When Nixon’s Ace in the Hole Turned Into a Blank

Following last night’s debate between Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, CNN aired what will be the first of a series of shows called Race to the White House looking at past elections, in this case focusing on the 1960 race between John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon.

I’m currently teaching my course “Tricky Dick: Richard Nixon, Poker, and Politics,” and in fact we were just reading about and discussing the 1960 race, including watching lengthy excerpts from the first JFK-RMN debate. I made sure to let my students know about last night’s program, then, for a couple of reasons.

For one, since we had only just gotten through discussing the race I thought they’d find it interesting to compare what we’d learned with what was included in the hour-long show. Secondly, I like reminding them how even though we’re studying people and events from a half-century ago, many are still interested in these things and believe them to be relevant today -- as indicated by CNN giving an hour of prime time to the ’60 race.

The ads for last night’s show made it seem as though the focus would be on the historic first debate (of four) between Kennedy and Nixon that took place on September 26, 1960, a notion furthered by the fact that the show was being paired with the Dems’ debate. In truth, though, the debate only earned a tiny bit of attention during the hour, fleetingly discussed for just a few minutes during the latter half of the show.

The rest of the hour was spent covering the respective candidates’ campaigns via commentary from a few academics and others, the showing of numerous clips from 1960, and some fleeting reenactments employed to enhance the story. Kevin Spacey -- evoking his House of Cards role as U.S. president -- is the narrator for the series, and was heard at the start of the hour suggesting (somewhat misleadingly) that Nixon was hopelessly outmatched by Kennedy as a politician and campaigner.

“You think you know the rules,” he says as we watch an actor portraying Nixon in shadowy profile. “But what happens when you discover you don’t even know how to play the game?”

Following such a line, it isn’t surprising to see a lot of emphasis thereafter on Kennedy’s right moves and Nixon’s wrong ones during the campaign. That said, the show provides some balance as well, illustrating in a necessarily cursory way pros and cons for both candidates. Near the end it is emphasized that JFK was as adept as RMN was when it came to “dirty tricks,” although the show doesn’t really dwell on too many examples (other than alluding to possible voter fraud in Illinois and Texas tilting the election JFK’s way).

Nixon’s eagerness to debate Kennedy is correctly presented as a misstep. During the quick presentation of the first debate, Nixon’s five-o’clock shadow and flop sweat is of course highlighted, and in fact there’s even a quick pre-debate clip of Nixon saying “think I better shave.” The much-repeated line about those listening on radio thinking Nixon “won” the debate while TV viewers favored JFK is uncritically repeated again, something that started as a few anecdotes and got blown up into some sort of ultimate signifier of not just the debate but the entire campaign and election.

Other more meaningful moments from the 1960 campaign are highlighted, including JFK’s address to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association, Martin Luther King’s arrest in Georgia and JFK’s phone call to Coretta, and a couple of Nixon’s “bad luck” moments including being hospitalized for two full weeks at the end of August and beginning of September.

Nixon’s hospitalization resulted from an infection that resulted from his banging his knee on a car door during a stop in Greensboro, NC in mid-August, part of his foolhardy effort to visit all 50 states during the campaign -- something he insisted on doing even after his injury and hospitalization.

In his discussion of the 1960 campaign in Six Crises (written shortly afterwards), Nixon concludes with a list of 16 things he “should have” done, all decisions which in his mind likely contributed to costing him the election. He does not include campaigning in all 50 states among the list of items, though he does lead it off with “I should have refused to debate Kennedy.”

For the second item on the list, and perhaps the second-most important one in retrospect, Nixon says “I should have used Eisenhower more in the campaign.” There is brief reference to Ike having been largely absent from the campaign near the end of the CNN program. With less than a week to go before the election, Spacey’s narration suggests the Nixon campaign had been cleverly waiting to use Eisenhower at the very last to produce a greater effect.

“Nixon has one last card to play,” he says, “his old boss, ex-General and President Dwight D. Eisenhower.” Despite the card-playing metaphor, no indication is made to the fact that both Ike and Nixon were poker players.

We see shots from the ticker tape parade of November 2nd in which Ike finally appeared with Nixon, an event which is said to have given Nixon a late boost as Election Day drew near. I anticipated another turn in the story here -- one explaining how this “one last card” wasn’t nearly as effective as it might have been. But the program moved in a different direction.

