Want to bring America’s classes together? Make poker mandatory
Poker tables are pure meritocracies. The pecking order of respect at Charles Town is determined by how good you are at the game. Other players may like you personally, but if you’re a bad player you’re a bad player, and nothing about your status in the outside world makes any difference. For readers with high-powered degrees and high-powered jobs, let me suggest that nothing will do more to keep your feet on the ground than to start playing poker in a public casino. Poker is a game of incomplete information involving complex intellectual tasks, self-discipline and the courage to take properly calculated risks. When you are outthought and outplayed not just once, but regularly, by a skinny 28-year-old wearing a football jersey and with his baseball cap on backward, it is hard to condescend to him because he doesn’t wear grown-up clothes and never went to college. It will also do you good to be in the deference-free zone that is a poker room — as in recently, when I was cashing out and the woman in the cashier’s cage, noting my stack of chips with the patterns on the edges carefully aligned, said confidentially, “Your O.C.D. is showing, baby doll.”
Apart from putting overeducated elitist snobs in their place, the dealers and players at Charles Town could give lessons to the rest of the country about making the melting pot work. In the year and a half I’ve played there, I have not experienced a moment of tension arising from anything involving race, class or gender. I’m not saying such moments never occur, but they’ve never occurred around me. Better than that, it has been as if those issues don’t exist.
Blowback
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Until the American people double down on stupid…
LtGenRob on February 24, 2013 at 9:26 PM
In poker, everyone who plays has chips in the game.
In life, nearly 50% of people don’t. But expect to win anyways.
lorien1973 on February 24, 2013 at 9:33 PM
So a game that’s in large measure based on luck is now a meritocracy? There must’ve been a funny editing decision for the word in this year’s dictionary.
Stoic Patriot on February 24, 2013 at 9:39 PM
I’d argue that it’s not the meritocracy people think it is. Fortune favors the bold, as a general rule, in poker. Now, if you’re at the table with the only spending money you’ve got, you’re going to play differently than if I’m a millionaire playing in a $1/$2 no limit match. Why? Because I can re-buy a hundred times if I’m a millionaire. I’m going to be able to be both aggressive and patient, while you’ll sweat every blind you put in, every bet you make. You won’t play a hand unless it’s the nuts, because you don’t want to get shoved. And a player like that spends a plot of time at the table, but they get whittled apart. The worst part? It’ll be written all over how you play, and probably the look on your face.
You still need a decent roll to even get started in poker, or be a stone-cold killer who can treat his last $100 like it’s a drop in the bucket.
Sgt Steve on February 24, 2013 at 9:43 PM
That’s because racial and class tension exist almost exclusively on college campuses and in inner cities. The people who don’t need to get things done yet and the people who have no hope of getting things done are the only ones who agonize about things like race.
If you’re going places, and hell-bent on making it, nothing is going to stop you, least of all “tension arising from race class or gender”.
Atlas on February 24, 2013 at 9:49 PM
And they’ll want someone to give them some of your chips and kick you out of the game if you don’t share your chips.
Well, there is a part that luck plays in the game, but there is a lot more to the game than luck. For a while I made my “fun” money playing poker at the local poker room. Have stopped for a while, but I left the game up significantly.
ProfShadow on February 24, 2013 at 9:56 PM
I had a childhood friend who, I found out decades later, became a fulltime professional poker player. He was a nice, intelligent kid, but I doubt any of us had a clue he possessed that kind or level of talent. I’m not sure it can be quantified anywhere outside the casino.
Seth Halpern on February 24, 2013 at 10:08 PM
Measured by luck? I don’t think you understand poker.
MikeknaJ on February 24, 2013 at 11:35 PM
Maybe it is the way you play…..
tommyboy on February 25, 2013 at 7:03 AM