Messi’s Miss

Feel a bit for Lionel Messi, the footballing legend from Rosario who missed a penalty kick in last night’s Copa America finale for Argentina, with his team subsequently losing to Chile for a second straight Copa final.

Following the match, Messi announced he’d no longer be playing for the Argentinian team, a bit of a surprise even if (apparently) there might have been other reasons for his decision besides last night’s outcome. Still, if they’d won, it doesn’t seem likely he’d have made such an announcement so soon after the match (within an hour of its ending, I think).

I ended up watching the match quite closely, which seemed a bit chaotic with the refs’ control appearing tenuous for much of the way. Argentina clearly seemed the better side -- and I think all agree Messi was the best player on the pitch -- but Chile battled gamely to get it to PKs, and ended up making one more than Argentina to secure the win.

People compare the mental challenge of a penalty kick to other sports-related tests like hitting a free throw or making a putt in golf. Not really sure if the three are all that like one another, to be honest, but I can see why the comparison is a tempting one to make.

I’ve read online that the average success rate for PKs tends to be around 75%. That’s very close to the league average for free throws made in the NBA, which has been right around 75% for the last 15 years or so. That same 75% figure applies to putts of around six feet or so among PGA Tour players, who naturally make a lot higher percentage from closer in and a lower percentage the further out you go (with eight feet marking the point where they start dipping below 50%).

I suppose for Messi you’d expect a higher percentage of makes, and certainly a higher percentage of PK shots that at least would be successful if not for a goalie’s defense. (Messi’s shot cleared the crossbar last night.) Still, it more or less comes down to a higher pocket pair-versus-lower pocket pair scenario -- about a 4-to-1 favorite -- meaning it’ll happen, and not all that rarely, that there will be a miss.

Just like some poker hands, though, some shots are more important than others, and are thus remembered more vividly and recounted more often.

Image: “Messi 10” (adapted), Francisco Javier Gutierrez Zuñiga. CC BY-ND 2.0.

The Summer Slowdown

With the NBA season over and the NFL’s first regular season game not scheduled until September 8, sports fans are facing a long summer.

Baseball, tennis, and golf can occasionally work as a stop-gap. The conclusions of both the Copa America and UEFA European Championships will also provide some diversion for those with an interest. And of course the 2016 Summer Olympics in Brazil, set to play out from August 5-21, will be welcomed by sports fans, too.

But for the majority of sports fans -- in the U.S., at least -- these are the super-slow months, with none of these options necessarily presenting too much that tempts.

Meanwhile the World Series of Poker continues. Poker fans are already following what’s happening out in Las Vegas this summer via updates and the various reporting sites. But once again -- as I’ve thought before right around this time of year -- it seems like there’s an opportunity perhaps being missed.

I mentioned yesterday how I’ve dipped into the live streams now and then on WSOP.com this summer and have been impressed, particularly with the stud games where they’ve discovered a method to handle the graphics in what seems to me a viewer-friendly way.

I don’t really think any of these preliminary events necessarily warrant a larger platform, although I found myself imagining half-hour recaps of key final table moments being shown on one of the many sports networks. WSOP.com is already doing something similar at times when showing highlights/bustout hands from past final tables while waiting for a new stream to begin.

I do think, though, that ESPN could well do something with the Main Event in July to fill a week’s worth of otherwise slow summer nights, sports-wise.

I know there’s the long-standing argument that ESPN wants to avoid potentially affecting viewership negatively for the weekly edited shows -- that tend to air opposite NFL games, actually -- by showing Main Event coverage in July. If memory serves, 2011 was the only year they did try some July shows from the Main Event, to mixed reviews.

Unfortunately, not only won’t there be anything like that on ESPN in July, but there won’t even be any live streaming of the Main Event either. Ah well... there will probably a baseball game on somewhere.

Image: “Blue Skies & Hot Sun” (adapted), Michele Frazier. CC BY 2.0.

A Game Seven Hot Take

So the NBA Finals has turned into some kind of weird, twisty-turney soap opera with six fairly non-competitive games resulting in a 3-3 tie between Golden State and Cleveland. Even if Game 7 results in yet another blowout, it will nonetheless provide an intriguing climax to an unexpectedly gripping series to punctuate the season.

One sure-fire prediction -- whoever loses the game will be forced to endure an incredible letdown. For the Warriors, it would mean failing to cap a record-breaking regular season with a title. The Cavs would similarly suffer greatly with a loss, coming one step shy of completing a never-before-accomplished comeback from 3-1 down in the finals to lose in the finals a second straight time.

I’ll add a few other predictions I’m less sure of, but in which I’m still reasonably confident. The Cavs probably won’t be as consistently brilliant as they were in Games 5 and 6. Neither will the Warriors be as consistently bad. Both will likely show some evidence of nerves, too, especially early in the game and perhaps again near the end (depending on the closeness of the score).

But here’s a less obvious prediction I’ll throw on top of the bonfire of “hot takes” that’s already starting to build, will grow higher by Sunday night, then disappear like so much ash in the wind once a result is determined. This one is probably contingent on the game being close at some point beyond the start -- i.e., in the second half, either early or late.

Here’s the “hot take”...

From the referees there will be a judgment call (or non-call) that will be agreed upon afterwards by most viewers to have affected the game’s outcome.

Every sport adjudicated by human beings involves some degree of error. Happens in poker, too, when rulings based on partial or even incorrect evidence sometimes occur, or even incorrect rulings based on clear and complete (and misunderstood or misinterpreted) evidence occasionally arise.

Over the course of an NBA basketball game, refs collectively make hundreds of decisions. They never make it through an entire game getting every decision correct, although generally do hit the mark on most of them. I’m not predicting (necessarily) that there will be an incorrect decision that will affect the outcome of Sunday night’s game; rather, I’m suggesting that some judgment call (which may or may not involve bad judgment and thus an incorrect decision) will be considered by most watching as having inordinately affected the outcome.

I guess my prediction itself involves a kind of judgment, although I’m saying most of those watching will come to the same conclusion that a key call (or non-call) more or less decided the game. It’s a prediction partly about the game and partly about how it will be discussed Monday morning, and it’s based both on the way the NBA games currently are officiated and tend to play out and the way games are scrutinized and discussed today.

Within a minute or two, the call (or non-call) will be a Vine, delivered instantly like an outlet pass starting a fast break all over the web. And many will be hot, hot, hot about what they are sharing.

Image: Emojipedia.