This might have been the biggest omission from the show, actually. Not only was Eisenhower mostly absent from the campaign, but in late August 1960 (just a week after Nixon bumped his knee in Greensboro), Eisenhower infamously concluded his weekly press conference with a line that would greatly hurt RMN in the weeks leading up to the debate.

“We understand that the power of decision is entirely yours, Mr. President,” began a reporter, leading up to what would be the last question of the presser. “I just wondered if you could give us an example of a major idea of his [i.e., Nixon's] that you had adopted in that role, as the decider and final, uh....”

About to leave, Eisenhower said “If you give me a week, I might think of one. I don’t remember.”

Afterwards Eisenhower would say he didn’t mean to suggest he actually needed a week to come up with an idea of Nixon’s his administration had found useful. Rather he was just referring to the fact that he’d be giving another press conference a week later and they could continue the discussion then.

But the damage was done. In fact, in that first debate a month later Nixon would be asked early on about Eisenhower’s statement, putting RMN on the defensive right away. And not long after that, the Kennedy campaign built a television ad around Ike’s line -- take a look:

I was a little surprised CNN didn’t touch on this part of the story of the 1960 campaign, the moment when Nixon’s “ace in the hole” suddenly turned into a useless blank. Still, for those unfamiliar with the 1960 race there was enough in the program perhaps to whet your appetite to learn more.

Image: Graphic from CNN advertisement, Race for the White House, 3/6/16 episode.

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.

Six Paradoxes of Poker

Continuing yesterday’s discussion of what poker is -- or, rather, those elements that are essential to the game (cards, money, and bluffing) -- today I want to talk about some of the game’s more interesting contradictions. What follows is a discussion of six such “paradoxes of poker,” all of which add to the game’s complexity and, in some cases, popularity.

Obvious to most is the competitive nature of poker, a “zero sum” game in which no one can win without someone else losing. A rake being taken from a cash game or tournament fees actually make it not quite “zero sum,” but the point still holds -- there are no winners in poker without there also being losers.

That money is being won and lost adds further incentive to players’ desire to best one another, with even the smallest-stakes games sometimes encouraging antagonism given the fundamental need for each player to pursue his or her self-interest. Yet cooperation among adversaries is also needed for game play, and while many rules are unalterable, mutual agreement often must be reached regarding various particulars in order for games to proceed.

There’s one paradox of poker, then -- it’s a game that at once promotes self-interest and community. (For more on that one, see an earlier post titled “Poker, the Antisocial Social Game.”)

Furthermore, poker is often heralded for its promotion of egalitarian ideals -- “a truly democratic activity,” as Al Alvarez once described the game. “Race, color, creed, what you look like, where you come from, and what you do for a living are of no interest at all,” he argues in Poker: Bets, Bluffs, and Bad Beats. “A little green man from a distant galaxy could sit down and play without anyone blinking, provided he had the necessary amount of chips in front of him and anted up on time.”

Charles A. Murray’s New York Times op-ed from about three years ago titled “Poker Is America” (discussed here) anecdotally reinforces such a position, noting how the “occupational and income mix” and variety of races and ethnicities he routinely encounters while playing suggests “a poker table is America the way television commercials portray it but it seldom is.”

Even if the political scientist’s account of never having “experienced a moment of tension arising from anything involving race, class, or gender” while regularly playing poker in a West Virginia casino was met by many with counter-examples of less utopian scenes around his idyllic baize, his point that the game itself does not discriminate remains valid.

Such is one reason why a succession of poker-playing presidents would be inspired to describe their domestic programs in poker terms, with Theodore Roosevelt’s “Square Deal,” FDR’s “New Deal,” and Harry Truman’s “Fair Deal” all aimed at resetting the game of economic opportunity according to poker’s inclusive impartiality. A similar view has been voiced by Barack Obama -- another poker player -- during his time in office, who has often reiterated “I believe that this country succeeds when everyone gets a fair shot, when everyone does their fair share, when everyone plays by the same rules.”

However, as soon as the cards are dealt and the first pot is pushed to a winner, a problem becomes evident. In a game that necessitates cooperation and promotes parity, chips are exchanged with every hand played. In other words, if all are really are equal at the start, the goal of everyone involved thereafter is literally to better him or herself at others’ expense, or make things as unequal as they can.

As Garry Wills wrote in Nixon Agonistes when describing mid-century administrations’ economic efforts, “to protect the game, the government would give everyone a new deal, making sure it was a fair deal,” but “each time the cards have been newly dealt, we must collect and reshuffle them to allow for new players who have drifted up to the table; we are endlessly ‘dealing,’ never getting to the game.” (“The metaphor is a mess,” Wills concludes.)

