The Shape of the World

Kyrie Irving, the star guard for the Cleveland Cavaliers who hit the winning shot in Game 7 of last year’s NBA Finals, believes the earth is flat. No, really.

When I first heard the story a few days ago, I thought perhaps it was a prank of some sort being pulled by Irving, meant to illustrate how outrageously easy it is to manipulate social media, which in turn makes it trivially simple to make any sort of absurdity go “viral.” After all, if you had thought about it a week ago, the idea that Kyrie Irving believes the earth is flat probably would have seemed almost as unlikely as the earth actually being flat.

But, no. He wasn’t joking. Given that Irving spent part of a year at Duke University before going pro provides this UNC fan a ready opening, of course. But I’m more interested in a larger issue connected to this story.

Irving made his position known on an episode of a podcast hosted by two of his Cleveland teammates, Richard Jefferson and Channing Frye. Amid talk of conspiracy theories, Irving mentioned his view about the planet’s shape, defending it as not a conspiracy but a fact (in his estimation). “If you really think about it from a landscape of the way we travel,” Irving explained, “the way we move... can you really think of us rotating around the sun, and all planets align, rotating in specific dates...?”

There’s more, but it’s hardly worth transcribing. The gist of his position is to insist that “there’s a falseness in stories and things that people want you to believe and ultimately what they throw in front of us.” Or, to put it another way, “I think people should do their own research, man.”

Some, like NBA Commissioner Adam Silver, shared my initial, skeptical response to the story of Irving’s skepticism and tried to contextualize Irving’s comment in a way that made it seem less patently ignorant. “He was trying to be provocative and it was effective,” Silver said, reflecting on Irving’s own later comments about the furor he’d created.

“I think it was a larger comment on the sort of fake news debate that’s going on right now... and it led to a larger discussion,” added Silver, who didn’t omit appending the sanity-affirming disclaimer “I personally believe the world is round.”

The denial of objective truth is difficult to combat. It’s quite challenging to convince a superstitious poker player who refuses to accept that the cards dealt on one hand are wholly independent of the cards next on the next one that the “pattern” he perceives is in truth wholly subjective and not at all meaningful. You have to find some sort of common ground even to communicate with someone refusing to accept something as fundamentally obvious as the planet’s shape, rotation, and orbital path.

Existentialism encourages us to make our meaning, emphasizing subjective experience over the blind acceptance of received ideas about “reality” -- that is, not to receive “what they throw in front of us” without applying a little of our own rational analysis as a test. That doesn’t preclude, however, accepting certain (nominally) objective truths, even tentatively. Like, say, the laws of physics.

If Irving really understood the science, he’d understand how gravity works, which explains why when he launches a basketball skyward it comes back down toward the spherical planet’s center and doesn’t careen toward the center of his imagined “flat” earth, wherever that might be (one of dozens of easy-to-observe phenomena proving the earth’s roundness). Irving apparently hasn’t considered this or if he has he doesn’t find convincing the evidence he necessarily witnesses every waking moment of his life.

Silver -- who probably doesn’t care too much about one of the league’s stars espousing what might be called “fake science” -- grabs that “fake news” thread, trying to suggest that Irving was himself making some sort of point about the need to be skeptical amid what can certainly be a confusing climate of reporting and news-sharing.

But that kind of twists what Irving was saying. Rather, he was only referring to his incredulity that people would care so damn much about his position that the earth is flat.

“There are so many real things going on, actual, like, things that are going on that’s changing the shape, the way of our lives,” Irving told ESPN a couple of days after the initial blast. In other words, he doesn’t view the news of his belief as being “real” or “actual” (as in “significant”) compared to other, more important issues.

Irving even unwittingly puns on the word “shape,” saying (to paraphrase) that we should concern ourselves much more with the things certain people are currently doing to shape our world in a figurative sense than with the literal shape he imagines the world to be.

I agree with Irving on that point. In other words, I’m glad to know that our perspectives regarding the world in which we both live overlap at least in this way. I’m also more worried about the “things going on that’s changing the shape” of our world -- particularly about the people who are doing those “things” -- than about Irving’s flat-earth folly.

I’m additionally concerned, though, when the people shaping our world seem influenced by ideas about it that are easily discovered to be false.

Need examples? People can do their own research, man.

Image: “Fragile Planet,” Dave Ginsberg. CC BY 2.0.

The Turn Changed Nothing

At one point a couple of weeks ago I was helping cover a pot-limit Omaha event at the World Series of Poker with my friend and colleague Rich. A hand arose in which a player was all in before the flop and at risk, and someone commenting on the hand amused us greatly with his narration as the hand played out before us.

Not to get too caught up in specifics, the grins began with the commentator uttered the phrase “the turn changed nothing” when in fact the turn card had given the at-risk player a flush draw with one card to come. Rather than changing nothing, the turn had greatly improved his chances, giving him nine more outs to survive.

To make a short story even shorter, we laughed afterwards about the phrase being misused, then I began repurposing it in various ways.

“The turn changed nothing,” I’d say, then, adopting the character of a not-so-savvy player and/or observer, I’d add: “I’m still a moron.”

I suppose in just about every work environment there will develop a special language between workers used both to describe their assigned tasks and perhaps to comment on them, too, sometimes sarcastically. Thus did we start to employ the phrase “the turn changed nothing” as a kind of shorthand for anything worthy of criticism or that struck us as at all funny.

You know, a little emblem of absurdity, added to the catalogue. Every workplace has got ’em.

I realize what I’m describing might not make much sense out of context, and now that I’m back home and in an environment where I doubt I’ll ever encounter a spot where I might say “the turn changed nothing” I’m starting to think of the phrase a little differently.

In truth, in hold’em or Omaha the turn always changes something, except in those rare instances when a player is already drawing dead after the flop, in which case you could say nothing changes with the turn or the the river, at least as far as the outcome of the hand is concerned. I think that was part of the reason why the phrase seemed so funny to us, namely, because it so rarely applies.

Of course, even in those situations when the flop utterly decides who is going to win a hand, the turn card still brings a hand one step closer to its conclusion, even if only as a formality. When players are drawing dead on the flop, the dealer still deals a turn and a river as though running out a grounder even after being thrown out at first. Although the cards don’t affect the outcome, they are somehow needful nonetheless.

Last night I was talking to someone about my summer in Vegas who at one point began asking me if it had been a worthwhile, positive experience. At first I wanted to answer jokingly, to laugh at the idea of self-reflection and dismissively characterize the whole time as having “changed nothing.”

But in fact it was a positive experience, and entirely worthwhile. And besides, it’s never true that what we do changes nothing, even if it seems otherwise.

2013 WSOP, Postlude: Unfinished Business

I am home again after a thankfully uneventful voyage back across the continent yesterday. Got to sleep around 11 last night and didn’t wake until just a couple of hours ago.

I admit the first few minutes of consciousness this morning were filled with confused thoughts regarding my whereabouts and duties for the day. I wasn’t completely sure at first that I wasn’t still in my room in Vegas, and that I didn’t have another day’s worth of reporting ahead of me.

