Arlington day

Cardgrrl and I spent the afternoon hiking through Potomac Overlook Regional Park, which had lovely scenery like this:

Then we went to dinner at Cassatt's Kiwi Cafe, followed by dessert at Pastries by Randolph, which had lovely scenery like this:

I, spy

Yesterday Cardgrrl and I chose, among all the touristy things to do in D.C., to visit the International Spy Museum. The thing that most surprised me was how busy it was. Even though I knew it was a weekend in the peak of tourist season, I had expected this to be a little-known, little-seen place--probably because I had never heard of it until I looked at a list of area museums yesterday while deciding how to spend our day. Boy, was I wrong. It was completely packed, shoulder-to-shoulder all the way through.

It was also a lot bigger than I expected. It doesn't look big on the outside, but it took nearly three hours to go through all the exhibits. It does not just cover the predictable cold-war era, but the whole history of spying--starting with the Bible and Sun Tzu's "The Art of War." There is, for example, a room devoted to spying during the Civil War, and you'll learn about Cardinal Richelieu, the Dreyfus Affair, and George Washington's spying efforts.

I chose the title for this post because at the first stage of the museum tour, one is asked to adopt a cover identity--memorizing details about an alter ego. At the end of the tour, one is quizzed about it. I failed, sadly, not having taken the memorization part of the program very seriously. The computer was rather vague about what exactly would happen as a result of my cover being blown, but based on what the museum said about the fate of other spies who failed to stay under the radar, I was probably captured, interrogated, and executed.

A few photos from the day:

The Metro station, waiting for the train:

Roy Lichtenstein's "Modern Head," which has been moved from near the World Trade Center in New York to one of the Smithsonian buildings, just across the street from the Spy Museum:

The International Spy Museum:

Statue of Felix Dzershinsky, father of the KGB, flying overhead in the entrance:

A bunch of random stuff in the display cases:

This is cool: an actual Enigma machine (not a replica) from WWII:

This is said to be the set of rules that American agents working in the Soviet Union came up with for survival and success. Sound applicable to poker to you?

Lots of museums around here are free. This one is not. It's $20 apiece. But I think it was worth it. The video presentations are especially well done. I enjoyed learning about how double agents helped the invasion of Normandy be pulled off successfully, and how Aldrich Ames's treachery was discovered by his peers inside the CIA. It's worth a visit if you have the time and inclination.

Tomorrow we're off to Charlottesville to look around at Monticello.

Phillips Collection

Today Cardgrrl and I went to the Phillips Collection, a relatively small private art museum. Though a few old masters are represented (I think today was the first time I've seen an El Greco work on display), it's mostly 20th century stuff--some beautiful, some interesting without being beautiful, some just weird and incomprehensible. For the most part, it was work by people I've never heard of, though there was the scattered Monet, Cezanne, Matisse, and Mondrian thrown in.

One of the most interesting pieces is a brand-new exhibit, a two-part thing called "Skin" by A. Balasubramaniam. The outdoor portion is a steel sculpture, vaguely shaped like a human heart, with channels running through it, confounding one's conception of what is the piece's interior and its exterior, reminding me of a Klein bottle. (It pleases me to have a girlfriend who knew what a Klein bottle was without needing to have it explained.)

The inside portion is a series of five small works that use the wall of the gallery itself as the medium. One looks like a fist has attempted to punch through a wall made of rubber, and got stuck. Three look like skin has been bunched up and is being held in place with nails. One looks like an ugly gaping wound, as if in the middle of a surgical procedure.

You can see a 5-minute video of the installation work of both parts here.

There wasn't a lot that made me think, "Oooo, I wish I were rich enough to own that," but all in all, it was a nice and educational sampling of the last hundred years of art history.

Then we walked a couple of blocks to Dolcezza, a little shop with amazing gelato and sorbet, in unexpected but delicious flavor combinations.

Even though these people in D.C. do strange things like mix lots of moisture with their air, this whole not-working-for-a-while thing is pretty nice, I must say.

Addendum

Cardgrrl's photos from the museum are here.

Outta here

I'm leaving Wednesday morning for a week in D.C. visiting the wunnerful, wunnerful Cardgrrl. With much to do before flying off, I anticipate no more posts of any substance until sometime after I return. On the other hand, if we end up doing something of touristy interest I may manage to put up a story and/or pictures about it.