I would suggest this paradox of poker is in fact a central part of the game’s appeal, with the game (in a way) providing what society or government cannot. Every hand really is a new beginning, a chance to start over and get it right, to reinvent oneself and others and reimagine one’s place at the table -- or in the world.

Other contradictions characterize poker as well, including the related one that finds poker promoting individualism and self-reliance while also necessitating the kind of collectivism or interdependence described above. Poker is not a team sport, yet it cannot be played alone.

A third paradox of poker is borne from the disparate approaches taken to the game by that great variety of players it attracts, with the so-called “professional” motivated more by profit than pleasure sometimes seated directly across from the “recreational” opponent for whom time spent at the table is viewed a vacation from genuine labor.

From the time of the Civil War and even before, those making a living off of cards adjudged their activity as work, not play, a group that would come to include those 19th-century card sharps for whom the occupation of “gambler” included an understanding of and willingness to cheat and sometimes literally fight for their livelihood. Even the ill-fated Wild Bill Hickok’s last ride to Deadwood was primarily motivated by a desire to earn an income from the poker tables such as the one at Saloon No. 10 where he’d be dealt his final hand.

The subsequent growth of the game in the later 20th century later fashioned new types of poker pros, such as those inhabiting the California card rooms categorized by anthropologist David Hayano in Poker Faces (discussed here) according to their degrees of financial commitment (the “worker professional,” the “outside-supported professional,” the “subsistence professional,” the “career professional”). Las Vegas card rooms would likewise come to be populated by “regs” showing up daily to earn livings off the succession of tourists whose participation in the games were of much shorter duration.

The later rise of tournament poker then created a new class of “circuit grinders,” among them a subsection of “sponsored pros” whose monetary investment would be lessened by the online sites they represented. Tours criss-crossing the United States and several other continents would feature tournament series in which amateurs routinely took on the pros, with the World Series of Poker in Vegas each summer attracting tens of thousands of home game heroes to compete directly with the game’s elite.

That poker can be viewed at once as both work and play is a direct consequence of yet another of poker’s paradoxes -- the fourth in our list -- namely the complicated way the game rewards skillful play yet also does not deny luck as a factor affecting outcomes.

A sound grasp of odds and probabilities has always provided an edge to some, as has being equipped to suss out the significance of opponents’ game-related actions, words, and other non-verbal “tells” while successfully masking the meaning of one’s own. Yet as all who have played poker well know, a hand perfectly played does not guarantee a positive result. “Suckouts,” “bad beats,” and “coolers” frequently occur, the many ways players lose despite outplaying opponents reflected by the variety of terms indicating different types of misfortune.

The relative weight of skill and luck in poker has been the subject of numerous legal arguments dating back to the 19th century, with proponents wishing to distinguish poker from other types of gambling by emphasizing skill, those wanting to forbid the game rather motivated to argue for luck’s role, and judges having ruled for either side many times over.

That poker involves both skill and luck also has encouraged some to argue further for its close connection to American history and the country’s development and character. Defining what he calls the “American DNA,” James McManus has written of “two strands in particular that have always stood out in high contrast: the risk-averse Puritan work ethic and the entrepreneur’s urge to seize the main chance,” noting how poker uniquely satisfies both urges. Here McManus echoes others linking poker to the “frontier spirit” that at once values hard work yielding legitimately gotten gains while embracing risk in the name of seeking even greater rewards.

That a lucky card can help an amateur win a hand against a pro provides encouragement to the former to take a seat against the latter. But an understanding of luck’s role and that skillful play generally wins out in the long term likewise encourages the pro to endure. As Jesse May’s poker-playing protagonist in his novel Shut Up and Deal explains, “Poker is a combination of luck and skill. People think mastering the skill part is hard, but they’re wrong. The trick to poker is mastering the luck.”

A fifth paradox of poker that like others might be said to have added further to the game’s popularity is the way poker alternately -- or simultaneously -- satisfies desires for both realism and romance (an idea I’ve explored here before). As evidenced by a river one-outer denying a 98% favorite to win a pot in Texas hold’em, the cards force upon players an occasionally cold reality that must be accepted. So, too, must players hopeful to win at poker on a regular basis understand and accept their own limitations as a prerequisite to improve.