“Am I really done?” I asked myself. Couldn’t help it.

In 2008 I was first recruited to go out to Las Vegas to help cover the WSOP for PokerNews. I’d signed on in the spring, then a couple of weeks later the announcement came regarding the whole “November Nine” idea. I remember then being disappointed I wouldn’t be there to see the Main Event final table finish and a winner emerge, and as I wrote here at the time, I thought delaying the final table four months was mostly a lousy idea, even if I understood some of the potential benefits of doing so.

Like most, I’ve more or less come around to accepting the delayed final table now. Do anything six years running and it’s hard not for folks to get used to it. As I was saying last week about the Rio having become the WSOP’s new home, what was once novel became custom, and now what was custom has edged over into a kind of tradition.

Thus for those of us who are in Las Vegas every July for the Main Event’s play down to nine, we’ve come to accept the moment when the 10th-place finisher gets eliminated as a kind of climax of the summer. For reporters, that’s the moment when the “end” of the story can finally be chronicled, even if the last tournament of the Series hasn’t really concluded. There’s always some more to do after that last hand plays out, but soon the WSOP fades from view as other business comes to occupy us.

I’ve actually never gone back out for the final table, having always followed it from home. I had a desire to do so those first couple of years, but that’s waned over time. It would still be fun to witness the spectacle in person once, I think, but having seen and experienced so much else at the WSOP over the years, I don’t feel so much like I’m missing out on something I absolutely need to see.

That said, each year when I have come home from the WSOP and finally woken up in my own bed again every mid-July, I do so with a sense of incompleteness. Part of that feeling stems from the Main Event being artificially paused as it is, but there are other factors, too, that increase the sense of work left undone.

I’ve written here before about tournament reporting and how in the end no matter how comprehensive one is -- or a team of reporters are -- there’s always so much left unsaid. Even doing the hand-for-hand reporting as we did that last day leaves out a lot. All of the bets and raises and folds and cards are there, but as anyone who’s ever played a hand of poker knows, there’s a lot more happening every single hand than can be seen and passed along.

I was chatting with Mickey after all was over early Monday morning (around 3:30 a.m.), and he was still thinking about the night and wanting to go back over everything to make sure all was finished. So was I.

Mickey likes to be as accurate and exact as possible, his famously precise chip counts being just one example of this trait. During the short break before the start of the 10-handed final table night before last, he took on the task of counting Carlos Mortensen’s creatively stacked chips and I wasn’t the only one taking a picture of him doing so. His work ethic has inspired many of us over the years, but I think a lot of us also share his same wish to be as complete as possible with what we do.

There happens to be a construction company based in Las Vegas the name of which coincides with mine. One sees the name around here and there, and in fact on a few occasions when introduced to Vegas-based folks I’ve had them react by mentioning the company. It’s not the only time I’ve experienced such coincidences with my name.

For the last several years, those going to the WSOP have been seeing a building going up near the Rio on Twain Avenue. Construction on Wyndham Vacation Resorts Desert Blue (a 19-story, 281-unit timeshare) began about five years ago and was originally scheduled to be completed by 2010. But they’d only really gotten started on the project when construction was shutdown. Some recession-related reason, I think.

So the building has been standing there within view of the parking lot for years now, and the fact that my name has been emblazoned on a large banner attached to the side of the edifice has inspired a long-running gag. “When are you going to finish your building?” I’m asked, and I usually respond that I’ve been so busy at the Rio I haven’t been able to find the time.

After something like three years of no movement on the project, construction finally resumed a couple of months ago, and so this summer some have commented to me about perhaps my building being completed sometime soon.

The last few times people mentioned the building and my name hanging on it, I’ve responded by saying that by now it had evolved into a kind of symbol to me. For weeks I’d park my car and walk into work, and every time I did I’d glance over to see this large, conspicuous reminder of the many unfinished projects in my life.

In his piece about Doyle Brunson last week, Brad “Otis” Willis touched on the problem of getting older and this feeling that increases with each year that we aren’t accomplishing what we should. “I look at what I’ve done and know it’s not enough,” writes Brad. “I look at what I’m doing and know it’s not enough.” I’m probably not the only one who reads such lines and thinks “I know what you mean.”

And so another summer in Vegas ends, and once again things still aren’t finished. There was so much more to write about this summer than I was able to do here on the blog. There always is. In fact, I still intend to write one last post here about Carlos Mortensen’s amazing run that also ended with him not quite finishing what he set out to do.

I’ll get to that eventually. But I’ll post this today as a kind of final postlude to the summer’s reporting, realizing again that this sense of incompleteness is just something I have to accept, just as we never really get to finish all that we set out to do.

2013 WSOP, Day 28: The Old Timers’ Game

I said yesterday how I was hoping to gather some color to report, having found myself with a day off after a week’s worth of 15-hour days reporting from the World Series of Poker.

Part of the plan also was to catch up on sleep, as I’d probably been averaging around 3-4 hours most nights during that first week. Unfortunately after finally hitting the sack around 4 a.m. Tuesday morning, the hotel phone was ringing promptly at 8 a.m. with some applesauce about the bill going forward not being paid.

“No, this room isn’t paid for,” insisted the person the other end, soon forcing me into full consciousness. Soon I was dressed and talking in person with my accuser, and while eventually all was settled (they were mistaken) I’d lost my chance to sleep away the morning.

Ended up doing some work in the room, then by early afternoon had enough energy to do some errands, including on a whim deciding to visit the Palms just to see what the poker room looked like now that they’ve moved it to a new location.

The room remains quite modest with only a few tables, although the ambience is better than it was previously. Instead of a closed in, smallish space, it now sits on the edge of the sportsbook which now features an amazing wrap-around screen that extends nearly 180 degrees left to right, positioned high on the wall overlooking the bettors (see above). Rather than being a series of connected screens, it’s one continuous one with all the games, races, and wagering opportunities on display.

It being the early afternoon, there were just a couple of $2-$4 low limit tables going, and I decided to sit down for a short while. The new screen was the initial topic of conversation, with a dealer opining that it would be fun to show the Super Bowl on it with a long, continuous, wide shot of the entire field end-to-end. I agreed it would be an interesting way to see a game.

The old timers were at the table, and I soon realized I was about to pick up some of that color I was looking for. Most played there frequently, perhaps every day, with many referring to each other and the dealers by their first names. One gregarious fellow kept starting conversations with people by asking them how old they were, which brought the whole idea of aging to the foreground as a kind of theme.

He’d bet and raise a lot, too, regardless of his hand, and the first couple of times I’d three-bet him he referred to me as “big shot” as he called my reraise. It was only after I saw him betting into a fellow on the river who’d already tabled his better hand that I realized he’d entered into the still-functioning-but-no-longer-comprehending stage of drunkenness.

At one point he was quizzing the fellow to my left about his age. “What year were you born?” he asked. “1953,” came the reply. “What month were you born in?” “September... I’ll be 60 in a couple of months.”

