Shannon Elizabeth is as delusional as Jerry Yang

At the end of the post I just put up a short time ago (the last substantive post; I was about to start this one when I noticed that it would be #700, so I had to take a slight detour and take care of that housekeeping before coming back to the serious stuff), I mentioned Jerry Yang and his strange beliefs about God rearranging the deck in the dealer's hand. I was about to include, in the same paragraph, mention of Shannon Elizabeth. She believes in basically the same nuttiness, except that she attributes the power to her own mind (and that of people around her) rather than to a deity.

I didn't include it there because I realized that I hadn't written about that fact in detail before, so I couldn't easily link to a previous post on the subject. This is to make up for that deficiency. Besides, it gives me an excuse to illustrate a post with a photo of Ms. Elizabeth in a bikini, and I think we'd all have to agree that, whatever positive attributes this blog might have, it has been woefully short of pictures of pretty women in bikinis.

Last year I started writing an article that I intended to submit to a magazine. It's about the weird things that poker players believe. I got distracted by other projects (including this blog), and never finished writing the article. But here's what I wrote about Elizabeth in the unfinished first draft:

Shannon Elizabeth, best known for starring in the movies “American Pie” and
“American Pie 2,” is one of the most accomplished actors-turned-poker-players,
having recently made it to the semifinals of the televised 2007 “NBC National
Heads-Up Poker Championship,” in which matches are played one-on-one—an
especially difficult format—defeating some of the world’s best players in the
process.

She claims to call on a mysterious skill: She seems to
believe that her thoughts can rearrange the cards in the already-shuffled deck.

In an interview after her first-round win in the heads-up
tournament she said, “One of the biggest things, like a change that I’ve been
making just in my overall life, is the law of attraction and positive energy,
and really trying to, to picture the cards I need and not to picture the cards I
don’t want, cuz I don’t want to attract those cards.” [1]

As
stated, she may simply be thinking that her mental energies can change how the
cards get arranged during the shuffle—which would be remarkable enough in
itself, if it were a demonstrable ability. But an incident later in the
tournament seems to show that she extends this to influences that can be exerted after the shuffle, too.

In the last hand of her quarter-final match, Elizabeth is all-in before the
flop with K-10 against her opponent’s K-3. While they wait for the dealer to
produce the first three community cards, Elizabeth can be heard chanting, “Ten,
ten, ten.” This is not too strange, as it is natural to hope for a card that
will strengthen one’s position. It does not require any supernatural belief to
possess such hope. But immediately thereafter, she hears one of her supporters
mention a “three.” She quickly turns, hold up the palm of her hand to this
friend, and earnestly rebukes him, saying, “Don’t call for that…. Don’t call for
what you don’t want, call for what you do want. Please. Ten. Seriously. Ten. Law
of attraction. Ten.” When she is still ahead with only one card to come (and no
pair to her ten having been revealed, despite her incantations), she can be
heard repeatedly saying “Five of clubs, five of clubs, five of clubs,”
apparently having arbitrarily picked a card that would help neither player, and
thus leave her with the winning hand. The ace of hearts comes, which, while not
the card she willed to appear, accomplishes the same thing. [2]

It
is difficult to interpret her apparently deadly serious instructions and actions
here as anything short of manifesting a belief that her mental exertion, perhaps
combined with that of her supporters, can actually change the order of the
shuffled deck in the dealer’s hand. The ordinary view would be that once the
shuffle and cut of the deck is complete, the die is cast, and what cards are
dealt out cannot be altered (barring, obviously, simple errors or outright
cheating on the part of the dealer). But Elizabeth appears to truly believe that
if a pair to her opponent’s three—a losing card for her—was destined to appear,
she can change that by what she and her friends think and say in the few seconds
before the dealer turns over the card.

Unfortunately, the broadcast’s host did not ask the actress in her
interviews to explain in detail the mechanism by which this influence is
supposedly exerted. Do the cards physically rearrange themselves in the dealer’s
hand? Or perhaps the printing on the critical card is supernaturally altered, so
that we would find a duplicate of some card in the deck upon inspection after
the hand has been played. Or maybe her belief is that her will acts in a
temporally retroactive fashion, affecting the shuffle that occurred a few
minutes before via some sort of space-time warp. We are left to wonder.

[1] The entire 2007 tournament, as broadcast on NBC, is available
at http://nbcsports.msnbc.com/id/23011821/site/21683474/.
Elizabeth's comments, as transcribed by the author, are in Episode 3, Segment 2.
Her reference appears to be to such recently popular books as Michael Losier, Law of Attraction: The Science of Attracting More of What You Want and Less
of What You Don’t, (self-published, 2004), and Rhonda Byrne, The Secret (Atria Books, 2006), both of which claim that one can alter the physical
universe and the actions of other people by thinking correctly and positively
about what one wants to see happen.

[2] This hand is played
out in Episode 8, Segment 5, at the URL above.

So now you know: Shannon Elizabeth is just as crazy as Jerry Yang. They simply put different labels on what is, at its root, the same basic delusion.

She looks a lot better in a bikini, though.* That doesn't put a dent in the delusional thing, but it's something.


*Clarification added in anticipation of snarky reader comments: No, I haven't actually seen Jerry Yang in a bikini. I'm just guessing here. I think it's a pretty safe guess.