“There can be no self-deception for a poker player,” pro player Mickey Appleman once lucidly explained to Alvarez (as reported in The Biggest Game in Town). “You have to be a realist to be successful. You can’t think you’ve played well if you lose consistently. Unless you can judge how well you play relative to the others, you have no chance.”

It’s a position well supported by others, including Anthony Holden who in Big Deal once articulated one of the more often quoted pronouncements regarding poker’s unflinching requirement of players to be realistic about themselves: “Whether he likes it or not, a man’s character is stripped bare at the poker table; if other players read him better than he does, he has only himself to blame. Unless he is both able and prepared to see himself as others do, flaws and all, he will be a loser in cards, as in life.”

But even a poker realist like Appleman recognizes how the game can likewise provide an inviting exit ramp to carry one away from reality.

“I’m a romantic,” Appleman continues, with nary a trace of irony, “and for me gambling is a romance.... That’s what I enjoy; the rest is by the way. I play and I play and I play; then I pick up the pieces and see how I did. It’s only at that moment that I realize I was playing for real money.”

Like other favorite pastimes, poker provides many a similar kind of “escape” into a more interesting, consistently gratifying world whose pleasures are precisely related to their distance from the tedious redundancy of the everyday. It’s a game so absorbing it can create a world unto its own, a place where players can be themselves or something else entirely, as though they were not just playing a game, but playing a role as well.

For some, that role might resemble the one forged by many of poker’s most famous players, individuals who by the strength of their card sense managed to enjoy success outside the “system” -- or perhaps fashioned systems of their own.

Real life poker heroes may serve as templates, with examples going back to Doc Holliday and Poker Alice and extending forward through players like Tex Dolly, Kid Poker, and a man named Moneymaker. So, too, might fictional poker players like the Cincinnati Kid or his nemesis “the Man,” Bret Maverick, or Mike McDermott provide notions of the type.

All of these many contrasts add depth and richness to poker, while also complicating significantly the task of presenting a straightforward history of the game. Because poker is a game of bluffing, the line between truth and fiction is frequently challenged by it, with omissions and embellishments often compromising the veracity of even the most straightforward chronicle of a hand or session as conflicting accounts of what took place exhibit Rashomon-like contradictions and hopelessly blinkered subjectivity.

Meanwhile fictional representations of poker necessarily involve creative enhancements that have helped affect understandings of the game and how it has actually been played over the decades whether on steamboats or trains, in saloons and gambling dens, on military bases and encampments, or in card rooms, casinos, and private homes.

One might argue the story of poker as told in popular culture -- in both history and fiction -- is itself one long-running bluff, the game having been shaped into a romantic version of its historical reality by all of the many letters, memoirs, biographies, articles, guide books, paintings, radio programs, songs, films, television shows, stories, and novels describing poker and its players.

We’ll call that yet another paradox of poker -- a sixth and last in the list -- that is, how the game as it is actually played and the fictional renderings of it exist together in simultaneity, overlapping each other even as hands are dealt, bets are made, and narratives about the cards, the money, and the bluffing are constructed.

Images: “Dealer Button - Poker,” Poker Photos. CC BY 2.0 (top); “A Misdeal” (1897), Frederic Remington, public domain (bottom).

Cards, Money, and Bluffing

Gonna get a little abstract both in this post and the one tomorrow. I had written something up for another purpose a while back and never used it, and so rather than leave it hidden in an old file on my computer I have decided to share it here.

The first part has to do with defining the game of poker according to its essential elements. It’s something I want to say was first inspired by a conversation with Tommy Angelo from many years back, although it could be I’m associating the author of Elements of Poker with this argument about the elements necessary to the game.

Wherever this started, the question with which we begin couldn’t be more broad in its scope: “What is poker?” And the answer is a list: “Cards, money, and bluffing.”

First, cards. Dating back as far back as the ninth century to imperial China, playing cards were employed in a wide variety of games over the next millennium while spreading throughout Asia and Europe, reflecting a host of cultural symbols and values in their changing designs along the way.

By the early 1800s, most features of the modern deck had been established, including the size and thickness of the cards as well as the four suits, with various games including bouillotte, mus, pochen, and poque having been introduced throughout Europe and carried to North America. Features borrowed from each of these games, including the building of five-card hands as well as discarding and drawing, would be incorporated into poker, a game initially played with 20 cards, then later with the full 52-card deck.