The interviewer was interrupted as he had to be reminded the action was on him. He folded, then continued. “September you say?! What day?” “September 21st,” was the answer.

“Ah, okay okay.” He leaned back, suddenly looking tired. “I ask because my father was born in September, too... September 8, 1932.” He’d pronounced the year like it had much more significance than anyone realized, enunciating carefully so as not to slur. Nine.. teen.. thirty... TWO!

It was evolving into the most trivial conversation ever had until my neighbor said something about wanting 20 more years to live. At that the drunken questioner perked up.

“Why?” he asked. There was a pause suggesting my neighbor hadn’t expected the question. “Twenty more years to play poker,” he said, the inflection of his voice making it sound like he was shrugging even if he weren’t.

“Ah well that’s all right then,” was the verbalized judgment, although the questioner didn’t sound too convinced. He’d already established that he, too, was 60, and he added something that sounded like he thought that was enough life to live, although I didn’t quite catch what he’d said precisely.

It wasn’t a competitive game, and without even picking up too many hands I managed to win a dozen big bets’ worth without much trouble. One of the ladies at the other end of the table said something like “I have a rule... no set, no bet,” indicating the general passivity of all. There were various promotions -- “aces cracked,” “high hand,” etc. -- occupying everyone’s attentions at least as much as the hands being played. One Asian woman made a straight flush and got a bonus for that, putting a lasting smile on her face and faint ones on the others, too.

At another point I found myself sitting between two other elderly Asian men. The one on my left was asking the one on my right the name of a female dealer sitting at another table. He knew her, but couldn’t remember her name. The fellow on my right was the oldest of the bunch, and the most feeble, too, and had difficulty understanding what exactly he was being asked.

Finally he figured out what the question was, and eventually the pair got a floorperson to supply the missing name. A moment later, the older man on my right leaned forward to ask a question of his own.

“What... do you wanna f*ck with her?”

The one on my left acted like he didn’t hear the question. As did I, although if anyone were watching me my widened eyes might’ve given away that I had.

I thought about the dealers a little, all of whom were fine at managing the game and amiable custodians of the little social club of retirees. They knew several of these players, too, and I suppose some of these people have become somewhat significant supporting cast in their lives as well.

On the one hand, the game exhibited a desperate seeming pointlessness that’s hard to ignore, the kind of thing that made the idea of “twenty more years to play poker” a decidedly less than attractive fate to consider. But there’s also something meaningful going on, too, in the time these people share together sitting around a table hoping to pick up aces and lose with them.

In any event, was interesting to sit in on the old timers’ game for a short while. I’d like to play more serious poker while I’m here, especially after having had some success early in the trip, but as the old guys kind of helped point out, time is limited.

I left after an hour, stopped by the grocery store to pick up a few items, then headed back to the home-away-from-home with an intention to do more work. But I was too tired to do much of anything. Got a decent night’s sleep this time, and am extra energized as Vera Valmore arrives for her visit today.

I’d like to take her over to Red Rock Canyon to see what I got to see last summer when F-Train and I visited there. But the temps appear unfavorable for hiking, so we may just drive through and enjoy the sights from within the comfort of an air-conditioned automobile. We might try to got to Penn & Teller tonight, too, one of those shows we’ve thought about seeing every summer but never have.

Whatever we do, I’ll be greatly valuing our time we get to spend together. ’Cos that’s where the meaning comes from in this life, I think -- the getting together -- as we each otherwise individually play our hands.

An American in Cuba: The Place of Poker in Havana

The film Havana, directed by Sydney Pollack and starring Robert Redford, received a mixed reception during its 1990 theatrical run. Many saw Havana as a failed attempt by Pollack to recreate the critical and commercial success of 1985’s Out of Africa (also starring Redford). While the earlier film was universally praised, winning seven Oscars including Best Picture and Best Director, reviewers didn’t respond as warmly to Havana’s story set on the eve of the Fidel Castro-led Cuban Revolution. The film suffered at the box office as well, only earning back about a third of its huge $30 million budget.

While Havana is perhaps a bit over-reaching at times, stretching out what is really a character study to epic lengths, it does have a lot going for it. The film presents an inventive and engaging story, some enchanting cinematography, a cool soundtrack, and fine performances throughout. It also provides a plot and central character that poker players may find particularly interesting. Redford plays Jack Weil, a professional player who visits Havana primarily for the high-stakes games on offer, but who ultimately finds himself pulled away from the tables by revolution and romance.

The film also gives us something to think about with regards to the way poker sometimes stands as a kind of an emblem for America. Jack is a good player, his ability making him stand out from his opponents as much as does his blonde-haired, blue-eyed appearance. But several of the skills that make Jack a winning poker player -- his self-reliance, his confidence, his independent or even selfish approach to life -- could also be called “American” traits, too. And it is this idea of himself as free and at liberty to pursue whatever calling he chooses that gets challenged by the urgent political crisis in which he finds himself in Havana.

The entire story takes place during the last week of 1958, the final days of the six-year-long revolt that finally forced Fulgencio Batista out of Cuba on January 1, 1959 to be replaced by Castro's regime. It begins on Christmas Eve on a boat going from Miami to Havana, where we meet suave Jack agreeing to help a pretty female passenger get her car off the boat and through inspections upon arrival.

Soon thereafter Jack heads to the Lido, a hotel-casino managed by a friend Joe Volpi (Alan Arkin). Jack tries to persuade Joe to help him organize a group of high rollers for a high-stakes game, but Joe suggests uncertainty about the revolution has made it more difficult to get such a group together. Jack argues to the contrary, suggesting there’s “nothing like the sound of a gunfire to stimulate action,” but Joe isn’t cooperating.

So Jack plays elsewhere at a bar, where we watch him lose a hand of five-card draw early on in which he folds three kings to an opponent who shows a lesser pair of jacks. Jack effusively congratulates his opponent -- “You bluffed me, man!” -- and there are smiles all around. But when we cut to many hours later we see Jack is winning, and big. In other words, while he lost that small pot early, his long-term plan for the session has proceeded nicely for him, ensuring him a significant profit.

Finally Joe shows up, a little peeved that Jack has chosen to play elsewhere, and agrees to get a game going for him at the Lido. Jack is excited, and talks to Joe about his desire to make that one huge, high-stakes score against “guys who don’t even think how much they’re playing for.”

“This is the time for me, right now,” Jack tells Joe. “And this is the city.”

The line recalls for us how Havana is just one of many places Jack has played poker, a place that if not for the events that are about to unfold would have remained just another stop on his personal world poker tour.

As it happens, Jack reunites with the woman he helped on the boat, Roberta Duran (Lena Olin). It turns out she’s married to a leading figure in the revolt, Arturo Duran (Raúl Juliá). In fact, as Jack already partially understands from having inspected Roberta’s car, he’s helped smuggle some American radios for the revolutionaries to use.

He eventually meets Arturo who invites Jack to dinner with him and his wife. There Arturo tries to enlist Jack’s help in the cause, but Jack is only interested in poker. In fact, Jack can’t even take seriously the idea that the revolution is going to amount to anything, he’s so focused on enjoying -- and profiting from -- the decadent night life available to him in Havana.

