More on religion at the poker table

I previously wrote about some of the strange (in my view) things that Jerry Yang did at the final table of the World Series of Poker main event: http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2007/07/mr-destiny.html At the time, I had watched the event live. Now, though, I've seen ESPN's broadcast. I taped it last night, so I can transcribe some things accurately, instead of relying on memory. Moreover, ESPN's multiple cameras and microphones caught things that weren't shown on the live broadcast. In terms of overt religiosity, there was even more strangeness than I knew.

In the hand in which Jerry Yang eliminated Lee Watkinson, Yang raised pre-flop with A-9, then Watkinson moved all-in with A-7. While Yang was thinking about what to do, Watkinson's financee, whose name is Timmi Derosa (see http://pokerdb.thehendonmob.com/player.php?a=r&n=56512), is seen on the sidelines. She says, "If he calls, he's gonna double Lee up. No weapon formed against him shall prosper."

This appears to be an allusion to Isaiah 54:17: "No weapon that is formed against thee shall prosper; and every tongue that shall rise against thee in judgment thou shalt condemn. This is the heritage of the servants of the LORD, and their righteousness is of me, saith the LORD." (King James Version.)

So apparently Lee Watkinson is, according to his fiancee, a servant of the Lord, and as a result, he can't lose a hand of poker.

She repeats this a few seconds later, after Yang announces his call. Looking upward, she yells, "Come on, Father. In Jesus's name. No weapon formed against you shall prosper."

Note the little change of pronoun there, from "him" to "you." Now she is saying not that Yang is a weapon against Lee, the Lord's servant, but against God himself! Wow! I wonder what Yang did to deserve being accused of being a weapon formed against God, and how Derosa knows whatever this deep, dark secret is. But either way, whether one conspires to defeat the Lord or just the Lord's servant, one is obviously destined to fail.

Except that--OOPS!--Yang won the hand, and Watkinson was bumped out of the tournament. Hmmm. I guess that makes Ms. Derosa a false prophet. And what does the Bible say about false prophets?

But the prophet, which shall presume to speak a word in my name, which I
have not commanded him to speak...even that prophet shall die. And if thou say in thine heart, How shall we know the word which the LORD hath not spoken? When a prophet speaketh in the name of the LORD, if the thing follow not, nor come to pass, that is the thing which the LORD hath not spoken, but the prophet hath spoken it presumptuously.... (Deuteronomy 18:20-22, KJV.)

I'm not sure if that bit about the false prophet dying means that the religious community has an affirmative obligation to off Ms. Derosa, or if the good Lord will take care of that himself. Assuming, though, that she believes this passage to be true, she ought to be sure she has her affairs in order.

After the flop and turn haven't helped Watkinson's inferior hand, and only the river can save him, Derosa closes her eyes and says, "C'mon. Make him a believer. Make Lee a believer, Father." I don't know how to interpret this. Is this rhetorical, or is Lee not of the same faith as his fiancee? Well, if he wasn't, I doubt that this hand converted him.

Making this hand even more bizarre was Yang's simultaneous prayers for a contrary result: "Come on, Lord. You know your purpose for me.... You have a purpose for me today.... Father, in the name of Jesus Christ, c'mon, let me win this one." Norman Chad picked up on the strangeness of these dueling prayers, and said, "I'm not sure who the Lord is listening to."

I'm just speculating here, but perhaps Derosa's prayers were less effective than Yang's because God was offended by her vanity. Based on the shots of her on the ESPN broadcast, it appears that she has had way too many collagen injections to plump up her lips, a visual effect that is accentuated by her use of dark lip-liner. Or maybe she got stung by a bee, or maybe Watkinson smacks her around. Who knows? Whatever the cause, it looks awfully strange and unnatural. "Surely God will not hear vanity, neither will the Almighty regard it." (Job 35:13, KJV.) "Who shall ascend into the hill of the LORD? or who shall stand in his holy place? He that hath clean hands, and a pure heart; who hath not lifted up his soul unto vanity" (Psalms 24:3-4, KJV.)

But back to the Dueling Christians. I can't help thinking of one of the coolest stories in the Bible: Elijah and the priests of Baal (1 Kings, ch. 18). Elijah sets up a contest between him and the priests of Baal, to see which deity will better respond to entreaties and an animal sacrifice, by miraculously lighting a fire under the sacrificial altar. The priests of Baal pray all day, even cutting themselves with knives in an apparent show of devotion. But nothing happens. Then Elijah takes his turn. In a showy display of confidence (and, I suppose, to ensure that nobody thinks he was cheating and somehow had fire hidden away), he has servants come and dowse the entire altar with barrels of water three times, then dig a trench all around the altar and fill that with water, too. Then he utters a simple prayer, and WHOOSH! Fire leaps down from heaven and consumes the whole thing. Then, of course, he has the priests of Baal slaughtered, because no showdown is really complete without that. When you go all-in against the Lord, he apparently takes it very seriously, man.