In the United States the game would grow and develop alongside the country itself, expanding to include a multitude of variants linked by the use of similar hand rankings and rules of play. Poker wouldn’t be poker without cards, but then the game has always been about much more than a flush beating a straight.

All of these precursor games offered opportunities for wagering, though it would be the amalgam of poker that would promote money to the status of being a required element of the game, as essential as the cards.

In an essay written about a half-century ago titled “Poker and American Character” (discussed here and here), historian John Lukacs maintains that “Money is the basis of poker: whereas bridge can be played for fun without money, poker becomes utterly senseless without it,” a position which many commentators on the game readily share.

Each hand of poker is like a complicated negotiation, with players forced both to invest in their own hands while weighing prices set by opponents on theirs. Entering into such transactions requires purchasing power -- one must bring money to the table to participate at all -- and just like in negotiations away from the poker table, each player’s personal idea of what money signifies directly affects the amounts set when selling, or the costs agreed to when buying.

“The money staked in poker represents not only our idea of the value of our cards, but our idea of what the other players’ idea of the value of our cards might be,” explains Lukacs, suggesting that money’s importance to the game is even greater than the cards. “Cards count in poker,” the historian acknowledges, “but they count less than in any other game.”

Of course, as anyone who has played even a single hand of poker well knows, such negotiations need not be entered into in good faith, thus making bluffing a third defining feature of the game.

Like the cards and the use of money, bluffing was likewise inherited by poker from most of its immediate precursors. For example, the British game of three-card brag -- one of the few antecedents of poker still played today -- bluffing is literally the name of the game, with players dealt a hand, then “bragging” their cards’ value with bets until just two remain.

“Bluff is the essence of poker,” argues David Spanier in Total Poker, articulating another sentiment with which many poker players would agree. “It is lurking in every single hand of the game,” he continues, alluding to the possibility of a bet or raise misrepresenting a hand’s value: “Has he or hasn’t he got what he says he’s got?” Every instance of a player backing cards with money presents the question to the next player to act, adding layers of complexity to the game that distinguish poker markedly from other card games and forms of gambling.

Poker needs cards, then, and money and bluffing. This argument might be used to exclude some card games that are often referred to as poker, such as liar’s poker (no cards) or HoldemX (no money) or Chinese poker (no bluffing), but to be honest I’m not that interested in drawing hard, angry lines around poker here. Rather I’d like merely to suggest cards and money and bluffing to be core elements of the game, perhaps forcing us to recognize that any variants that lack one of the three is better considered part-poker and part-something-else.

It’s not too complicated of an argument, saying poker is cards and money and bluffing. Of course, when these elements are combined, it is clear poker becomes much more than the sum of such parts, and, importantly, more complicated to describe. Doyle Brunson notes early start of Super/System that “poker is a game of people.” And because poker is a game of people -- and since people are inconsistent, flawed, and self-contradictory -- it perhaps isn’t surprising to find the game itself replete with several seeming incongruities.

These paradoxes of poker I’ll discuss tomorrow when I share the rest of this discussion.

Photo: “Cash Money,” Aaron Jacobs. CC BY-SA 2.0.

Hellmuth and Gold, Political Pundits

Today is Tuesday, which often makes me think of the “Super Tuesday” -- that is, the $1,050 buy-in weekly no-limit hold’em tournament on PokerStars. Of course today that phrase has a different meaning for many as both the Democrats and Republicans are holding primaries or caucuses in a number of states.

If I’m counting correctly, the Democrats are having primaries and caucuses in 11 different states with about a third of the total delegates up for grabs. Meanwhile the Republicans are holding primaries and caucuses in 13 states with about half of their delegates in play. In other words, after today both races will suddenly move from the early levels to the mid-to-late stages, with nominations perhaps even being all but locked up depending on how things go.

Speaking of poker and politics, I saw a couple of items pop up yesterday in which poker pros were being asked to weigh in on the ongoing presidential race.

First there was Phil Hellmuth tweeting about an article on the website The Street concerning Donald Trump running away with the GOP nomination and the efforts by some in the part to stop him. The article is titled “How Do You Beat Donald Trump? We Asked a Poker Champion,” and has Hellmuth characterizing Trump as a “loose-aggressive” (LAG) player and offering ideas for how to win versus such an opponent.

Nothing too unusual about seeing Hellmuth appear in such a context. I mean we all consistently go to Hellmuth for commentary on all sorts of things besides poker, seeking his thoughts about, say, Jay-Z’s latest joint, the Golden State Warriors, or Carl’s Jr. Texas BBQ Thickburgers.

