, for more on Fields and poker, see that old PokerNews piece.

(Post title from a Firesign Theatre track from their first LP, Waiting for the Electrician or Someone Like Him.)

It’s a Gift

Still primarily sticking with limit hold’em. Have thoughts during the day -- when not playing poker -- about other games, tournaments, higher stakes, new challenges. But those thoughts all tend to evaporate when I log on to squeeze in the usually brief session I try to play each day.

Of course, being a recreational player makes it tough to pursue loftier goals. Or any goals, really, other than just finding something enjoyable and sticking with it. And maybe making a little cabbage, too.

The fact that I’m winning (modestly -- hovering under 2 big bets per 100 hands) also makes it less enticing to do anything differently. Will have to push just a little here over the next week to maintain my Silver Star over at PokerStars, which now only requires 1,200 base FPPs per month. I want to do that, as I have now gotten into the routine of taking the $50 whenever I reach 5,000 FPPs -- perhaps not the best investment of the points, but one that makes sense for someone like me who just about only plays cash games and isn’t looking to parlay a couple of freerolls into the Sunday Million.

Continue to encounter all varieties of players at $0.50/$1.00, including some spectacularly bad ones. Had a fairly typical example at my six-handed LHE table yesterday limping every single pot, then calling every street until the river where he’d fold unless he happened to make a pair. Was looking in PokerTracker after and saw how in over 100 hands he’d voluntarily put money in the pot 87.5% of the time, only raised preflop twice (pocket aces both times), won only 33.33% of his showdowns, etc. Fairly easy to spot these guys, against whom one simply has to wait for a hand, then value bet.

Meanwhile, I had a couple of other players at the same table who had bought in for $100 each. (Was writing about stack sizes in limit hold’em a couple of weeks ago.) One was up a bit, one was down. But I was watching both warily, operating according to the standard prejudice that their big stacks might suggest they were better than average players.

Now that I think about it, while a lot of times I just hop onto the first open table -- reckless, I know -- when given a choice I’ll pick the table with more small stacks, again thanks to this same prejudice. Didn’t do that yesterday, obviously.

In any event, the one guy who had bought in for $100 who was down about ten bucks or so was sitting on my immediate left. He seemed to be playing very few pots. As a result, I hadn’t really noticed what he’d been showing down, so I didn’t have much idea about him when I picked up in the big blind. It folded to the cutoff -- a loose-passive type -- who called, the button folded, and MrHundy completed in the small blind. I might have raised here, but I was playing this one passively myself, and so checked my option.

Flop came . MrHundy checked, I’m not interested at all and check, and the cutoff also checks. Turn is the , and again we all check. River the . How about that? Easy game. MrHundy checks, I bet, the cutoff thinks a bit and calls, and MrHundy also takes a moment before calling. I show my Broadway to win the small pot. The cutoff had -- middle pair and a busted flush draw.

What did MrHundy have? .

Will have to think of a name for this kind of hand -- sort of the opposite of a “So It Goes Hand,” really. A hand in which you make no mistakes, but also exert little or no effort, and surprisingly win thanks to someone else’s bungling. You know, the kind of hand where you realize when the pot is pushed your way that you Got It For Taking up space....

Oh, right. There’s already a name for that.