LION CUBS!!!!!!

Warning: Extreme Cuteness Ahead!

I shot all these videos with my little Nikon point-and-shoot camera on its maximal telephoto setting. They're not the best that one might be able to produce, but they are certainly adequate to show what was going on. I hope they suggest how incredible playful and adorable these lion babies are. If you don't immediately fall in love with all seven of the little critters, you are heartless. Period. I think it is also impossible not to find deep admiration for the attentiveness and playfulness with which the two mothers care for their young.

And while I'm editorializing, I'll add that anybody who would shoot a creature as beautiful and magnificent as a lion, for purposes of adding a trophy to his wall or floor, should himself be shot and mounted, as a cautionary testament to the depths of depravity and evilness we humans can stoop to.

(If you're going to watch just one, I suggest trying #5.)

















See also Cardgrrl's wide-angle video of the cubs here.

National Zoo--including lion cubs

Today we spent a couple of hours at the National Zoo, which is conveniently just about a mile from my girlfriend's apartment.

The main purpose of the visit was to see the lion cubs that were recently born--two litters arrived a short time apart, totalling seven cubs. They are let out into the public viewing area for one hour a day. And Oh The Adorableness! We had to leave a little before the hour was over, because we had absorbed a nearly lethal dose of cuteness, what with all the rolling and frolicking and climbing and jumping and mewing and exploring and playing.

We also stopped to watch the elephants, a fishing cat, a sloth bear, a giant panda, and a clouded leopard, all of which you can see in my newest photo album on Picasa Web. If you look closely, you might even find a shot of the extremely rare and elusive wild Cardgrrl.

Pictures here: http://picasaweb.google.com/rakewell1/NationalZoo?feat=directlink

Feeling blue at Arlington National Cemetery

Cardgrrl and I spent a couple of hours this afternoon at Arlington National Cemetery, yet another in the virtually endless list of tourist sites around D.C. that I've never been to before.

I took a bunch of photos, and had hopes that a few of them would be gems. However, when I got home and started looking at them on the computer, I quickly noticed that both the white gravestones and the green grass were blue. I realized pretty fast what had happened. When at the museum the other day, the automatic white balance on my camera was not compensating well for the dim, yellowish light, and pictures were looking yellow, so I manually set it to "incandescent light." I never changed the setting back. Today, under the late afternoon sun, the stupid camera thought we were still indoors with 100-watt bulbs around us. As a result, the pictures are all quite thoroughly saturated in blue that doesn't really belong there.

I'm disappointed, but there's not much to be done about it now. I suppose I might be able to apply some sort of digital correction, but I think it would be more work than it's worth. So I'm just going to chalk it up as a learning experience--the modern equivalent of shooting a roll of film with the lens cap on. And even with no photos that I can proudly show off, the touching experience of the cemetery remains undiminished.

You can see the blue-washed photos here: http://picasaweb.google.com/rakewell1/ArlingtonCemetery?feat=directlink

Tomorrow, we hope to see lion cubs at the zoo, then a nice dinner and show (The Capitol Steps) with good friends.

Happy New Year, everyone.

Smithsonian Museum of Natural History

Cardgrrl and I spent some time today at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History--not a lot, as we got a late start and available parking ended at 4 p.m. But we managed to hit some of the famous highlights: the rotunda, dinosaurs, the Hope diamond.

It was difficult to take any decent photographs, because the place was (1) jam-packed (to our surprise), and (2) very dimly lit. But the few that turned out well enough not to be completely embarrassing are collected here: http://picasaweb.google.com/rakewell1/SmithsonianNaturalHistoryMuseum?feat=directlink

Air and Space Museum

Yesterday Cardgrrl drove me out to Chantilly, Virginia, to tour the Udvar-Hazy Center of the Smithsonian's Air and Space Museum. (I find the "Udvar-Hazy" name completely too obscure to remember, so in my mind it has become the "Uber-Nazi" center. I find this much more amusing than Cardgrrl does. However, it turned out to have at least a touch of accuracy, as some of the warplanes in the accompanying photos represent the first time that swastikas have appeared in this blog.)

It's a very cool and interesting place to visit--a fact which I can best support not by describing stuff, but by showing you a ton of photos that I took while there. See here.