Arturo tries to suggest that Jack’s poker-playing skills could be useful to the revolutionaries’ strategic planning, but Jack waves off the suggestion.

“Oh, no,” pleads Jack. “I don’t play cards for that. That’s politics.”

“That’s very American,” replies Arturo with a smile. “Politics is what your life is about, but you’re not interested!” Arturo tells Jack he’s “fascinated by men like you... how you keep a kind of innocence” amid the revolution going on around him.

“Perhaps it isn’t innocence at all,” interjects Roberta somewhat hesitantly. “Perhaps Mr. Weil really doesn’t give a damn.”

Weil defends himself by saying that he’s played poker with politicians before, and in fact likes to because they tend to be easily beatable opponents. In fact, says Jack, the poker table is “the only place an ordinary man can beat a politician.”

Arturo asks Jack why politicians are easy to beat, and Jack’s reply reminds us of how he played the earlier session. “Sometimes in poker it’s smarter to lose with a winning hand so you can win later with a losing hand,” Jack explains. “And politicians never can quite believe that. ’Cause they want the power now.”

In a way, Jack is suggesting he believes he’s chosen a pursuit that is somehow nobler than politics -- or at least one in which he doesn’t have to concern himself with politics. In fact, later on he’ll say “I feel more honest playing cards than trying to make believe the mountains are mine.”

Thus satisfied with knowing how to beat politicians at his preferred game, Jack has carved himself out a life in which he believes he does not have to play other “games” in which the goals aren’t as clear or attractive to him.

As has already been suggested, Jack does get further involved in the revolution, thanks in part to his attraction to Roberta. The game at Lido’s becomes a part of the plot, too, when one of Batista’s lieutenants and the head of the secret police also participate. Jack wins money, information, and some additional leverage in the game to enable him to help the revolutionaries and Roberta in particular.

I’ll leave the remainder of the complicated (though not too hard to follow) plot for those wishing to see the film. Ultimately the movie comes to resemble in many ways Casablanca, another film in which a somewhat unwilling American (Rick, played by Humphrey Bogart) finds himself thrust into the middle of a political conflict thanks largely to his attraction to a woman (Ingrid Bergman’s Ilsa).

And like in Casablanca, even though our hero is primarily motivated by a woman to act, surrounding circumstances make the possibility of his being with that woman unlikely if not impossible.

In Havana, making Jack a poker player serves to reemphasize parallels between his character and Bogart’s cynical Rick, a couple of existentialists whose extreme self-interest is -- as Arturo says -- “very American.”

We see Jack repeatedly asking himself and others “What do I want with a revolutionary?” and “You think I care about any of this stuff?” as he grapples with the idea that there is more to the world than his own personal pursuit of happiness. Roberta in particular challenges him repeatedly, accusing him of seeing Havana only as “a place for a card game” rather than a city in which lives are being affected in profound ways.

“I try to keep out of the way of stuff I don’t understand,” says Jack to Roberta. “All this is like living your life in the newspapers.... But they make too much out of it. Most of the time nothing is going on. Just everyday stuff.”

Very existentialist. Very American, too, one might argue. And a lot like what we hear at the poker tables, a place where the outside world often gets conveniently shut out as we await the deal of another hand or the announcement of another bet.

Thanks to Bruce McCullough for having first suggested to me that I take a look at Havana and its use of poker. For further reading, see my interview with McCullough for Betfair Poker, “Poker in the Classroom: Teaching Probability and Decision-Making,” in which we discuss a poker-themed college course he has taught as well as the way Havana subtly suggests Jack’s character to be especially gifted when it comes to understanding odds and probabilities.

A Momentary Loss of Focus

Had a nice, relaxing day yesterday, made even nicer by all of the friendly birthday tweets I received. (Thanks again, all.) Yeah, it was my birthday, which I didn’t mention here but did note on Twitter when I decided to host a “Birthday Bash” home game over on PokerStars.

By the way, if you have a PokerStars account and want to join my “Hard-Boiled Poker” home game in which the games are for play money (and pride), the Club ID is 530631 and the invitation code is noshinola. I’ll probably crank up another couple of tourneys this week, which I’ll announce over Twitter (@hardboiledpoker).

Am thinking it might be fun to set up some sort of weekly tourney or league at some point, probably after I return from the WSOP in mid-July. Anyone with suggestions and/or preferences for times, tourney types, structures, etc., feel free to send them along.

Mostly rode out the big day at home, although I did go out at one point for some errands, including a needed visit to the eye doctor.

I’ve worn eyeglasses for most of my adult life, and not long ago got a new prescription and had the lenses replaced in the frame I’ve had for a few years. Unfortunately that old frame finally gave out and broke -- on my Uruguay trip, actually -- and so I had to go in to see about that.

Anyway, I relate this mundane bit of trivia to you mainly because of a funny moment that came up along the way. Before heading over to the eye doctor, I fished around to see if perhaps I had any old glasses lying around. I found a pair, put them on, and was kind of floored by the fact that the world appeared an indecipherable, blurry mess when I looked through them.

Wow, I thought. I didn’t realize my new prescription was that different.

It was my birthday, mind you. And perhaps as a result, ideas of getting older and bodies failing and all the other existential applesauce that sometimes accompany such momentous occasions surfaced even more quickly than usual.

I indulged for a few minutes in a probably predictable bit of brooding, then found more immediate distractions to keep such thoughts at bay. You know, like usual. What our lives mostly consist of, right? Staying in motion. Keeping busy. Looking at what’s just ahead.

Eventually Vera got home and at some point we got around to discussing my quest for a new pair of spectacles. Something in my story sounded a little off to her, and quickly she set it right after pointing out where I’d gone wrong.

That old pair of glasses I’d tried on weren’t mine. They were hers. No wonder I couldn’t see a thing through them.

In my defense, Vera’s glasses do look very similar to mine, with the same small oval lenses. Even to people who can see clearly. Her prescription is much, much different, though. And really, if I’d thought about it for more than a few seconds, I’d have realized there was no way those lenses were at any point in time ever correct for me.

In fact, after a bit more searching I did find an older pair of mine from a few years back, and after putting them on realized my vision hasn’t weakened all that much over the last few years.

Thought it was funny, though, how quickly and easily self-doubt can come. Happens in poker all the time, even in a single hand. We make a decision on an early street about an opponent’s possible holdings, then something happens later to make us doubt that earlier read.

“Man, did I see things badly before,” we think. Then come to find out we were seeing just fine earlier, it was later we started misread the situation. Not to mention misread our own judgment -- our ability to see -- as well.

Was It Just Me?

Well, I suppose there’s no avoiding placing this post in the category titled “The Rumble.”

Yes, I felt the earthquake yesterday. Was at home working on the laptop, when suddenly it seemed like the couch was weirdly wiggling underneath me. Lasted just a few seconds, but it was long enough for me to get up and look around confusedly.

