Assassin

Last week at the Venetian, in the session I described here, somebody at the table referred to me as "the silent assassin," after I had accumulated a large stack.

I would have thought it just an odd little spontaneous nickname, except for one thing: This was about the tenth time in the last four years that that same exact label has been suggested for me by an opponent. It's never "quiet killer" or any of a dozen similar monikers that one could coin embodying the same general idea. Sure, when I'm playing well but not talking much (that's usually the case, I think), it's not hard to see why that kind of adjective and noun get stuck together for me, but I was mystified as to why it was always exactly the same. I shrugged it off as likely being some movie reference that I was missing.

However, when I mentioned the oddity of it to Cardgrrl later when we were doing our usual nightly videochat, she was apparently even more curious than I was. She Googled the term, finding the apparent answer to why it is this specific name that keeps coming up: There's a comic book (pardon me--graphic novel) and a videogame sharing that title, apparently unrelated to each other. See here and here.

So now I know, and so do you.