In the article Hellmuth unsurprisingly advises patience and waiting for a strong hand with which to defeat the player getting involved in too many pots (and betting too much when he does). Of course, that strategy hasn’t worked very well for Trump’s opponents thus far, perhaps because they themselves are too weak as candidates to have much with which to play back against him.

To Hellmuth’s credit, he also outlines a Plan B which involves essentially being even more loose and aggressive in response. It’s a more interesting article than you might think, getting a bit more specific and going beyond that earlier attempt at casting Trump as a poker player appearing in Time a month ago.

The other item that came up yesterday was Jamie Gold (of all people) appearing on Fox News to talk about the presidential race. It was a short three-minute bit in which Gold, introduced as both a former “world poker champion” and an “expert odds analyst,” shared a few thoughts about betting on the election.

Gold talks a little about how betting odds perhaps provide more accurate indicators of what will happen than polls, then offers some ideas about how to bet the election, including explaining the idea of “middling” (here relevant if, as Gold suggests, “it’s about a 99% chance” Hillary Clinton and Trump will be the parties’ nominees).

Gold’s appearance predictably earned some funny and cynical responses yesterday, although it made me think back to his expressed desire after winning the 2006 WSOP Main Event -- on High Stakes Poker, I believe -- that he one day become known as the greatest bluffer ever. Have to say, his commenting on a major news network as an “expert odds analyst” is getting there, wouldn’t you say?

Gold was fine in the short segment (I thought), which you can watch here.

Photos: “Phil Hellmuth” & “Jamie Gold” (adapted), flipchip / LasVegasVegas.com, CC BY-SA 2.0.

Breaking the Game

Watched that Golden State Warriors-Oklahoma City Thunder game on Saturday night, the one in which Stephen Curry capped off a truly jaw-dropping week by draining a game-winning jumper from 32 feet (or so) for a record-tying 12th three-pointer of the game. Take a look:

I’ve already written here once this season about Curry and the Warriors. I freely admit I’m kind of fascinated by both the player and the team (now 53-5 and a genuine threat to break the ’95-’96 Bulls record of 72 wins in a season), as well as this idea that they’re somehow “breaking” the game with their unprecedented efficiency.

Curry made 12 of 16 three-pointers on Saturday, scoring 46. That was two nights after getting 51 against Orlando via 10 three-pointers, 10 two-pointers, and a free throw. The night before that he scored 42 (with “just” six threes) and back on Monday he scored 36 (with five from beyond the arc).

You might’ve heard some of these crazy percentages Curry has been shooting from especially long range. I’d seen one stat prior to the OKC game that he was 35-of-52 on shots between 28 and 50 feet (the range from which he fired up Saturday’s game winner). No shinola.

If a player shot 52 lay-ups and made them all, that’d be 104 points. Curry meanwhile had scored 105 points shooting 52 shots from 28-50 feet.

I used to play a lot of pickup ball. I remember once getting into a series of games with a dude who would frequently launch shots from 30 feet or so, hitting just enough of them to keep his teammates from getting too angry about him doing so.

It was a little disruptive, in a way, causing not just his team but the defense also to play differently in expectation of the long one going up yet again. Rather than chase our guy around in a standard man-to-man, we essentially had to start blocking out as soon as the dude crossed midcourt. Makes me think a little of what occasionally will happen in microstakes games online when a crazy raiser gets bored and starts shoving every single hand, necessarily changing the game for everyone.

But these latter examples of the pickup game pooh-bah and the maniac at the micros only partly parallel Curry, who can also very ably make his way inside that 28-foot arc where everyone else is and play it “straight.”

I guess that’s what makes what Curry is doing even more remarkable to watch -- the fact that he doesn’t have to make shots from 32 feet to be the best player on the floor, but he can do that, too.

Spring in the Garden State for PokerStars

At long last, PokerStars is returning to the United States. Or at least to part of the United States. One of the states. It’s a start.

We first started hearing about New Jersey as a possible initial post-Black Friday reentry point into the U.S. for the world’s largest poker site way, way back in late 2012, even before New Jersey finally had an online gambling bill get signed into law in late February 2013.

You might remember how Governor Chris Christie kind of surprised us with his non-veto of the bill back then, deciding at last to change his tune on the issue. (Perhaps it shouldn’t have been a surprise to see Christie abruptly changing his mind regarding another subject earlier today.)

