Tell bad-beat stories, get a PhD

I saw this notice, on Prof's Poker Blog, about what sounded like an interesting lecture that took place at UNLV yesterday. This afternoon I found that the podcast of the lecture was up (here), and I listened to it while having lunch.

Ugh. It's horrible. The presenter, a graduate student named James Avery, is apparently working on a sociology PhD based on his observations of poker players in their natural environment, what he calls "the ethnography of poker." How could I resist wanting to hear this? But heed my warning: There's nothing there.

First, the guy is just an awful public speaker. If you play a drinking game of taking a shot every time he says "y'know," you will be passed out after the first minute. He goes through 26 minutes of prelimary, irrelevant crap, before he gets to the substance of his talk. (If you're going to listen, at least do yourself the favor of skipping ahead that far.)

At that point it gets slightly better because he starts reading from a narrative he previously wrote, which reduces his incredible complex of annoying verbal tics. But what we hear is badly written, substituting a plethora of adjectives for good writing, in the way that is typical of high school students trying to be creative. Worse, the stories we hear amount to nothing more than an excruciatingly detailed account of how a poker hand plays out--not a thing there that you wouldn't know after playing live for a few minutes--plus a couple of over-elaborately told bad-beat stories.

Seriously, if I ever over-wrote the story of a poker hand as badly as Mr. Avery does, nobody would ever read this blog again.

I had honestly hoped to be the first to point the poker world to an insightful, fascinating look inside the world of poker from an academic point of view. Instead, I'm left wondering whether the world of graduate schools is so bereft of quality that one can actually get a PhD from a major university by telling poker stories that are not even worthy of a blog post.

Bleah.