Most surprising fact learned at the museum: The U.S. had flying aircraft carriers in the 1930s. Who knew?! Second most surprising fact: The SR-71 Blackbird housed here flew coast to coast on its last run (20 years ago) in 64 minutes. Third most surprising fact (tie): The urine collecting devices on Skylab were yellow, and they shot their urine out into space after collecting it. In space, no one can hear you pee.

Go see this museum next time you're in the D.C. area.

Things I've seen

In the morning, I'll be flying back to Vegas. It has been a lovely and delightful week with Cardgrrl, as always, but life must go on. All play and no work makes Grump a broke boy. Or something like that.

My first day here (Wednesday last week) I went for a walk while Cardgrrl was on an extended work-related conference call. Here's some of what I saw.

Some very pretty flowers (pansies? I'm not sure):



A big, old tree with wrinkled skin:



A sculpture that I kind of liked, for reasons I can't exactly articulate. It is identified as "Divine Nature" by Chris Tousimis, 2006:



This is part of the outside of a Jewish center. I just like the assemblage of interesting lines--two peaks, one of them under a gentle arch, some vertical lines, some horizontal lines, some criss-crossy lines:



A lovely, simple, red door at St. Albans parish:




Many years ago, my brother told me about having seen a bunch of ants paired up two by two, heads together, mostly not moving, but occasionally the dyads would break apart and they'd each find new partners. He was at the time somehow in contact with E.O. Wilson, the world's pre-eminent ant researcher, so asked him what that was about. Wilson apparently told him that it was a territorial battle between adjacent colonies, and the pairs were soldier ants that had their jaws locked on each other. I thought that sounded pretty cool, and for a long, long time I have hoped that someday I would get to see such a thing for myself. (You might think photos would be on the web. Maybe they are, but do a Google image search for "ant wars" and you get all sorts of things, but not that.)

I stopped to look at a bunch of ants on the sidewalk, wondering what bit of food had attracted them. I was surprised to find that there was none. They were also mostly stationary, not milling about. When I looked more closely, I noticed that they were in pairs, head to head. I had found it! My own little ant war! And now you can see it, too. Look at the big version, and it's easier to see what's going on.

(The macro setting on my camera seems to have some aberration in the lens toward the right side. Never noticed it before, and don't know what it's about. More exploration needed when I get home. Sorry for the partially blurred image.)



Here's a shot from the basement of Cardgrrl's apartment building. Kind of a Hitchcock "Vertigo" thing going on, though it feels a lot safer on the bottom looking up than the other way 'round:




Finally, while on a trip out to the burbs for some errands, we passed by this sign, which is one of the finest examples of oxymoronity I have come across:





(Yes, I know that it's referring to Bush 41, not 43, and not to his own personal intelligence but to the gathering of security information about other nations. Still funny.)

Off

In about an hour I'm leaving for the swampland which our Founding Fathers saw fit to designate as the nation's armpit capitol. The lovely Cardgrrl asked me to pay her a visit for her birthday, and it seemed like a good idea. After all, a girl turns 29 only once. I'll be there through next Wednesday.

Last night I finished reading Pauly's Lost Vegas. It's a great read, but for personal reasons it has left me with a bunch of very weird feelings that I think will take some time and rumination to sort out, put labels on, and figure out how to describe. I smell a long, rambling post to come out of that process around the time I return home.

Great Falls National Park

I'm home. Poker playing and blogging will resume soon.

In the meantime, let me show you a bit of Great Falls National Park, where Cardgrrl took me Monday. It's a beautiful place. Unfortunately, my photographs don't do it justice. None is even good enough to feature here as an especially good one or a favorite, as I have been doing with my vacation photos in recent months. But you can see what the place looks like in the photos here.

Maybe the most impressive thing I saw--though it looks completely pedestrian in the picture--is the marker showing the flood levels over the last hundred years. It's impressive because that marker stands at least 50 yards laterally away from the current river, and at least 50 feet above it. It's truly hard to imagine the volume of water it would take to overflow that gorge and spill out into the park. And when it does, there is no other natural barrier to contain it for a few hundred yards out--that is, in order for the water to be that high, it's also going to be amazingly wide. I wouldn't want to be there during such a flood.

In the park you can also see remnants of the lock system built by a company that George Washington founded, in an attempt to get shipping around the falls. Pretty impressive engineering for 200+ years ago.