What the Polls Are Saying

Was thinking a little today about the preponderance of polls that tend to dominate the reporting about the ongoing presidential race. It’s almost claustrophobic, with the only thing seeming to cut through the constant stream numbers being the next outrageous thing a candidate (usually the current GOP frontrunner) says or does.

In fact, after that outrageous thing gets spun through the usual news cycle a few dozen times, the focus immediately returns to those numbers again and how they may or may not have changed as a result. Then come the primaries and caucuses, with even the reporting of actual voting results being prefaced by unending references to exit polls and still more polls appended afterwards.

Of course, there’s the unthinking reporting of poll numbers (which we most often see), then there are more careful examinations of what those numbers actually mean. Like has happened with the rise of “analytics” in sports -- and poker -- some of the analyses of polls have become increasingly sophisticated, occasionally resulting in uncannily accurate predictions of how the voting will go (although surprises still do happen).

I’ll admit I find myself checking in over at FiveThirtyEight frequently, especially on those evenings when there are primaries or caucuses, just to see how Nate Silver et al. are further crunching the numbers as they arrive. FiveThirtyEight helps us judge particular polls’ credence as well as how to sort through all of the data in a way that helps show its actual relevance.

That said, the constant focus on polls tends to eclipse actual discussion of candidates and their various positions and substantive issues, operating like a kind of virtual (and ongoing) scoreboard alongside the delegate tallies. To borrow Global Poker Index CEO Alex Dreyfus’s favorite word, it works to “sportify” the presidential race, or at least making it even more like a sporting event than has been the case in past decades.

Polls become a shorthand for both reporters and voters, fitting easily within 140 characters or as a colorful, eye-catching graph and standing for more involved consideration, and becoming something to cheer or fret over. You know, now that football season is over.

Photo: Voter polling questionnaire on display at the Smithsonian Institution, CC BY-SA 3.0.

Travel Report, EPT12 Dublin, Day 7 -- Pub Talk

Was focused primarily on Day 1 of the European Poker Tour Dublin €10K High Roller for the afternoon and early evening today, an event drawing all the usual suspects and since it featured a single re-entry there was a decent amount of action through the first several levels. Shaping up to be a big event, perhaps to produce another of the star-filled final tables these HRs often do.

Managed to get out before it got too late, though, and so made it over to a place not far from the venue, Searsons of Baggot Street, for what turned out to be a long and relaxing dinner full of fun conversation, not to mention a good dose of Irish pub ambience.

Had the lamb shank which was tender and delicious and came with braised carrots, asparagus, and a small Shepherd’s pie on the side. Then as my mates were all ordering more Guinness and I was having water, I went for the cheesecake afterwards and went back to the home-away-from-home mightily satisfied.

While there I enjoyed hearing more from Howard and Stephen about the early years of the EPT, kind of a sequel to our conversation from a couple of nights before. I’d heard some of the stories earlier, but our new colleague Jack had not and I didn’t mind hearing them again.

From there we got onto a number of other topics, including a lot about sports as Jack is a big NBA fan and Stephen a lifelong baseball obsessive. I always kind of delight in talking American sports with non-Americans, and it was again fun going over favorite teams and games and stories with a couple of Englishmen.

Another theme of the evening was the important place games have in people’s lives, with poker naturally coming up as an example. We swapped stories about ourselves and others illustrating the point in different ways.

Going back in tomorrow and likely sticking with the €10K High Roller for what will prove a more interesting day as the re-entries end, the money bubble will burst, and the serious contenders for the title will emerge.

Remembering and Recovering

Today Vera Valmore and I went to the local Y (which we’ve just joined). For the first time in I don’t know how long, I spent a half-hour shooting hoops.

Had to a chuckle at that sign pictured at left, one I noticed when heading into the gym. The top one, I mean. Can’t say avoiding dunking has ever been that much of a problem for me.

Basketball has always been my favorite sport to play. I grew up with a hoop in the driveway and spending practically every single day of my childhood and right into my late teens playing. I continued to play regularly through college and grad school, often playing pickup games up to three times a week.

Over the last decade-and-a-half things trailed off considerably for me as far as b-ball goes. It’s the unfortunate transition most of us find it hard to avoid making at some point after reaching adulthood -- less play, more work. I was still occasionally jumping in games and at least shooting around up until about five years ago, but to be honest I can’t even remember the last time I even took a shot before today.

I knew from previous experience that the first shot, and likely the first several, would not be pretty. It wasn’t as bad as I thought it’d be, though, and in fact within the first handful of shots I’d already swished a three-pointer. Even so, I was mindful of how the memory of a skill like shooting a basketball only comes back to a person in stages after a long period having not exercised it.

For me, the first part of the “recovery” concerns simply holding the ball. I don’t have to work hard to remember how I hold the ball when I shoot it, and it only takes a little more effort to remind myself how to lift the sucker up and push it toward the basket.

After that comes becoming familiar once again with gauging how much physical exertion is needed to shoot from various distances -- five feet, 10, 15, 20, and so on -- as well as sharpening the aim to make the ball go more or less straight and not to one side or the other. I found it easier to remind myself how to shoot the long ones than the middle-range ones. Even lay-ups were a little tricky, partly because one of the last things I was remembering how to do (or “recovering”) was how to move my feet and hold the rest of my body when shooting.

It reminded me a little of playing poker, which has also become something I do less frequently these days. As a result, I’m often going through a similar “recovery” period when taking those first few hands, starting with simply handling the chips and cards, then moving on to remembering strategy and trying to learn once again how to play effectively.

I didn’t get into a game tonight, which means I didn’t challenge myself to try to run up and down the court several times without interruption. I know from previous experience how that is almost an insurmountable hurdle for those who haven’t played for a long time, as it only takes a couple of times running the court for a lot of us to be left gasping for air.

That’s also a poker-related skill -- namely, stamina and the ability to focus and perform for lengthy periods -- that necessarily takes time to get back. The last session of any considerable length I have played was probably the media event at EPT Barcelona where I finished third, adding up to four or five hours of time at the tables (I think). I don’t doubt if I were to jump into a multi-day tournament with days scheduled to go ten hours-plus, I’d probably be in rough shape halfway through Day 1.

Fun to play again, though, even for just a little while. Will have to find a way to play more.

Winners, Losers, and Playoff Randomness

The Major League Baseball playoffs have begun, and with them the annual conversation has also started about how even though a 162-game season does a good job determining who the best teams are, the much smaller sample size of the playoffs increases the chance element markedly, often making it hard unequivocally to anoint the World Series winner as the season’s greatest team.