Not sure what I was looking for, really. I suppose I thought I might see my cat banging around at the end of the couch or something, not that she -- at less than ten pounds -- could ever move such a big piece of furniture like that. I sat back down and returned to my writing, but soon saw the Twitter messages and realized what must have happened.

I ended up checking in with all of my family members yesterday to see if they’d felt the quake as well. And I assume I’ll probably be talking with others today about it, each of us sharing our distinct experiences. There are much more important items, weather-wise, for us all to be concerned about, that hurricane currently heading toward the east coast the most obvious one at the moment. But the uniqueness of the event, an earthquake with an epicenter here on the east coast, necessarily got all of our attentions.

I realized later in the day that one of the more interesting aspects of the whole event was the way most of us initially experienced it individually, then quickly sought out confirmation from others regarding what we had felt. The fact is, many of us had never experienced an earthquake before. (Vera and I have spent time in California, but neither of us could recall ever being there for any sort of earthquake, even a small one.) So it was a natural response, I think, to ask each other what the heck just happened. And perhaps to make a bit more of it than our friends out west laughingly thought was warranted.

Of course, for a lot of us that response followed an initial, more private one. I’m talking about that bit of self-questioning. Or self-doubt, first causing us to ask ourselves “Was it just me?”

Existentialists point out how we all make what we will of our experiences. For many of us, having some sort of corroboration with others about what we believe we are seeing and experiencing is a big part of the way we make that meaning. But it all starts with the self, with the individual.

Poker exemplifies this idea with every single hand. Each player, the dealer, and anyone who happens to be watching experience what happens differently. A kind of “consensus” comes with the awarding of a pot, one might say. And while everyone may, in a sense, come to a kind of additional agreement about the “meaning” of it all -- e.g., judgments about how well or poorly those involved played their hands -- each player ultimately comes away with his or her own idea of what happened, perhaps influenced by others’ ideas, perhaps not.

Not so much ambiguity with an earthquake, though. Funny how a natural phenomenon involving the further rupturing of the planet’s faults -- in other words, a tearing apart -- necessarily serves to bring people together.

Play the Game Existence to the End of the Beginning

“Back to quits” is one of my favorite poker expressions, although I don’t think it is one that is all that commonly known or used. I don’t see it in The Official Dictionary Poker by Michael Weisenberg, accessible online over at Mike Caro’s site. Nor does it appear in The Poker Encyclopedia compiled by Ethan Allan and Hannah Mackay.

Can’t recall exactly where I first encountered it. I know Anthony Holden uses the phrase in Big Deal, which is why I think of it as probably more of a British term -- like calling a player a “punter” or the pot the “pool.” Early in the book, Holden describes starting out his year-long experiment as a poker professional with some losses, followed by a couple of cashes in small tourneys and “a run of cards in a £5-and-£10 Hold ’Em side game, which got my bankroll back to quits.”

The meaning of the phrase is clear enough, I assume -- getting back to even. I like the way the phrase connotes that irrational feeling we’ve all had that makes recovering one’s starting stack a requirement for leaving the game.

We know it’s wrong to think this way. “Perhaps the stupidest words in poker are ‘I’ve got to get even,” writes Al Schoonmaker in Your Worst Poker Enemy. “When you feel that way, you are in danger of turning an unpleasant loss into a catastrophe,” explains the psychologist. “You can get further off balance, play more poorly or perhaps go to a larger game or the craps table, desperately trying to get even.”

Thus do I like calling it getting “back to quits” rather than getting even, because the phrase tends to remind me that my real goal is simply to leave the game -- which perhaps I should consider going ahead and doing rather than pressuring myself to recoup my losses. In other words, realizing that I’m simply trying to get “back to quits” sometimes helps me get up from the table sooner -- not always easy to do. (Wrote about that a couple of times before, actually, in “Poker Sisyphean Challenge” and “The Long Goodbye”).

I sometimes marvel at how this mindfulness of how much I am up or down perfectly evokes the existentialist idea of “making meaning” -- in this case, interpreting the meaning of my play according to what is necessarily a wholly subjective criterion that only really matters to me. In fact, depending on how aware my opponents are, sometimes I might be the only one who even knows if I’m up or down. And even if others are aware, they haven’t a true idea what the significance of being up or down (by a lot or a little) means to me, anyway.

It was during another session of Rush Poker (pot-limit Omaha, six-handed, $25 buy-in) that I found myself thinking about all of these things once again. Despite playing a few hands well early on, I’d taken a couple of unfortunate beats, then made a couple of missteps to take me nearly two buy-ins down. I gradually fought back, and without winning any large pots managed to get almost “back to quits” before signing off.

As those who have played Rush Poker know, with each new hand you are taken to a new table. After a while, you do start to see the same players, and it is even possible to get reads and use them (especially if you are a note-taker). But a lot of what happens in each individual hand happens without the usual contextual info of the standard game.

I realized absolutely no one knew whether I was up or down during my session. In fact, towards the end I was sitting with a fairly big stack (nearly three buy-ins deep), but was still down a couple of bucks. Nor did anyone know if I’d been playing well or poorly.

A hand came up where it folded to me on the button and I raised pot with a trash hand. As I did, I momentarily thought of my “image” and its significance (or lack thereof). My opponents didn’t really know if I was the sort of player who sometimes would raise with bad cards there. But I did.

As I waited for the blinds to act, I began involuntarily thinking about how I’d played the last couple of times it had folded to me on the button, actually considering -- and maybe even being slightly affected by -- the patterns in my own play. Patterns I had noticed, but no one else had.

The existentialist recognizes that while we play with each other, what the game means is necessarily going to be different to each of the players. And if for you getting to the end means returning to the beginning, well, only you may see the meaning of within.

Six Hundy

Colleague and I were jokin’ around yesterday. Talking shop, mostly, but also interweaving the occasional, broader reflection on life, the universe, and everything.

Somewhere in there she was making a point about the difficulty of doing a job well, adding how what often ups the angst factor was the unavoidable impulse to be self-critical.

I nodded, thinking yes, it is exhausting. Always judging oneself, looking for ways to improve. Sure, apply it to poker, if you wanna.

To punctuate her point, she quoted Socrates’ one-liner with a shrug of acknowledgement: “The unexamined life is not worth living.” Might’ve even sighed a little, too.

I smiled, suddenly inspired. I had the perfect rejoinder.

“Actually, the unexamined life is... pretty cool.”

Or would be, anyway. Think about how easy it would be, to glide along without them existential doubts always gnawin’ at ya. Without even the hint of such worries. Yeah, I know. We’re talking about other people here. None of us can really manage that. Not really.

Six hundred posts. I mean, c’mon. That’s kind of overdoing the whole self-examination thing just a touch, wouldn’t you say? For which reason I think I’ll forgo the usual slice of centennial-inspired introspection, and instead just thank everybody for stopping by this here corner of the interweb every now and again.

As a token of my appreciation, allow me spare you a bit of self-examination. I’ve looked into it already, and so can tell you...

You guys are the nuts.