I took a short video of the main part of the falls, embedded below:





Oh, those gorgeous orange and purple flowers in the next-to-last picture in the album are not in the park, but in front of Two Amys Neapolitan Pizzeria, where we went for dinner after our walk. Yummy stuff.

Gephyrophobia

I learned a new word today.

The wedding that Cardgrrl and I went to yesterday was near Easton, Maryland, at a home on an estuary of Chesapeake Bay. That meant that we had to drive over The Bridge. I had probably seen and heard of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge at some point, but it never stuck with me in the way that, say, the Golden Gate Bridge does. So as we approached it, I had no idea how long or high the thing was. As bridges go, this is one heck of an imposing monster. (Read all about it here, and where it stands in the world list of longest bridges here.)

Cardgrrl told me about a friend who has significant anxiety crossing bridges, and said that this one causes the most problems of all for her, due to its length and height. Moreover, she told me that she had read an article in the Washington Post about the number of drivers that panic, freeze up, and hence cause traffic snarls on this particular bridge. I had never heard of such a thing. I get a bit tense driving over bridges where the sides appear (mostly erroneously, I'm sure) to be not quite up to the task of preventing one's car from going over the edge should one have a tire blowout, or get pushed over by another driver changing lanes forcibly at an inopportune moment, or whatever. But it's nothing like a debilitating fear. Before today I don't think I had heard of that subset of people for whom this is a serious problem.

So when we got back home, I looked it up. Here are a few articles on the phenomenon generally, all of them tied at least in part to the Chesapeake Bay Bridge specifically:

http://www.sciencebuzz.org/blog/gephyrophobia_fear_of_crossing_bridges_is_now_in_the_spotli

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26838613

http://www.startribune.com/lifestyle/11491446.html


There's my completely non-poker-related bit of public service/education done for the day: gephyrophobia. You're welcome.

Quick life update

Nope--not writing about the fish found at poker tables. The above is part of the decor at Kinkead's, one of the nicest restaurants I've ever dined at. Cardgrrl and I ate there tonight, my belated Valentine's Day gift to her, as it's her favorite eatery. I'm not so big on seafood, which is their speciality, but I had a Jamaican whole roasted yellowtail snapper with banana-habernero ketchup and mango salsa, which was surprisingly good. I was even so adventurous as to take a couple of bites of Cardgrrl's squid appetizer. Then we had for dessert the most luscious sorbets I've ever tasted--a trio of pineapple, sour cherry, and mixed berry.

We spent much of the day shopping for some clothes for her and for a gift for the wedding we're attending tomorrow. (For those keeping score, that's two new life experiences in one day--clothes shopping with Cardgrrl and eating squid.) Thursday Cardgrrl was at the TedXPotomac conference with some friends, which had been planned long before this trip. I just slept, puttered around, and went for a walk in the neighborhood. Tomorrow is the wedding, and after that I really don't know what the rest of this trip will entail. It's not like we spent months planning out every minute.

That's what I've been up to. Yeah, I know it's pretty uninteresting to read about--no need to express such a gripe in the comments.

Still alive

Still in D.C., hanging out with Cardgrrl. Today we went to her church, then to the National Zoo, which is only about a mile away from her place. We saw lions:



And red pandas:





Unfortunately, a lot of the best things were closed for one reason or another: elephants, pandas, seals, great apes, and others. But it was a nice walk anyway. (She takes me on walks every day. Walking for its own sake, with no particular destination--what a concept!)

We also went to a poker tournament in Manassas, Virginia, Saturday night. I got bumped out early on a bad beat. *sigh* But it's still a fun group to play with.

On the way home, we stopped for gas and I noticed this sign:



That's an apostrophe (or possibly a severely misplaced comma) after "beer." Very odd.

Cardgrrl has also been beating me at every game we play: Upwords, Set, Bananagrams, and an odd little thing called Scrabble Word Play Poker. But she also feeds me, gives me a place to sleep, gave me a beautiful sweater and some interesting books for Christmas, and is just generally much nicer to me than I deserve, so the losing isn't such a terrible thing. As you can see, just being around her makes me temporarily ungrumpy:



Five more days of this lovely break, then it's back to the casinos for me.

D.C. trip photo dump

I moved all the pictures I took on my recent trip from the camera to the computer, and have now uploaded most of them (I left out the duplicates, blurry and badly exposed ones, etc.) to my Picasa album.

Tour of the Library of Congress here.