We talk about sample sizes a lot in poker, more often than not about how inadequate they are. We talk about variance, too, and how luck necessarily invites a disruption between what is and what ought to be.

The new wild-card playoff -- a one-game, winner-take-all-affair -- with which the MLB playoffs now always begin encourages such discussions even more, with each league producing one team who after 162 games will lose the 163rd and head home for the winter. The Pittsburgh Pirates, losers of the NL wild card earlier this week to the Chicago Cubs, had it happen for a second year in a row.

Just like like year when the Pirates ran into the hottest starting pitcher in baseball, Madison Bumgarner of the San Francisco Giants (then the Giants went on to win the whole sucker), this time they were up against the Cubs’ Jake Arrieta who is on a historic streak of success over the last several months. Both Bumgarner and Arrieta pitched complete game shutouts to oust the Pirates, this year after the team won 98 games (more than every other playoff team except the St. Louis Cardinals who took the Pirates’ division by winning 100).

For the Pirates it has been #JBL, as the poker-related hashtag would go.

In the NFL teams play 16 games, then enter into a series of single-elimination playoff games which obviously heighten the randomness more than a little (especially for a sport in whcih injuries are so significant). Even so, the 16-to-1 regular-season-to-playoff ratio is still not as big as the 162-to-7 ratio (or about 23-to-1) in the MLB. That’s looking ahead to the best-of-seven series coming up later for the league championships and World Series. That’s also assuming teams get to seven games in those series, which often they do not.

The NBA and NHL each play 82-game regular seasons and feature best-of-sevens each round of their playoffs (a little less than 12-to-1). NCAA basketball has it worse, I suppose, with a 35-game season (roughly) then a single-elimination tournament at the end.

Having playoffs is still better than not having them, I think, as college football proved for several decades up until the institution of the Bowl Championship Series from 1998-2013 and the College Football Playoff starting last year. Voting on the best team never worked well, nor does applying the incredibly complicated advanced analytics that are available these days to “let the computer decide.”

No, it’s best to have the teams play it out. It’s a little like a well played poker hand resulting in an all-in on the turn and something that is often close to a coin flip situation thereafter. Skill helped the players get into a position to win, then luck necessarily plays a role thereafter.

The Serena Stunner

Was working this afternoon with the U.S. Open playing on the teevee, pretty much the way it has gone for the last 10 days or so after my return from Barcelona.

Tennis probably ranks fourth or fifth on my list of favorite sports to watch (with the NFL and NBA up top). As with golf, it is really only the majors that encourage me to tune in when it comes to tennis. I’ll happily leave the set on all day and night during the two weeks of Wimbledon, the French, and the U.S. Open. (Not so much during the Australian, because of the time difference.)

My viewing goes back and forth between passive awareness of how matches are progressing and concluding and active following of every point near the ends of sets or matches.

Today I can’t say I even really paid much attention at all to Flavia Panetta’s quick handling of the No. 2 seed Simona Halep in the day’s first match. I’d seen several of Halep’s matches leading up to today’s, and considering her high seed I’d guessed she was going to be a finalist, so the 6-1 6-3 result was kind of eyebrow-raising.

Then came Serena Williams’s match with Roberta Vinci. I looked up for a while before it began to hear the commentators talk about “David versus Goliath” and speculate how quickly the match would be completed, none thinking for a moment that Williams could possibly lose to the unseeded Italian.

The first set was over in a flash, won by Williams 6-2, and I’d moved fully into passive mode as they moved through the second set. Saw Vinci -- who at age 32 is older than the average player although a year younger than Williams -- was up a break, then watched as she managed to hold on to win that one 6-4, and suddenly I was setting work aside to see what was going to happen next.

The third set was a strange one, with Williams breaking Vinci early to go up 2-0 and seemingly in position to cruise into yet another major final. But Vinci broke back right away and seeing her rallying herself and the New York crowd it suddenly became obvious she wasn’t going to be an easy out. Soon she was up a break, and after Williams missed an opportunity to break back (having a couple of break points to do so), it was all crazily pointing to one of those huge, impossible-to-have-foreseen upsets.

The last game was almost an anticlimax, with Vinci clinching the set 6-4 to stop Williams’s run at the grand slam. Stunningly. The Italian’s post-match interview was terrific. “Today is my day, sorry guys!” she said, and it was impossible not to grin in response.

Maybe it shouldn’t have been such a surprise. After all, Vinci’s name literally means “win.”

Afterwards the commentators tried to find examples from other sports with which to compare the magnitude of the upset, with the usuals (Villanova over Georgetown, Douglas over Tyson, etc.) being highlighted.

From poker I was harkening back to Hal Fowler defeating Bobby Hoff heads-up at the 1979 WSOP as a closer analogue than Moneymaker over Farha. This evening I saw Pamela Maldonado make what was probably an even better comparison over Twitter, bringing up Joe McKeehen’s knockout of Daniel Negreanu two spots shy of the November Nine back in July and noting McKeehen’s similarly sympathetic-while-competitive response afterwards.

The favorite-underdog dynamic makes poker an exciting game, since in every hand the dog still has a chance. In sports, too, it adds a layer of interest as we watch to find out how what happens compares to what was thought would happen. And there, too, do the favorites -- even the greatest ones -- sometimes fall.

Playing Games, Watching Sports

Saw someone refer in passing to this whole “sportifying” poker idea that has come up now and again over the last several months, usually in the context of the Global Poker Index and some of the ideas and stories related to their method of ranking tournament players and associated ventures.

It was an unsympathetic reference, insisting -- as I tend to do -- that poker is really a “game” not a “sport,” although not elaborating on the point much further.

This debate or conversation starter or whatever you want to call it comes up occasionally in my “Poker in American Film and Culture” course, thanks largely to a reading I assign early on, the first chapter of Al Alvarez’s book Poker: Bets, Bluffs and Bad Beats titled “The American Game.”

In that chapter Alvarez makes a good case for why poker is, in his opinion, the “American national game.” In fact the first move he makes as he launches into the argument is explicitly to distinguish poker from baseball and football -- i.e., a couple of other games which might spring to mind as candidates for the title he’s bestowing on poker.

The difference, says Alvarez, is that “baseball and football are spectator sports, and, airtime and column inches notwithstanding, not many people go on playing them once they have left school and lost their physical edge. Poker, in comparison, is a game for life and a great equalizer -- what the young gain from stamina the old make up for with experience -- and it is played by at least sixty million Americans.”