It was a couple of months before that PokerStars had been talking to the Atlantic Club in Atlantic City, negotiating to buy the failing casino as a prelude to getting an NJ license to offer online games. That deal fell through, and the Atlantic Club stopped just failing and failed altogether in January 2014.

In mid-2013 PokerStars partnered up with the Resorts Casino Hotel, and after New Jersey held up their application for a license later that year the Amaya purchase in July 2014 helped change things in a positive way for Stars’ prospects in the Garden State. After many months of back-and-forthing including tentative launch dates being frequently bandied about, the NJ license finally got preliminary approval last September.

Then yesterday came the news of a concrete date for PokerStars NJ to go online -- March 21, 2016, the first day of spring. PokerNews summarizes the announcement, while the Online Poker Report offers a comprehensive discussion of what happens next, including some speculative thoughts about both the near-term and long-term.

From the latter, I’m most intrigued by the prospect of a PokerStars-branded live poker room being constructed at the Resorts (the plan for which was announced some time back), as well as the possibility of live PS-sponsored festivals happening there down the road. In the meantime it’ll be interesting to see how the NJ-only site fares, knowing of course that in relative terms it’ll be super-small change like every other U.S. regulated site has necessarily been.

Image: PokerStarsNJ.

Global Poker League… You’re on the Clock

Had that Global Poker League Twitch channel on the teevee during the afternoon and early evening, watching some of those American Poker Conference panels and then the draft for the Global Poker League.

Watching Twitch through the Roku is much, much better than on the laptop, I’ve discovered. For me Twitch never works properly via Safari, and while it plays okay on Chrome my laptop tends to run hot whenever I leave it on for a while. Meanwhile watching on television is a breeze, and so I was able to let the sucker play on over in the corner of the room while I worked on other things.

While my attention was coming and going, the panels were interesting and kind of reminded me a little of academic conferences from long ago where I gave my own presentations, listened to others’, and did the same sort of discussing and networking afterwards. Meanwhile the GPL draft similarly did a decent job of imitating the familiar, lengthy draft shows ESPN puts together for the NBA and NFL drafts. Kara Scott was even there to tell teams “you’re on the clock” when it was their turn to pick.

I’ve never much liked those other draft shows, mainly because I’ll know of only a few of the players being drafted (usually at the very start), making the rest of it kind of tedious. Meanwhile with this GPL draft I knew practically every player, team manager, and even the folks running back and forth in the background and turning up in random crowd shots, in many cases personally.

That alone made watching a little more fun. The team identities and logos are kind of interesting as well, and there is something kind of cool about a “global” league with various big cities represented around the world (four in the U.S., and one each in Brazil, Canada, England, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Italy, and Russia).

Like many I’m still more than a little unclear about how the teams work, how the games will go, and the whole playing-while-standing-in-a-cube thing. There’s also the larger question of how exactly the GPL might invigorate poker, generally speaking, although with that I’m willing to exercise some patience. Gets a little fatiguing to keep hearing “stay tuned and find out,” but my curiosity about it all is certainly piqued enough to keep paying attention.

I will say this -- the apparent contrast between the GPL and the last attempt to create some kind of professional poker “league,” the ill-fated Epic Poker League, couldn’t be more stark.

Besides being incredibly short-sighted and impractical in the way it was run, the EPL from the start was purportedly about creating a context in which only the best could compete against the best. In other words, it was mostly about finding a way to keep others out the game.

The league’s commissioner Annie Duke introduced the EPL as “incredibly pro-centric” back in early 2011, arguing (unconvincingly) that the league would somehow represent “the one piece that’s kind of missing from the poker landscape right now... something for the best players in the world to compete against the best players in the world.”

Such an approach -- along with steep $20,000 buy-ins for events and fairly severe restrictions on who could enter them -- was enough to keep a lot of players away, then eventually the whole thing collapsed in on itself with the company that created the league declaring bankruptcy before a single season could be completed.

Meanwhile it’s clear that the Global Poker League seems to have a much different ethos, trying instead to be more inclusive and bring poker to a wider audience, if possible. The whole idea of having a league spanning the Americas, Europe, and Asia is one indicator of such a mindset, and watching the draft yesterday there’s obviously a lot of focus on marketing and spreading positive messages about poker that go beyond just what the league itself and its teams will ultimately be doing.