Sartre’s Gambler (1 of 3)

There’s a famous (though brief) passage early on in Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness (originally published in 1943) in which the French philosopher uses the example of a problem gambler to help illustrate what he means by “nothingness” and how it differs from “being.”

I suppose Sartre could’ve used a different example to make his point, but I can see a couple of reasons why he chose the gambler. For one, doing so enabled him to acknowledge in a subtle way the influence of Fyodor Dostoevsky. I’ve written here before about Dostoevsky’s 19th-century novel The Gambler and his status as a thinker whose ideas helped provide some of the groundwork for modern existentialism. Dostoevsky was also himself an inveterate gambler -- indeed, Sartre is referring to the Russian writer’s life (and not his fiction) when he brings him up here.

The example of a gambler who is trying to quit gambling also demonstrates in a particularly useful manner Sartre’s argument about existence. In particular, speaking of a problem gambler helps Sartre clearly distinguish the difference between who we are and our ideas about who we are.

I’m probably asking for all sorts of trouble, but I thought it’d be worth trying to take a shot at presenting Sartre’s gambler. My main motive here is just to try to sort out what Sartre is saying in order to understand it better myself. But I also thought others might be interested, too, as some of what Sartre says about his gambler seems to prefigure certain ideas I’ve seen explored from time to time in discussions of poker (both strategic and theoretical). That is to say, whether or not you buy Sartre’s explanations of existence, I think poker players might at least be somewhat intrigued by some of the various implications of what comes up in this here passage.

Gonna try to pull this off in three posts. In this first one, I’ll see if I can present in at least a semi-coherent way Sartre’s general argument about “being” and “nothingness” in order to give us a context for reading the passage. In the next post, I’ll do my best to summarize what Sartre is saying in that passage about the gambler. Then, in a third post, I’ll try to connect Sartre’s gambler to certain ideas I’ve seen specifically expressed by a few poker players.

Being and Nothingness

Being and Nothingness is a big, thick, imposing book. And making matters worse, it begins with a very hard-to-read introduction in which Sartre explains what he thinks “being” is. A lot of readers never get beyond the first few pages of this introduction. It’s understandable -- the prose is very rough-going, and the arguments not really as conclusive as what one finds elsewhere in the book.

Sartre starts out by rejecting “the dualism of appearance and essence” that he says has long “embarrassed” philosophy. According to Sartre, there is no such thing as “essence” (or “soul” or a “noumenon” or whatever you want to call that stuff that isn’t really there but which many philosophers insist is somehow accessible to us). No, says Sartre, “the being of an existent is exactly what it appears.” There is no “interior” or “secret reverse side” or whatever.

Of course, when it comes to us poor humans, we have this thing called “consciousness” that tends to complicate our experience of the world. Consciousness is what makes me different from, say, a poker chip or a playing card or all of the other stuff that exists but lacks consciousness.

Everything that exists -- me, the chip, the card -- has what Sartre calls “being-in-itself.” Of each of these “existents” we can say “it is what it is.” But unlike the chip and the card, I also have consciousness, which means I am also aware of all sorts of stuff that is not -- i.e., that is not there, that is not me, etc.

This leads to a distinction that Sartre is willing to make, and which is fairly important to everything else he has to say in Being and Nothingness. There’s “being-in-itself,” which I have, but which the chip and the card have, too. That’s a kind of being that is “unconscious” or “unaware.” We can only say that “it is” and nothing more.

Then there’s “being-for-itself,” which I have but which the card and chip do not -- namely, a kind of being that is “conscious,” but we’re not talking merely self-consciousness. Rather, says Sartre, “being-for-itself” is “consciousness conceived as a lack of Being.” To put it broadly, it is being conscious of what I am not. And that is “nothingness” -- the idea, I mean, not the “being-for-itself.” Nothingness not a type of being; rather, nothingness is brought into the world by those of us who are conscious of our being.

So unlike a lot of earlier philosophers, Sartre is not a “substance dualist.” There’s just the one substance for Sartre, and that is “being-in-itself.”

After that difficult introduction, Sartre gets into part one of the book where he addresses “The Problem of Nothingness” and this part is much more accessible. He presents some examples to illustrate nothingness. (This is the part of the book where his discussion of the problem gambler comes in.)

One such example involves a person looking in his wallet and expecting to find 1,500 francs, yet only seeing 1,300. As he “experiences the absence” of 200 francs, Sartre would say, he “brings nothingness” into the world. He gives another example of going to the café to meet his friend Pierre at four o’clock and discovering he isn’t there. Again, he experiences the absence of Pierre, or, to put it differently, he brings “nothingness” into the world.

Notice how both of those examples involved expectations being foiled. In other words, unlike “being-in-itself” (that mode of being that exists without needing anyone to be aware of it), “nothingness” is wholly dependent on our awareness.

Sartre goes on to talk about some other aspects of nothingness, but I’m going to leave it there. You can probably already see how this way of explaining our experience of the world -- talking about “being” (all the stuff in the world, including ourselves) and “nothingness” (all the stuff we imagine about the world, including what we imagine about ourselves) -- potentially relates to poker.

As I said, in the next post I’ll see if I can summarize Sartre’s portrait of the gambler, then add one more where I’ll try to make a connection or two to poker.

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 Spells Different Things to Different People

Still thinking about the many ways poker can be meaningful. Those five motives listed in the previous post (discussed by the Ante Up! guys) aren’t everything, of course. Poker can be other things as well. A creative outlet. An escape. A chance to socialize. An occasion for an amateur existentialist to explore his beliefs. You name it.

Even so, the more I think about those motives, the more I’m led to believe they might be refashioned as “principal categories” defining what poker means to (nearly) everyone who plays. In other words, poker means the following to all of us: (1) profit; (2) opponents; (3) knowledge; (4) enjoyment; and (5) risk. I don’t think I would be going very far out on a limb if I were to claim that anyone who plays poker does so because he or she wishes somehow to introduce these five things into his or her life -- to different degrees, of course.

As I mentioned before, these categories overlap considerably. It’s probably futile to try to talk separately about, say, wanting to make a profit and wanting to enjoy oneself. Indeed, it is a poker cliché to say I play to have fun but the more money I win the more fun I have. Still, we can distinguish between these motives somewhat, and part of assessing one’s own game is understanding which of these means more or less to oneself.

I thought I’d try to describe my own preferences here (or what I believe those preferences to be at this moment, anyway). To avoid becoming overly abstract, though, let me do so by discussing a particular hand I played from early last week. Rather than analyzing my play (directly), I’ll be analyzing what the hand “meant” to me given how I regard the significance of those five motives listed above. It’s a good thing, actually, that I’m not specifically analyzing my play in this hand, because it wasn’t so hot. In fact, it stunk. I’m about to share with you a (thankfully) rare instance of my having done what Miller/Sklansky/Malmuth repeatedly describe as a “disastrous” play in limit hold ’em -- I folded the best hand!