The book was published in 2001, when about 285 million lived in the U.S. Today the population is edging toward 320 million. You continue to see estimates of the number of poker players ranging from 40-60 million, although that’s obviously a hard number to pinpoint.

In any case it’s probably safe to say there are more people playing poker in America than are playing baseball or football. According to one report, there were a little over one million football players in high school last year and a little under half a million playing baseball. You could extrapolate from that how many total players (older and younger) there might be in each sport, but I think the total would be well below the 40-60 million poker players.

A lifelong sport like golf might be a better comparison, actually. It sounds like there are about 25 million golfers in the country at present, a number that has held steady for the last three years or so according to another report.

Stepping back from all of this (and perhaps getting a little abstract as I do), it occurred to me that calling poker a “sport” rather than a “game” could make it seem more like something you watch than something you play.

Many of us love to play one sport or another, but don’t necessarily look upon all sports as providing opportunities for participation. Or any, even. Each sport requires some specific set of physical skills that can potentially limit involvement for those who lack them. Meanwhile playing a game of cards also requires some skills (more so mental than physical), and to play cards well requires even more, but the game of poker is nowhere near as exclusive as are sports like baseball and basketball.

I know the idea behind “sportifying” poker is to make the game more accessible (and acceptable), but could calling poker a sport and championing its most successful players as superior mental “athletes” actually make the game less inviting to new players? That is, could it make the game seem more exclusive as far as participating is concerned, though (perhaps) more inviting to spectators?

Another way of posing the same question: Today the International Federation of Poker (@IFPoker) tweeted “#Poker is a game where the best players think about the way hands are played at a level most people couldn't even imagine! #mindsport #skill.” That’s a view I imagine most of us who have studied poker and who take the game seriously can readily appreciate to be true.

But does that make poker a more inviting game to play? Or less?

Contemplating Commissioners

Was listening today to an interview with the new Major League Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred who was elected to take over the position last August after Bud Selig stepped down.

Can’t say he was especially riveting to listen to as he addressed various “state of the game” questions, but afterwards my mind wandered a little into a couple of interesting memories from years past.

One was very long ago -- had to be 1981, I guess -- when Major League Baseball went on strike for nearly two months right in the middle of the season. I lived and breathed baseball then, playing all summer, collecting cards, watching and listening to games, and poring over box scores in the paper every day, so the strike was hugely disappointing to a young Shamus. (Making it worse, the strike started the day after my birthday.)

I was concerned enough about the situation to write a letter to then MLB commissioner Bowie Kuhn, something I probably wouldn’t remember having done if not for the fact that Kuhn wrote me back. I have long lost both letters, but you can imagine what they both said -- mine expressing a desire they’d resolve the sucker and his registering my concern and stating his similar hope.

I thought of that when hearing Manfred talk about how baseball fans contact him constantly -- some every single day -- with thoughts about the game and how it can be improved. I imagine he probably experiences that sort of thing much more often than Kuhn did back in those letter-writing days.

A bit of trivia: Had history evolved differently, Richard Nixon could have been in the MLB Commissioner’s seat then as he was actually offered the job in 1965, which he turned down. Later on, after both he and Kuhn took their respective offices in 1969, Kuhn presented Nixon a trophy honoring him as “Baseball’s Number 1 Fan” during a reception at the White House (pictured at left).

I also found myself after listening to Manfred being interviewed thinking a bit about the World Series of Poker’s experiment with having a commissioner and Jeffrey Pollack’s tenure in that position which lasted from early 2006 through November 2009. Pollack first came from NASCAR to the WSOP in mid-2005, and somewhere in there -- perhaps just after he changed from being VP of Marketing to Commish -- there were rumors that Pollack was in fact angling one day perhaps to succeed Selig as the next MLB Commissioner.

Some of Manfred’s PR-like talk about baseball made me think of Pollack and the rhetoric he employed -- often effectively -- when talking about poker in general and the WSOP in particular during those years. While many spoke favorably of him early on, later things soured a bit and his departure and subsequent involvement in the failed Epic Poker League helped influence many to conclude his influence on the game’s livelihood was mixed at best.

I was thinking, though, about how we got used to having someone in what seemed an authoritative position -- even if it weren’t, really -- who was constantly addressing questions about the “state of the game” and thus by default carrying a kind of influence, if not on the game at least on how people thought about the game.

There are certain poker players who today perhaps occasionally seem to fill that role. I suppose Alex Dreyfus with his GPI-related ventures perhaps also does, too, as do those leading the EPT, WPT, WSOP, and other major tours and venues.

But there’s no “commissioner” currently acting as the game’s “table captain” -- not that there actually can be, I don’t think.

Which is okay. Until there’s a strike, then to whom will the kids send their letters?

Analyzing Analytics

Yesterday ESPN published kind of an interesting piece in which all 122 professional teams in the country’s four major sports -- that is, the MLB, NBA, NHL, and NFL -- were assessed with regard to their relative commitment to “analytics” or using the advanced stats available to guide them in the development of their franchises.

They say they came up with the list “after looking at the stats, reaching out to every team and dozens of informed sources and evaluating each front office." Not sure what stats they looked at, actually. In fact, it almost sounds like they eyeballed it. (Rim shot.)

I wrote a couple of posts some time back about reading Moneyball and reinvigorating an interest in the topic that for me traced all of the way back to reading Bill James’ Baseball Abstract each year as a teen.

The Oakland A’s and their sabermetrics-using general manager Billy Beane were the focus of that book, and they earned a spot inside the top 10 at No. 9 in the rankings. Meanwhile the Philadelphia 76ers -- for a time earlier this year the worst team in the NBA -- sit atop the rankings as the franchise that has “embraced data the most.”

Within each league teams are broken down into categories as either being “all-in” with analytics (using a poker metaphor), “believers,” having “one foot in,” being “skeptics,” or being “nonbelievers.” The New York Knicks -- the team that took over the distinction as the NBA’s worst this year from the Sixers -- ranks dead last among NBA teams, with their president Phil Jackson described as a “conscientious objector.” The Knicks rank just above the Philadelphia Phillies at the very bottom of the overall list.

There are a handful of NBA teams who are “all-in,” but in the NFL not one team is accorded that status. Only one NHL team is -- the Chicago Blackhawks -- while the MLB has the highest percentage of teams “all-in” with analytics (nine of 30 teams), reflecting how most of the earliest work in that area occurred in baseball before making its way to other sports.

My Panthers are described as “skeptics,” while my Hornets have “one foot in” the analytics door. I’d probably describe myself as having “one foot in” as well, and so tend to feel better about the Hornets’ commitment than that of the Panthers.