Walk through Cardgrrl's neighborhood and a nearby park here.

One of the most spectacular landmarks in D.C. is the National Cathedral. Cardgrrl happens to live just a stone's throw away from it, so I went over on Saturday and looked around. It's a lovely building and grounds, with grand views of the city all around. See here.

In which I play a new game--and crush it

Cardgrrl and I had another non-poker day today. It was spent at the home of her closest friends, a husband-and-wife pair that she has known since college days. I had exchanged some correspondence with them in advance, and had anticipated that meeting them would be one of the best parts of the trip. I was right. They proved to be a completely delightful couple that I hope will be in my circle of friends for a long time to come.

The highlight of the visit was playing a game that Cardgrrl has played with them (and their two teenage sons, one of which was there, the other of which is off to college) frequently in the past: "Apples to Apples." This is absolutely one of the best games I've ever enountered. It is simple in premise, virtually instant to learn, fast-paced, funny, creative, and endlessly entertaining. Each player has seven red cards, on each of which is the name of a person, place, or thing (James Dean, oil spill, the Eiffel Tower, high school reunion, the ozone layer, babies, loan shark, girlfriends). One player, acting as judge, selects a green card from the pack. The green cards contain a concept or quality (silly, fake, manly, touchy-feely, clean, demanding, etc.). Players select from their red cards the one that they think the judge will decide best fits the category or characteristic specified on the green card. The judge can make the decision on any basis he or she wishes (the most literally correct, the funniest, the most ironic, or even random). The person whose red card is selected by the judge keeps that green card, and the first player with seven green cards wins.

I won twice in a row. And I have to tell you, it wasn't even close. In the first game, nobody had more than three when I hit seven. In the second somebody had gotten to five, but none of the others had more than three.

In other words, I crushed. (Here's that "insufferable" thing again that Cardgrrl was talking about. Don't worry--it won't last long.)

A large part of it is luck--having cards that perfectly fit and that are kind of obvious winners. E.g., I had "First man on the moon" when the category was "Technological." Hard to top that. (I also had "Skinheads" when the green card said "Hostile," and thought it was a shoe-in, but lost a close decision to "Attack on Pearl Harbor.") But some of the game is also getting inside the head of the judge and anticipating what he or she will find compelling. E.g., I submitted "Eiffel Tower" for the "Manly" green card, thinking that the judge (the teenage son) would find the phallic symbolism an irresistibly cutesy way to make his decision--and he did. Similarly, I guessed that our hostess, then serving as judge, would appreciate the lateralness of "talk radio" submitted for the "chewy" green card--i.e., topics for discussion on the radio being stuff to chew on, as in "chew the fat." She did, and on that basis.

Do you see poker parallels here? I sure do (though, of course, I tend to see them everywhere, so it's not saying much). You have to be able to see the game from the perspective of somebody else in order to be successful. I won a green card by correctly anticipating that our host would think "Corvettes" were more "Neat" than whatever others were submitting, but I would not have made the same choice if, say, Cardgrrl had been the judge that round--just as I will be more inclined to play a tricky little hand like 5-7 offsuit against an opponent that I believe has a big pair and will get too married to it than against a cautious player who is good at smelling traps and getting out of them, and will be more inclined to fire the three-barrel bluff at the overly nitty play-only-the-nuts guy than at the calling station.

A couple of years ago I briefly was part of a small group of players who shared difficult poker hands via email discussion. It didn't last long. I confess that I didn't contribute much. (Some of them are readers--so, sorry, guys.) Here's why: Every time I thought about submitting a hand for consideration, it boiled down to a question of deciding how this particular player would react to a bluff, value-bet, or whatever, or what cards he might have in this specific situation. But how to convey by email what information I had on that point? Consider, for example, this hand, which took me forever to write up, because of trying to explain everything I had gathered about my opponent, how previous hands had played out, what his emotional state and image of me likely were, etc. I just couldn't find the time or inclination to type out that level of detail very often. But that's just what one needs in order to make good decisions in poker--particularly in no-limit games--whether on the spot or after the fact. Who you are playing against is an enormous part of every decision you have to make.

As for "Apples to Apples," if we're being honest, most of my success today was the proverbial beginner's luck of having superior cards. After all, my four opponents not only know each other much better than I know any of them (or they me), but they have played this exact game against each other many times. So I'm not going to fool myself into thinking that it was some poker-honed, ultra-superior, mind-penetrating radar that brought the wins. But it was definitely in my thoughts the whole time that seeing things as other players see them was a crucial element to that game, as well as to the one with which I'm more familiar.

