Life and Poker

By Crispin Sartwell

 

In Vegas they're playing cards, and the person who emerges from a field of over 6,000 people to win this year's main event at the World Series of Poker is going to go home with something like ten million dollars.

    Driven by innovations that have made it possible to play on the internet and to watch card-playing like a sporting event on television - the commentators and viewers know as play unfolds what cards the players hold - poker has become gigantically popular, its best players mutating into worldwide superstars.

     But the game has always had this potential. It's kind of hyper-concentrated solution of human life. Success is driven by an inestimable combination of luck and skill, boldness and caution, truth and lies, practice and improvisation.

    Poker brings into play the romance of history, of old west card sharps, wiseguys in the back room, cheaters and wizards.

   The deck of cards itself constitutes a remarkable and enduring iconographic system, a hierarchy of roles and images that emphasizes the romance and danger always associated with gambling.  As the great card magician Jamy Ian Swiss puts it: "When you set a deck of cards down in front of most people, you invoke issues of chance, fate, skill, fortunetelling, money, power, love, and sex."

     Even as a mere physical object, a thing to be handled, a deck of cards and a stack of chips has a compelling quality - like a cigarette and a shot glass.

   The game which the poker world has settled on as its ultimate contest, no-limit Texas Hold 'Em, is remarkably simple and extraordinarily complex. The rules are easily stated - use two hole cards and five community cards to constitute the best possible five-card poker hand.

    But there is a library of books about Hold 'Em strategy and practically speaking there are infinitely many different possible situations at the table: combinations of cards, number and character of players.

    Traditionally, great poker players have subtle psychologists: crusty backroom bastards who know from the way you blink what cards you're holding, maybe even people who know when the moment is ripe to palm a card or deal the second card on the deck: existentialists, risking their lives and fortunes in a deep acknowledgment of and manipulation of uncertainty.

   Internet play has tended to reward another kind of player: technicians and rationalists who have played hundreds of thousands of hands in a relatively brief time, most of them mediated by computer so that they can't even read the eyes of their opponents.  (But even on the internet there are "tells": how long it takes the player to bet, for example, or even the history of his folds.)

    Still, you can bet that the person who wins this year's world series is going to have an extraordinary mixture of these traits. He's (all hes so far among the victors, though more and more women among the players) going to vibe the moment when he can steal a pot with a ridiculous bluff or when he has to fold his pair of queens, but he's also going to be furiously calculating the objective odds of making his straight.

   "S.W. Erdnase"  - author of "The Expert at the Card Table," the classic1902 treatise on card cheating - said of his book "it will not make the innocent vicious, or transform the pastime player into a professional; or make a fool wise, or curtail the annual crop of suckers; but whatever the result may be, if it sells it will accomplish the primary motive of the author, as he needs the money."

   That's a pretty good summary in poker terms of the basic dimensions of human personality: innocence and evil, incompetence and skill, foolishness and wisdom, gullibility and trust: and of course, greed and need..

    But there's one difference between poker and the rest of life that makes for great television. With all poker's subtlety and ambiguity, at the end ten million dollars in cash will be dropped on the table and someone will gather it toward himself in an ecstatic victory. Life itself never ends quite that beautifully.