The difference here is that, presumably, Derosa and Yang were praying to the same god, which makes the whole thing sort of a "Heads I win, tails you lose" situation. No matter how the cards fall, one camp or the other can say that Jesus was on their side. Which makes the bizarre incident a heck of a lot less compelling than successfully calling down fire from heaven. Oh well--maybe the god Yang and Derosa were praying to isn't really the same one that Elijah had on his side. Or maybe his powers have weakened over the centuries, and now all he can manage as a manifestation of his power is a little card trick. If Elijah had been at the WSOP final table, I assume that he would have stepped back, invoked a curse on his opponents for daring to stand in his way, and the whole table would have been consumed in a massive inferno from above. That would have been a lot faster than the 14 hours or so that it took Yang to defeat his opponents the hard way--and it would have been a lot cooler to watch.

Moving on, we have the hand in which Yang's J-8 outdrew Lee Childs's J-K to eliminate the latter. Again we get to eavesdrop on Yang's praying: "Father, I will glorify your name.... Let people see your miracle. I believe in your name." Of course, he only says this after the "miracle" 8 hits on the turn to give him the winning pair. But again, what a weak, pathetic kind of "miracle" this is, compared to, say, turning water into wine, healing the blind, raising the dead, feeding 5000 people with one loaf of bread, making a mule speak, sending manna from heaven, bringing down the walls of Jericho, etc.

Later, Yang calls an all-in bet from Alex Kravchenko before the flop. The latter has pocket 3s, and makes a set of them on the flop. Yang has just an offsuit K-Q, and is drawing dead. That is, by the usual rules of poker Yang cannot win the hand no matter what cards come on the turn and river. And in this situation there is a conspicuous absence of praying from Yang. Why? Does he have so little faith in his deity that he just assumes that he has lost? Even without going so far as to consume the entire table in a fiery blast, surely the Lord could, for example, make the dealer put out on the turn or river a card that was an exact duplicate of one already there (or of one in one of the players' hands). If there were found to be, e.g., two 8 of clubs in the deck, it would be declared to be a "fouled deck," and all the money put into the pot on that hand would be returned to the players. It's like the poker version of a children's "do over." Can't Yang's god perform even so trivial a miracle as that?*

I noticed that frequently after winning a hand, Yang and/or his family could be seen and heard saying "Hallelujah," which presumably means, to them, something akin to "Praise God." (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallelujah.) But oddly, we never see that happen when he loses a hand. I don't know how to interpret this discrepancy. Perhaps they declared their praise exactly the same either way, and it was edited out--though that seems unlikely. Assuming that they praised God when winning but not when losing, I have to wonder about the theological implications. Do they attribute winning hands to God's intervention, but not losing hands? If so, on what basis? Don't they believe that God is controlling everything that happens, for good or for ill? Wouldn't consistency require that they praise God for making Yang lose hands, too, since that presumably fulfills whatever his mysterious purposes might be? Hey, if Kevin Bacon in "Animal House" can choke out a "Thank you, sir, may I have another?" after getting whacked with a paddle (see http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=351627), surely Christians can respond to the small adversity of losing a poker hand with praise for the being that they believe controlled how the cards were shuffled and how the betting went down, right?

Overall, I'd have to say that if the best evidence for God's intervention in poker that so-called Christians can muster is that a mediocre player (and after watching the final table, there is no doubt that that's what Yang is) can get lucky and win the WSOP main event, then I'm going to have to hold to my conclusion that prayers such as Yang's and Derosa's are just a showy, weird, embarrassing, and slightly demented version of rubbing a lucky rabbit's foot--and precisely as effective.

Too bad ESPN cut out Norman Chad's great line during his post-match interview with Yang: "Do you think this is the most poker the Lord has ever watched over?"


* NBC ran an interesting invitational poker series last year: the "Pro-Am Equalizer," in which celebrity amateur players were given a substantially larger starting stack than the pros at the table. In one event, Penn Jillette (of "Penn and Teller" fame) was playing. With the river card yet to come, he was drawing dead in a hand in which he and his opponent were all-in. He said, "The only way I can win now is if they let me deal." This was a very funny line, coming from a man who is a genuine expert on slight-of-hand and card cheating. (He has even published a book on how poker cheaters work. See http://tinyurl.com/yrun4s.) I assume that if he were inclined to show off, in a situation in which nothing was at stake (so that it wasn't really cheating), that's one of the ways in which Penn, handed the deck of cards to deal the river, would resolve the dilemma in his favor. He can't win, but he could at least force the hand to be nullified by slipping a duplicate card into the deck. It doesn't say much for Yang's god if he isn't even as powerful a conjurer as Penn Jillette.