In fact, I would guess that each team’s fans feel more or less encouraged by the report according to how closely their team’s evaluation matches their own views of using advanced stats to guide roster decisions, the management of salaries, line-up creation and other in-game moves, and so on.

Someone should poll fans of all 122 teams and with the results build a spreadsheet, then measure the findings against team performance, attendance figures, regional climate, the city’s GDP, and other relevant factors to create a Fan Contentedness Index to be used for the scheduling of promotions and ticket pricing.

Or, you know, they could skip all that and just listen for cheers and boos.

Poker and Sports (and Fun and Games)

Earlier this week Victoria Coren Mitchell was interviewed over on PokerNews about various topics, one of which was the participation of no less than 22 men in this year’s women’s event at EPT11 Deauville. You might have heard about the men overrunning that event, with one of them eventually winning. In fact there were but 83 total entrants in the €200 buy-in tournament, meaning men made up more than one-fourth of the field.

I’ve written here before on several occasions about the subject of men playing in tournaments designated as women’s events. In fact I’ve even written about Coren Mitchell’s opinions about the subject, a post occasioned by my having covered the Ladies Event at the 2012 WSOP when around 10 men participated, as did Coren. That was before she would add Mitchell, and before the WSOP would add that inflated 10x price tag to the event for men wanting to play.

To summarize that earlier discussion, both she and I find the men playing in ladies events a huge bummer, a point of view she reiterated in the interview this week. There was another point she made at the end of the interview, however, that I found newly thought-provoking, something that came up in the context of discussing the Hendon Mob database.

Coren Mitchell has known the Hendon Mob guys from way back, having participated in the old forum, written columns in the past for the site, and also shared many funny anecdotes about them in her excellent poker memoir, For Richer, For Poorer: A Love Affair With Poker.

In her comments she somewhat laments the Hendon Mob site’s having been taken over by the Global Poker Index group, primarily because it disconnects the site from what it once was (and from her friends the Boatmans, Joe Beevers, and Ram Vaswani). “It was all a bit of fun, and now they are not involved in it anymore,” she says.

Continuing from there, Coren Mitchell speaks directly to the effort by the GPI and Alexandre Dreyfus to “sportify” poker.

“If the website is trying to seriously make poker a sport, I think they may have lost some of the comedy of the enterprise,” suggests Coren Mitchell. “But it doesn’t matter. Is snooker a sport? Is darts a sport? Is chess a sport? I don’t think it’s an important question, really.”

Again I’m finding myself agreeing with Coren Mitchell, sharing the same ambivalence about arguments over poker being or not being a “sport” (something else I’ve written about before.) But the idea that focusing on poker’s sport-like elements could potentially drain some of the “comedy” or fun from the game isn’t necessarily something I’d considered before.

I can see the point -- that is, how heightening the significance of competition perhaps diminishes that of community, thus (potentially) making things more serious and less fun. But it’s an idea I’ll need to think about further before deciding if I agree.

What do you think? Whatever your thoughts might be about efforts to “sportify” poker, do you think those efforts might in some way serve to reduce “the comedy of the enterprise”?

Let’s Get Ridiculous

Last night Vera Valmore and I went to see the Charlotte Hornets play the Milwaukee Bucks.

Was our first game since the team dropped the Bobcats name to reclaim the old Hornets nick. Of course, we couldn’t help but be reminded of the Bobcats early on when Charlotte missed 16 straight shots in the first quarter (including several open, close-range ones) to fall behind by more than 20. They were down 17 at the half, then finally hit a few and made some stops to cut the lead to seven after three.

They then completed the comeback in the fourth to take the lead by two during the final minute, but the Bucks tied it to send the game to OT. Sadly the Hornets appeared to have expended all of their energy making the comeback, and never competed in the extra period to lose by 10.

Our lower level seats were fantastic, though, and we enjoyed every minute of the game despite the frustrating performance of the home team. Time Warner Cable Arena was packed, too, and the fans were enjoying all of the noise and craziness during every timeout, including the constant firing of t-shirt cannons, parachutes dropping Xbox games (pictured below), the “Bongo Cam,” the dancing of the Honeybees (the Charlotte cheerleaders), the blaring of “Rock and Roll (Part 2),” the Rocky theme, and other anthems, and so on.

There was one sequence in which the soundtrack pounding through the timeout was Redfoo’s dance hit from last year “Let’s Get Ridiculous,” which prompted a lot of fun silliness on the big screen. Heck, whenever bald-headed Bucks coach Jason Kidd would walk out on the floor amid the Honeybees and pulsating beats, I thought for a moment I was watching a Pitbull video.

It’s almost odd, if you think about it, how the loudest cheers and greatest excitement for many at such events are not responses to the actual game, but to the extracurricular activities. Some talk about “sportifying” poker, but meanwhile sports are being turned into something other than what they once were (although I can’t come up with a clever gerund to describe it). Still fun, though, and there’s something undeniably cool about seeing lots of kids dancing and laughing their way through an evening out with the family.

Driving home Vera and I chose not to play the radio, enjoying the quiet after what had been two-and-a-half hours of nonstop sensory overload.

Games weren’t always that way. I thought a little about how the filling of every moment with music and distractions was like other aspects of our lives today where the constant checking of phones for Facebook or Twitter updates, channel-flipping, web-surfing, and so on leaves zero “down time” regardless of one’s activity.

Made me think as well about playing poker and the often pleasurable, unhurried rhythm of that game -- I’m referring primarily to live poker, although even online one doesn’t have to play 16 tables or “fast-fold” games or turbos all the time.

It’s fun to get ridiculous sometimes. Fun, too, to slow down once in a while.

Hitting Home Runs, Moving the Goal Posts, Putting on the Full Court Press, and Other Legal Maneuvers

Today while searching around I happened upon an interesting new article appearing in the Journal of Sports & Entertainment Law. The journal is published by the Harvard Law School, and the article by Megan E. Boyd is called “Riding the Bench -- A Look at Sports Metaphors in Judicial Opinions.”

For various reasons, not the least of which being my teaching a class called “Poker in American Film and Culture,” my ears always prick up whenever I hear poker metaphors employed in non-poker contexts. And it happens a lot, with poker terms and phrases popping up on a regular basis all over, especially in politics, sports, entertainment, and business.

As the title of Boyd’s article suggests, the use of sports lingo in legal matters is the focus of her article. She begins by noting how “the adversarial nature of the court system in this country mirrors the very nature of competitive sports,” thus making it unsurprising that sports analogies should be frequently employed in the courtroom.