Here’s how the hand went down. It’s a 6-max, $0.50/$1.00 game. I’d been at the table for almost three orbits -- 16 hands, to be exact -- and so had just begun to pick up on some of my opponents’ tendencies. (I’d never played with any of these players previously.) The table was quite aggressive. For a hand to be checked around on any street had been a rarity. In those 16 hands I’d managed already to drop a little over $10, mainly thanks to having lost two fairly big hands. In the first, my JJ lost to AK when my opponent turned a king. In the other, I had limped into a family pot from late position with KT-offsuit, then called the big blind’s preflop raise (along with four other players). The board ended up T6249 (no flush) and I lost to the preraiser’s pocket queens.

In this particular hand I was in the BB and was dealt JJ once again. Before the flop, UTG limped, UTG+1 raised, I reraised, and both players called. So there’s $4.75 in the pot and I’m out of position against two opponents. And a little bit out of sorts, given the poor start to the session.

The flop came -- a decent flop for me, one would think. I bet and both of my opponents called. $6.25 in the pot. The turn was the and I actually checked. To be perfectly honest, my memory is a little foggy here as to why I checked. In fact, when I looked back at the hand in Poker Tracker I was surprised to see that I had. What the hell was I thinking?

I might have had an idea that one of my opponents would take a shot at stealing this pot (as I said, I’d seen very few examples of a round with no one betting out) and I would check-raise him. More likely, though, I had grown timid -- perhaps affected somewhat by having recently lost with jacks -- and didn’t like being out of position with this holding. Whatever my reasons were, both opponents seemed invigorated by my show of weakness, with UTG quickly betting and UTG+1 then raising to $2. I was sure one had at least paired his queen, and so I let it go. (Looking back, I can see how I might well have been looking for any excuse to let this one go.) The river brought the , making the board 55Q3Q. I was slightly surprised to see both players check. UTG had . UTG+1 had , winning the $10.25 pot (minus $0.45 for the rake) with his ace kicker to the two pair on the board.

Not too much worse, really, than taking a few hits in hands you play correctly (or mostly correctly), then losing a nice-sized pot after a misstep like this one. The check on the turn -- frankly an uncharacteristic move on my part -- killed me here. And the decision by the eventual winner of the hand to reraise was well-timed, since he succeeded in making the best hand fold.

So this was a hand I clearly botched, losing not only what I’d put in the pot but what others put in as well. What did the hand “mean” to me, though? Let’s see . . . .

rofit. I play poker for real money and keep careful records of my wins and losses. I am overall a winning player, and that is important to me as I continue forward. The fact that after this hand I had $2.00 less than I had before it started -- when I might well have added $7.80 or even more to my stack if I’d stayed in the hand -- obviously means something to me. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that the amount I earn in a given hand eclipses all other “meaning” for me, but it does tend to affect everything to some degree (for me). At times I think this is another potential flaw in my game, the fact that I care too much about what the chips actually represent. Indeed, fretting over losses in previous hands likely didn’t help my decision-making in this one.

pponents. I do derive a great deal of motivation from facing competition. Some time back I attended a large midwestern university. For those who liked to play basketball, at this school they could easily find several pick-up games running in the centrally-located gymnasium -- pretty much 24/7. I played in the games regularly (three times a week). Shooting around is okay, I guess, but I always preferred the games. I liked having a place where I could count on finding opponents against whom I could compete. Poker similarly satisfies such a desire. While I’m generally not interested in seeking out conflicts in other areas of life, I do so when playing poker. I appreciate skillful play. In fact, I’d call it another weakness of mine not to walk away from a table when I find myself up against one or more obviously talented players. Rather, I want to stay and see if I can compete. In this hand, I like how both of my opponents played the turn -- both had flush draws, and both pounced after I showed weakness. Hopefully I learned something from how they handled this hand. I do hate losing the hand, though. Here I competed poorly and thus (as often, but not always, happens) ended the hand one of the losers. And that, too, is meaningful to me.

nowledge. I do think I learned a bit from this hand and so it did satisfy my intellectual curiosity perhaps more than the average hand does. I learned something about these two players, obviously, as well as the situation I was in (one that will undoubtedly recur in the future). I also learned something about myself. I recognize a couple of patterns exemplified by the hand that may be of use to me in the future. I see how winning or losing previous hands can affect my decision-making moving forward. I also see how difficult it is to manage two opponents from out of position, particularly if both show aggression. (Additionally -- perhaps most importantly -- I also see in this hand evidence that I’m probably still not ready to move up a level.) Since building my knowledge base is a considerable motive for me, I see this hand as contributing significantly to that endeavor.

njoyment. Having fun playing poker is also important to me. And while I don’t necessarily equate having fun with winning money, I do tend to derive less pleasure from losing sessions. I probably have the most fun when I feel as though I’m playing well -- making good reads, value betting when appropriate, etc. So it is possible for me to lose money and still enjoy myself, although I doubt I could have fun for very long that way. The hand was hardly pleasurable for me, but I am getting a certain amount of gratification from looking back on it here. And so while adding to my knowledge base does provide me with a kind of pleasure, ultimately this hand mostly “means” pain for me.

isk. Perhaps as a consequence of the particular importance I place on my profit, I do not receive any special satisfaction from taking risks. Especially foolhardy ones. My play in this hand certainly illustrates that tendency. As does my decision to stick primarily to limit games rather than venture over into the deep end of the pool and swim with the no limit sharks. I must like to gamble some, because however much we want to claim poker is a skill game, it is also gambling. And I’m certainly getting something from that. In this hand I toyed with risk a bit, then thought it too great to continue.

Like I said, I ain’t so proud of this here hand. But it does illustrate some of the things that poker “means” to me. What might be the optimal balance between these different motives -- or attempts at “meaning-making” -- that would produce the most successful poker player? Who knows? I suppose, in the end, the answer depends on what one means by “successful.”

Who Am Us, Anyway?

To continue (for one more post, anyway) this discussion of “Poker and Nothingness” . . . . Okay, then. For those of us who keep playing, poker means something. But what?

This week’s episode of Ante Up! did a nifty job of presenting and examining several of the reasons why people play poker. If you haven’t heard the show this week (#67), check it out. And if you don’t know about Ante Up!, well, get off yr keyster and start listenin’. With the retirement of Card Club on Lord Admiral Radio, Ante Up! is probably the poker podcast I enjoy and look forward to the most (closely followed by PokerDiagram and Rounders).

The main subject of this here episode -- “Psychology and Poker” -- was inspired by Cosenza’s recent announcement that he was through with online poker, a decision specifically prompted by a brutal bad beat -- losing a $430 pot to a rivered one-outer -- that punctuated an especially miserable weekend of online NL hold ’em. Cosenza wrote about his decision on the Ante Up! blog, prompting numerous comments, a thread over on the Card Clubs Network forums, and responses from both Long and occasional co-host Mike Fasso.

The hosts’ conversation was sincere and genuinely insightful (in my opinion). Although regular listeners already had a pretty good idea of the respective “player profiles” of both Cosenza and Long, the episode distinctly spelled out their many differences.