Interestingly, the GPL used Global Poker Index rankings -- the lone piece of salvage remaining from the EPL wreckage -- to establish criteria for draft eligibility, having invited the top 1,000 ranked players to “opt in,” with a little over 200 doing so. The 48 players drafted yesterday came from that smaller group, and teams can now add two more players each as “wild cards” with no restrictions other than not being able to select any of the almost 800 who didn’t opt in for the draft. (That rule was implemented for the sake of fairness, not exclusion, as the GPL didn’t want top-ranked players to opt-out and then join teams later.)

We’ll see how it all goes and whether or not the GPL gathers any momentum in its own right, as well as whether it does produce these intended effects as described by entrepreneur and league founder Alex Dreyfus to help promote the game in positive ways. I’m intrigued about it, and as long as I can watch via my Roku I’ll probably do so once the season gets going.

Image: Global Poker League.

Nothing Endures But Change

Strange weather here on the farm today, where the skies were constantly going back and forth from dark gray to bright blue as the sun played hide-and-seek. Temperatures varied wildly as well, with winds up around 25 miles per hour at times. Precipitation came and went a few times, too, though we had none of the hail or more severe stuff that occurred all around us, including tornadoes in the Carolinas and surrounding states.

During the late afternoon I was cleaning stalls and taking care of some other barn-related duties. When inside our modest-sized (four-stall) barn everything sounds a bit more ominous than it actually is. Even a medium-strength drizzle gets amplified to a booming drone on the barn’s roof, while the wind whipping through conjures thoughts of the black-and-white scenes in The Wizard of Oz.

While working I thought in passing about where I was just a few days ago, standing amid tables’ full of poker players who together created a different sort of whirlwind as their chips went scattering around and around. There, too, everything is in constant flux, with any snapshot taken at a given moment becoming relatively less indicative of the scene once another orbit’s worth of hands go by.

At one point I stepped outside the barn to refill some water buckets, and was almost taken aback by the breathtaking sight above.

The sky had been dark and slightly menacing-looking just a few minutes before, as shown in that photo up top. Now it was light again, with a brilliant and vivid rainbow splashing down in the woods that run alongside the edge of our property. A double-rainbow, actually:

(Click either of the pics in this post to embiggen.)

That only lasted a few minutes longer, too, as the sun began to dim and dark clouds swiftly tumbled back to fill the skyscape. Later in the evening I talked with Vera’s mother, describing the scene to her as well as I could. She joked that a leprechaun might have followed me back from Ireland and over in the woods had hidden a pot of gold.

Looks like tomorrow there will be clouds but less of the craziness, if the prognosticators are to be believed.

Perhaps I might wander over to those woods at some point today, just to be sure no one has left anything.

2016 WSOP Schedule Released

This afternoon the World Series of Poker released details regarding this summer’s 2016 WSOP schedule, another monster with 69 bracelet events this time around.

They’re advertising the series as starting on May 31, although in truth the first bracelet event doesn’t kick off until June 1. The Main Event will again play down to a final table and then come back to finish in the fall, with the last day of that scheduled for July 18. The “November Nine” will actually start in October on the 30th and last three days, finishing November 1. Here’s a .pdf with details of the Main Event schedule.

There appear to be a lot of changes from previous years both in terms of the events being offered, the schedule (11 a.m. starts), payouts (15% getting paid for most events), starting stacks (50,000 in the Main; 5x stacks in other events) and accompanying structure changes, and so on.

There’s a new “top-up turbo” event with 20-minute levels with bonus chips for satellite players, a “triple draw lowball” mixed event featuring ace-to-five TD, deuce-to-seven TD, and Badugi, another mixed event featuring three Omaha variants, a “tag team” event in which groups of 2-4 players enter as a team, among other new stuff.

Kind of interesting trying to absorb such a mass of information all at once. Seeing lots of quick responses already by folks, with most seeming favorable and a few less so regarding specific items. It’ll take a week or three for more substantive evaluations to emerge, I imagine, then once we get to late May and into June we’ll probably hear more intensely delivered opinions once players realize exactly how specific events have been planned.

The WSOP will continue to enjoy its central spot on the poker tournament calendar. It also will probably always remain unique in the way it continues to attract players from around the globe, in particular non-professionals. But with the year so jammed with tournaments already, both in the U.S. and everywhere else, it’s hardly as distinct as it once was, even just a decade ago during the early “boom” years.

The full schedule can be found here, while the WSOP’s presser highlighting the new events and changes is here.

Image: WSOP.