Just wading into such a discussion makes it hard not to think about how legal matters are often covered by the media today -- that is to say, as if they were sports contests. In any case, Boyd makes some interesting observations about how ubiquitous sports-related metaphors are in legal arguments, with some of the most common phrases such as calls for “fair play” or to “level the playing field” evoking at once ideas of legal justice and rules for ensuring games’ integrity.

The article discusses metaphors drawn from boxing, baseball, football, basketball, golf, hockey, billiards, rugby, track and field, wrestling, cricket, and car racing. And there’s even a section covering poker, too. “ESPN considers card playing to be a sport,” Boyd explains in a footnote, “and because of the interesting poker-influenced metaphors found in judicial opinions, I have included it here.”

In that section she runs through several examples including plaintiffs having to “reveal their hand,” attorneys using an “ace in the hole” to launch suits, or parties “sandbagging” by withholding evidence until more opportune moment.

Boyd also mentions how lyrics from “The Gambler” often get quoted in the courtroom, citing a couple of instances. She doesn’t mention there another reference to the song in a legal context from about three years ago when a couple of the Black Friday defendants, John Campos and Chad Elie, were still fighting to have their cases dismissed. (You know what I mean -- that Black Friday, not today.)

Amid that battle, federal prosecutors filed a response to the pair’s motion that spelled out the many reasons why the host of charges against them should stand, a statement that reaffirmed poker to be gambling and thus covered by the Illegal Gambling Business Act.

In a totally superfluous aside, the feds also included a reference to “The Gambler” identifying it as “Willie Nelson’s classic poker song.” We know Willie plays poker -- and can perform a good card trick, if you ask him -- but obviously they meant to refer to Kenny Rogers there.

Some gaffe, that, although I didn’t really matter much to the argument. Sort of like missing a fly ball with two outs with the two-base error not resulting in any runs scored.

The Players Speak

Saw this new website launched yesterday by recently-retired New York Yankee Derek Jeter called The Players’ Tribune. From articles I’ve seen describing the site, the idea seems to be to give professional athletes a forum through which to share “their own perspectives without the filter of a reporter.”

Actually that quote comes from a reporter who has filtered Jeter’s perspective into the above paraphrase. You can read the original in a letter by Jeter on the site in which he talks about his own career and experience with the media, and how that experience appears to have helped inspire the idea for The Players’ Tribune.

“I know I’ve been guarded,” Jeter says, acknowledging his notorious reticence throughout his 20-year career to diverge much at all from the usual cliché-filled sports-speak in interviews. But he insists “I’m not a robot. Neither are the other athletes who at times might seem unapproachable. We all have emotions. We just need to be sure our thoughts will come across the way we intend.”

On the one hand, it’s an interesting idea. I’ll admit I’m not that intrigued to read about Jeter’s emotions or those of Russell Wilson, the site’s first contributor who has shared a confessional-type story about being a bully as a youngster. (Like Jeter, Wilson has also routinely been “robot”-like in every interview situation I’ve ever read or seen.) But there could be some contributors to come whose stories I might want to hear.

Then again, social media and other forms of online communication have already well established numerous avenues for players to deliver their stories and opinions in an “unfiltered” way -- to the detriment of some of them.

It reminds me a little of about five years ago once Twitter had become popular, then suddenly I realized when reporting on a tournament I was amid the “Land of 1000 Reporters.” Today all poker players can, if they wish, tell their own stories with as much detail as they wish. And many of them do -- everyday, and without cessation.

In some cases, reporters tell those stories again, often “filtering” them to suit some purpose. So, too, has already happened with both Jeter’s letter and Wilson’s column, with articles on practically every sports and sports-related site retelling those stories with different emphases and conclusions.

Of course, any currently-employed professional athlete will hardly be speaking without constraints on The Players’ Tribute -- their agents and teams’ managements will ensure that. Might be curious, though to see if the site (or others like it) might affect the way people perceive the athletes who contribute and/or the sports they play.

Poker, the Least Sporty Sport

The fall semester has already begun, and that means I’m again teaching my “Poker in American Film and Culture” course. I generally like to start the course with an excerpt from the first chapter of Poker: Bets, Bluffs, and Bad Beats by Al Alvarez in which he declares poker to be “The American Game.”

Alvarez begins the chapter comparing poker to various sports that are popular in the U.S., noting how unlike other candidates for the title of “the American game” like baseball or football, poker is a game people continue to play “once they have left school and lost their physical edge.” It’s “a game for life and a great equalizer,” he says, going on to point out how so many who “were athletes in their youth... turned to poker because their desire to compete and win lingered on long after their legs gave out.”

When discussing the excerpt with the class we’ll often address this comparison of poker to sports, and in that context I’ll usually bring up how occasionally some will argue that poker is a sport, or at least has enough in common with other sports for such a designation not to be easily dismissed.

But yesterday I found myself a little less ready to share that observation after my attention was drawn to a chart resulting from a survey conducted on Reddit in which respondents were given a list of more than 50 games and activities and asked whether or not they considered them as a sport.

The list included a few obvious “sports” (to me, anyway) like boxing, lacrosse, wrestling, and golf, as well things like paintball, fishing, chess, and poker about which people reasonably disagree about the designation. If I’m following the explanation of the chart clearly, it looks like there were 460 respondents altogether -- not a huge sample, but enough to make the results interesting nonetheless.

The chart showing the results dramatically positions poker as the activity the fewest respondents said they considered to be a sport, with just a little over 10% saying they consider it as such. Even cheerleading, competitive video gaming, and competitive eating were considered sports by more respondents than was poker.

Here’s the chart, with poker nudged all of the way there on the right-most edge -- to the periphery, you might say (click to embiggen):

Comments on Reddit reiterate commonly made observations that people “don’t consider poker a sport because you’re just sitting there with a deck of cards” -- i.e., the relative lack of physicality involved in the game hurts poker’s candidacy here.

As I’ve written about here before, I am disinclined to call poker a sport -- preferring “game” instead (as the title of the Alvarez chapter has it) -- although I certainly understand and often enjoy thinking about the many affinities between poker and several sports, especially individual ones. Additionally, to some I describe my tournament reporting as being much like sports writing, too, which sometimes helps make the job a lot easier to explain.

While a larger sample size would be helpful, I don’t think it would largely alter poker’s low-ranking status when it comes to this particular survey question. Meanwhile, the exercise brings a couple of other questions to mind.