Cosenza specializes in no limit hold ’em, routinely playing games (both live and online) that feature $200 maximum buy-ins (e.g., the $1/$2 game at Full Tilt Poker). While not a professional, Cosenza is a consistently winning player who keeps careful records of his earnings and also cashes out frequently (i.e., he doesn’t play with his entire bankroll, and has in fact used his winnings to pay part of the mortgage on his house). He’s endured downswings and bad beats before. He’s also frequently skeptical of the “random number generators” used by online sites (one aspect of which I discussed a bit in a couple of earlier posts).

Conversely, Long does not specialize in any game in particular, although he does prefer limit games to no limit. He typically does not play for the stakes Cosenza does, and (as he admitted during this episode) is a losing player overall, although he isn’t terribly affected by that fact. (He likens the cost of poker to “tuition” -- i.e., he’s willing to pay to learn.) He’s spoken on the show before about losing swings and having had to reload his online accounts. He sympathizes with Cosenza’s skepticism regarding the "randomness" of shuffling programs online, but doesn’t seem to feel as adamant about the issue as does his co-host.

I’m not going to rehearse every detail of their conversation here, but I will make a couple of observations. The first is how in the course of describing their own motives the pair managed to identify a remarkable number of reasons why people play poker. Of these, the five they discussed most were (1) to make money; (2) to satisfy a desire to compete; (3) to experience an intellectual challenge; (4) to have fun/obtain pleasure; and (5) to experience the thrill of risk (i.e., to gamble).

For example, Long explained that having fun was for him a primary goal, and he suggested that Cosenza was more motivated by other motives -- namely, the first three (to make some scratch, to compete, and to be challenged) -- than by a desire to have fun. And Cosenza agreed Long was likely correct in his assessment. (Long also suggested Cosenza didn’t enjoy risk or “gambling” . . . a characterization which Cosenza only partially accepted.)

Note how all of these reasons are different “meaning-making” strategies employed by poker players. Or (to return the rarified air of the last post) different ways of combating “nothingness.” And they are all related, really. Notice how it is practically impossible to talk about one of these five motives without touching upon one or more of the others. Despite what some players might say, none actually play poker solely to make money and for no other reason. There are other ways of making money, most of them much easier than via poker. Poker “means” something else to these players, whether they realize it or not.

The second observation I’ll make is how both Cosenza and Long appear to contradict accepted stereotypes about limit and no limit players. Somewhat, anyway. I say that because Long loves to have fun, to be challenged, and doesn’t mind losing money -- three characteristics that seem to go against how limit players are typically characterized. Long hardly sounds like the image of limit “grinders” presented in Al Alvarez’s The Biggest Game in Town -- i.e., unimaginative “technicians” for whom “poker playing is strictly a business.” Nor does Cosenza sound like Alvarez’s no limit player attracted by “the romance of gambling,” somehow spellbound by the pleasure of risk-taking.

Proving (yet again) that poker can mean all sorts of things to different people. And . . . when you’re sitting there wondering if your pocket queens are any good against that check-raise all-in . . . for that guy sitting across the table, poker probably means something else to him than it does to you.

(Firesign Theatre fans recognize that post title as a line from their 1969 comedy LP How Can You Be in Two Places At Once, If You're Not Anywhere at All? Others, go get on the funway!)

Image: Ante Up! (adapted).

Poker and Nothingness

Been intending for a while to try to explain that reference to existentialism in the descriptive subtitle to “Hard-Boiled Poker.” Partly alludes to the great hard-boiled novels of writers like Hammett, Chandler, Cain, Thompson, Willeford, and others, all of which could -- in one way or another -- arguably be categorized as notable examples of “existentialist art.”

I also have in mind a more direct connection to existentialism as defined and explained by Jean-Paul Sartre and others -- an implied argument, if you will, for a connection between poker and existentialist thought. A lot of ideas produced by the existentialists seem to me to be readily applicable to poker. They may even be useful. But that (as the existentialists would insist) is up to each individual to decide.

First there’s Sartre’s famous observation that existence precedes essence (as far as humans are concerned). We start with existence, then formulate ideas about who we are, what our “essence” or “nature” might be. Thus might we say that the experience of the poker player is what defines him. He plays a number of hands, then becomes a certain kind of player (to himself and to others). He plays more hands, and his so-called “essence” changes still again.

The way we exist -- what we say, what we do, whether we call preflop raises from late position with suited one-gappers -- defines who we are. (You might want to argue the reverse -- e.g., that my conservative “nature” is what makes me fold ace-rag preflop -- but the existentialist knows better. He knows that folding ace-rag is what makes me a conservative player.)

It doesn’t help, of course, that the world in which we exist is indifferent to our plight. At times it may appear to follow some “order” (and thus imply some sort of creator having fashioned it thusly), but in actuality such order is only the result of our own idiosyncratic perceptions -- our relentless attempts at “meaning-making.”

In a previous post, I mentioned Miller/Sklansky/Malmuth’s observation in Small Stakes Hold ’em that “cards are pieces of plastic . . . [that] have no knowledge, no memory, no cosmic plan.” In other words, despite the frequency and/or conviction of our invocations, there are no poker gods. And not only do the cards have no “memory” or “plan” -- they have no meaning, either. Not on their own, anyway. (Just like everything else, actually.)

Facing such a circumstance, we could go the route of the nihilist and say that having accepted (1) existence precedes essence & (2) that the world is indifferent to us, there is no point in going forward. It’s a common mistake, actually, to say the existentialist believes life has no meaning. Not so. It’s the nihilist who believes life is without meaning, purpose, truth, what have you. (Sartre titled his book Being and Nothingness -- not simply “nothingness” -- deliberately choosing a phrase that implies a kind of ongoing conflict.)

Unlike the nihilist, the existentialist understands and accepts that we are the ones creating meaning -- that we are free, in fact, to make whatever we want of the world. To change the world, or what it means to us . . . for the better, even (if that’s your cup of tea).

We’re on our own, though. No “god” is going to help us. (Thus does such freedom produce a great deal of anxiety in us.) The poker player cannot control the cards. Nor can he perfectly control others’ actions at the table (although he can influence those actions). But he can certainly affect what those cards mean (to him). He can affect what his opponents’ actions mean (to him). And he can affect what his own actions mean (to himself). In fact, he not only can affect the meanings of those things -- he necessarily does affect what they mean. Every single hand.

In that earlier post (about Dostoevsky’s The Gambler -- another example of “existentialist” art, one might argue), I proposed that poker might be defined as “an activity in which each participant is trying to exert the most control in situations where everyone is a little out of control.”

In a way, that’s what I’m trying to say here about “meaning-making” at the poker table (and beyond). Poker is meaningful . . . because we give it meaning. And when we play, we not only confront other players, we confront that villainous “nothingness” who always seems to be following us around, showing up in the bathroom mirror, sitting across from us on the bus, waiting in line behind us at the store . . . .

And while we sometimes lose to the other players, we beat him . . . every time.

Image: Portrait of Edward James (a.k.a. Not to Be Reproduced) (1937) (adapted -- notice the book on the table), Rene Magritte, fair use.