First, how might the fact that most are unwilling to entertain the idea that poker is a sport affect attitudes toward the game, generally speaking? Also, as many who have taken up the “cause” of poker have tried the tactic of likening it to sports in order to make it seem more culturally acceptable, but does that argument largely fall on deaf ears?

Humility and Hubris

I’ve mentioned here a couple of times how over the last several months I’ve gotten hooked on The Dan Le Batard Show. It originates each weekday afternoon from Miami where they have an hour just for the locals, then three more hours syndicated nationally.

The show was especially fun to follow during the latter half of the NBA regular season, playoffs, and the post-Finals drama involving LeBron James that ended with his decision to leave the Miami Heat after four years to return to play for the Cleveland Cavaliers.

James, you’ll recall, made that announcement via a letter published in Sports Illustrated. The general response to the move was much more positive than had been the case four years ago when James decided to leave for Miami, with “The Decision” still earning him derision as a poorly-conceived bit of PR. Here, though, James saying “I’m coming home” played a lot more favorably among most observers (outside of Miami, anyway), and it does set up an intriguing storyline for the NBA next year.

They’ve predictably spent a lot of time discussing both James’s departure and the future of the Heat on Le Batard’s show. Also capturing the attention of folks in Miami was how James conspicuously failed to thank the Heat fans in his letter. He refers to Miami as a “second home” and thanks his teammates and Miami management, but doesn’t specifically thank Heat fans.

Today there is a big “Welcome Home LeBron” event happening in his hometown of Akron, Ohio. As a prank, the Le Batard show bought up several billboards telling James “You’re Welcome” from the Miami fans, humorously drawing attention to the omission in the letter.

Regular listeners of the show knew all about the billboards as well as the fact that the show was readying a “multi-pronged attack” involving some more hijinks today. They also know that Le Batard himself is much more interested in having fun than anything else, and his buying up the billboards to deliver a message genuinely felt by some Miami fans was mainly just a goof to fill some downtime in the sports calendar (and drum up publicity for his show).

The ESPN folks didn’t find the billboards as funny or harmless, though, actually suspending Le Batard and knocking his show off the air for two days in response. Saying the “stunt does not reflect ESPN’s standards and brand,” the network weirdly claims they “were not made aware of his plans in advance” despite the fact that the idea was discussed repeatedly on the show beforehand.

ESPN’s reaction is silly, although it kind of helps promote even further that sense of “fun anarchy” surrounding the episode (to use Le Batard’s phrase describing the “stunt”). In any case, the story made me think about how sports fans relatively value humility and hubris, a topic that comes up in poker sometimes, too.

James’s move to Miami was overtly cloaked in hubris, with his infamous prediction of multiple championships (“not one, not two, not three...”) still being endlessly quoted as a mark against him. He scored points for humility, though, with his SI letter, explicitly saying “I’m not promising a championship” and “I know how hard that is to deliver.”

The jokey, indirect complaint about James failing to thank the Heat fans, though, refers again to a lack of humility -- something most missed when reading the letter initially.

We see this in poker sometimes, such as in the reaction to Ryan Riess saying after winning the WSOP Main Event last fall that “I just think I’m the best player in the world.” Or Daniel Colman stirring things up by proclaiming after winning this year’s “Big One for One Drop” that “I don’t owe poker a single thing.”

We like competitors to express confidence, but I think we like hearing expressions of humility a lot more. Perhaps in poker it is different, where the element of luck is more conspicuous than in basketball or in other sports (where it exists, too), thus making it appear even more unseemly not to acknowledge that one isn’t actually invincible.

In any case, will be interesting to hear Le Batard when he returns, including where he will position himself on the humility-to-hubris spectrum regarding ESPN’s humorless action.

(EDIT [added 8/11/14]: For more regarding Le Batard’s suspension -- which sounds as though it was more for some planned-for hijinks than for the billboards alone -- read his column over at ESPN.)

Transactions vs. Action

As a sports fan, I’m prone to choosing sports radio as a kind of default option when involved with certain tasks like mowing the lawn (discussed yesterday), cleaning stalls, errand-running, and the like.

Back in the day we were all confined to listening to the local guys yammer on about local teams. (Actually, if I think far enough back I can remember days when sports radio was a unique option on the AM dial where you were more apt to hear music or news.) But now we’ve got our smart phones and internet and can pretty much pick whatever we want when it comes to sports radio.

It’s nonstop, too, airing round the clock with thousands of stations all running at once. It’s kind of overwhelming the actual sports about which everyone is talking, really. And the games obviously don’t provide enough to fill all that time, so other aspects of sports tend to help fill up all of those hours.

Lately I’ve been listening more and more to Dan Le Batard’s show out of Florida, which is often quite good (and funny). Yesterday I had his show on while doing some work around the farm, and he was expressing a lot of angst over all of the NFL draft jibber jabber this week. I feel exactly the same way, not caring in the least about the draft, and so was keen to hear Le Batard express a similar view.

One line in particular stood out for me from what he had to say about the overkill in coverage of the draft, an observation that kind of put it into a larger context regarding how people tend to follow sports these days.

“Transactions have replaced action in sports,” said Le Batard, here referring in particular to the draft and side stories of trades and so on. He went on to explain how it was not just the business of sports that seem to occupy so many so much, but also fantasy sports which allow fans to play at the business of sports, building their own teams, making their own trades, and so on.

I’ve written here before about how fantasy sports don’t really do it for me. Le Batard and I come from roughly the same generation, I think, and so we both grew up watching sports in the same way -- more focused on the action than the transactions. I’m intrigued by trades and even the business side of sports sometimes, but it is never as compelling as the games themselves for me.

Sometimes I think with poker there’s a similar phenomenon wherein a large number of players and others -- we’ll put them all under the heading of “enthusiasts” -- get more involved with various contexts for the game than the game itself, including the business of poker, legal issues, and other dramas that arise fairly frequently thanks to the wide variety of characters the game attracts. Or it could be I just feel that way after being relatively out of “action” for so long (i.e., without an online account or a ready live venue in which to play).

Looks like the draft is on again. At least there’s an NBA playoff game coming on in an hour.

The Desire for Results

Was listening to The Dan Le Batard Show last Friday for a short while and caught a brief visit by NBA Hall of Famer and commentator Charles Barkley.

Barkley was only on for just a few minutes. While I had missed the discussion that just preceded his arrival, apparently Le Batard and his co-host had been talking about Robert Horry, the power forward who had a solid, long career who happened to be on seven different teams that won NBA championships -- two with Houston (1994-1995), three with the L.A. Lakers (2000-2002), and two more with San Antonio (2005, 2008). (That is Horry pictured after winning his seventh title.)

The discussion had been focusing on Horry’s seven rings and the suggestion that players who perhaps had more individual accomplishments on the court but no titles might wish to swap careers with Horry. Barkley -- one of many great NBA players who never won a championship -- was then invited on to comment on the topic, primarily because Horry himself had made an interesting statement that he would in fact rather have had Barkley’s career.

I don’t want to get into comparing the two players’ careers, but rather I just wished to share something Barkley said during his comment, which reminded me a little of the oft-discussed topic of being “results oriented” in poker.

“Charles, if I give you Robert Horry’s career... seven championships... [would] you trade it for yours?” asked Le Batard of Barkley.

“I don’t look at it like that,” Barkley began. “I tell all of these guys, basketball is what you do, not who you are. I mean, to be honest with you, I think the championships are more for the fans.... I wanted to win for the fans of Philadelphia and for the fans of Phoenix. But I still tell these guys ‘Don’t you ever let these people tell you basketball dictates what you think about yourself as a person. It’s what you do, it ain’t who you are.’”

There were a couple of ideas overlapping in Barkley’s comment, I believe, one of which was this broader statement about self-worth and not getting caught up others’ standards of greatness when considering your own accomplishments.

The more specific point, though, was to respond in an indirect way to the suggestion that winning a championship represented a goal that transcended all others in sports. Perhaps never winning a title has encouraged Barkley to want to speak of doing so as only part of the picture for NBA players, not the entire picture. In any case, it struck me as interesting to hear him deliberately contradict the much-repeated mantra in sports that winning is all.

Also intriguing (to me) is this idea Barkley tosses out that “the championships are more for the fans” than for the players. There I think Barkley isn’t necessarily correct, as it’s obvious most players, coaches, owners and front office folks find championships especially important. But I realized when hearing him make that point that it evoked pretty strongly those discussions about being “results oriented” you often hear in poker.

One way of taking Barkley’s statement is to regard it as a claim that as a player he recognizes things about the game that the fans only partly know about or don’t understand at all. There are lots of ways of measuring one’s success as a player and teammate, says Barkley, that fans don’t necessarily appreciate, and in fact the winning of championships tends to eclipse a lot of those other evaluative measures for the fans when it comes to judging players and/or teams.

In other words, fans are (in a way) results oriented. (Which is absolutely fine, I think Barkley is saying.) Players, meanwhile, know better than strictly to judge an individual’s career based on how many titles he won.

Meanwhile in poker the complaint about people being “results oriented” usually comes from a similar angle, with the more experienced (or skilled) player being the one pointing out how less accomplished players or observers with little understanding of poker strategy are too easily swayed by outcome of a hand to realize it doesn’t always accurately reflect the skill with which it was played.

In poker, too, there are different ways to measure players’ worth than simply on the basis of their results. But again (to further the analogy suggested by Barkley’s comment), it takes a keener understanding of the game to appreciate that fact. (Here, I think, the criticism also often implies that those who make the mistake of judging players solely by results should learn more about poker and correct their ways.)

Setting all of this aside, though, it’s funny how the very fact that results do signify so heavily in poker and in sports is in fact a chief appeal of both. When one team wins and another loses -- or when one player wins a poker hand and another loses -- we have something very concrete and unambiguous to help us define the experience of playing or watching. We have “closure” (of a kind). So much of life isn’t so definite, with “winners” and “losers” and the whole idea of “results” being much, much more elusive.

It’s no wonder we get carried away with assigning importance to results in the games we play and watch. Results are something the games give us, something we desire, and something we have immense trouble finding elsewhere.

Links on the Links (Poker and Golf)

Not too long ago I was writing about golf and how unlike poker it was a sport that readily appealed to spectators who weren’t necessarily players. I wrote mainly from experience -- or should I say, from non-experience -- seeing as how I’d only played golf a couple dozen times in my life and not for around 15 years.

Well, last Friday I broke my lengthy streak of non-golfing by playing a full round with my father and brother, something the three of us had actually never done before. Like me, they’re both casual golfers although both have been playing now and then over recent years, with Pop having gotten back into the game a lot more since he retired a few years ago. (That’s him up above putting.) But we’d never had a golf outing together, and so besides being fun just spending time with them there was an added novelty to the day as we wound our way around the lengthy course one stroke at a time.

The only time in my life I ever played golf regularly was in grad school at Indiana, joining some buds at a Par 3 many times and occasionally playing the regular course where students could play on the cheap. Lining up my first tee shot on Friday, I had little confidence I would remember how to swing and strike the ball, but kind of stunningly managed to hit it perfectly about 140 yards right down the middle of the first fairway.

Of course, things became decidedly less simple as I struggled to recall how to use the irons and wedges, and indeed I can’t really say even after 18 holes that I’d figured out how to handle the middle game. But I did drive okay all day, even hitting a green on a par 3 (the highlight of the afternoon), and while my putting was erratic I at least didn’t feel incompetent once on the greens.

We didn’t really keep score, and in fact on the back nine decided to play “Captain’s Choice” (a.k.a. “scramble golf”) in order to help speed things along. Again, we were playing my tee shot usually, but after that it was Pop getting us to the greens and then usually one of them getting us to the hole.

I found myself thinking occasionally of various parallels between golf and poker, of which there are many. At one point I remembered a “Pop Poker” piece I wrote for PokerListings a while ago in which I talked with Tom Schneider about some of those connections as well as “Why Poker Pros Love Gambling on Golf.”

It’s pretty easy to think of a single hole of golf as being like a poker hand, and when I say I was fairly comfortable with my tee shots but not so much afterwards it does feel a lot like saying I knew what to do preflop, but would get a little lost on the flop, turn, and/or river. (Indeed, I literally got lost in the river more than once -- that is, the small water hazards that dotted the course.)

There are myriad other connections between the games, too, perhaps the most obvious being the way both incorporate skill and luck, with the more accomplished players being necessarily less affected by the games’ chance elements, and the novices being more needful to get lucky in order to succeed.

Both games feature sometimes complicated rules and layers of etiquette. Both are usually played on a soft green surface. Oh, and of course, in both players occasionally need to be mindful of the rake. (Rimshot.)

Not really seeing myself becoming a regular golfer any time soon, which perhaps evokes yet another personal poker parallel with my choice to remain a “recreational player.” But I definitely was reminded of both the game’s appeal as well as forced to appreciate how mentally and physically challenging the game can be.