Cardgrrl and I are going to a live deep-stack tournament tomorrow, probably to be followed by a cash game. I hope that I am able to carry over at least a little bit of the good fortune I had today, and also remember how useful it can be to get inside the other players' heads.

The cool thing I did today (no poker content)

Today Cardgrrl and I took a day off from poker. We went to the Library of Congress. We took the official tour of the main (Jefferson) building, which was interesting enough. But part of our reason for choosing that institution to visit, as opposed to a thousand other places one might explore, was that we were going to be meeting up with two of Cardgrrl's friends for dinner, and they both work at the Library of Congress. We got to their building (there are several) just after closing time, and so had to be escorted in. But that meant that we got to see some of the office space and some of the storage areas where the general public ordinarily doesn't get to go.

By happenstance, one of the friends we were meeting spied in the hallway a colleague that she thought could and would take us on a special impromptu tour, and that's exactly what happened. We were ushered into the vault of the periodicals section of the library, where are kept the most rare and valuable of the collection. Part of it is what I understand to be the largest collection of comic books on the planet. Hence the photo above. Those particular ones were lying on a cart because they had been pulled from the shelves for a visiting scholar who is researching the history of images of women in American comic books.

About three feet away from that cart (to the right of what is framed in the photo) was a set of shelves on which were the newest acquisitions. They included a mint-condition first issue of some old superhero comic that I hadn't heard of before, but of which the curator was exceptionally proud. (It was apparently a very expensive purchase.) She also showed us a newly acquired bound volume of the earliest issues of the first Cherokee-language (actually bilingual, with English in parallel columns) newspaper in the U.S. On the same new-acquisition shelves was a bunch of old newspapers being collected because they printed the Declaration of Independence in 1776. My understanding was that the library has been trying to assemble as many samples of these as they could find. You could see by the dates how the news spread around the country and the world. She pulled out for us examples such as a Virginia newspaper from, I believe, July 16, 1776, and the first newspaper in which the Declaration was published in London in late August. A Philadelphia newspaper had it on the front page, but right next to it were ads for, among other things, slaves for sale. Oh, the irony! (I could see that this bound volume was sitting on the shelf, though she only described it for us rather than pulling it out.)

There are, we were told by the official tour guide, some 140,000,000 items in the Library of Congress. I don't suppose that an Archie or Wonder Woman comic, or even a bunch of 1776 newspapers, are the most interesting things there. But it was an unspeakably cool and unexpected treat to be personally escorted into one of the library's usually completely-off-limits vaults, after hours, and shown some of these rare items by the very kind, enthusiastic, and technically knowledgeable woman who is in charge of their safekeeping, just because we happened to have been visiting one of her colleagues at the right place and time.

From there were walked to a nearby Mexican restaurant, Tortilla Coast, which I liked very much. The purpose of the get-together was for me to be able to meet some of Cardgrrl's best friends, and them me (more of which is coming tomorrow), and to celebrate the belated birthday of one of them. It was a delightful time.

If I had something pokery to report, I would. But I can't apologize for having no poker news when I spent my day in such delightful company and pursuits. Once in a while, I am reminded that there is more to life than poker, and it can be quite nice indeed.

Legality of poker in the District of Columbia

Now that I have played in an underground poker game in the District, I thought maybe I should learn for myself whether I was committing a crime in the process. Oh, sure, some people might check that out in advance, but that's not how I roll.

To the best of my ability to determine, the central statute in operation is this:

DC ST § 22-1704

Division IV. Criminal Law and Procedure and Prisoners.
Title 22. Criminal Offenses and Penalties.

Subtitle I. Criminal Offenses.
Chapter 17.
Gambling.
Subchapter I. General Provisions.

§ 22-1704. Gaming; setting up gaming table; inducing play.

Whoever shall in the District set up or keep any gaming table, or any
house, vessel, or place, on land or water, for the purpose of gaming, or
gambling device commonly called A B C, faro bank, E O, roulette, equality, keno,
thimbles, or little joker, or any kind of gaming table or gambling device
adapted, devised, and designed for the purpose of playing any game of chance for
money or property, or shall induce, entice, and permit any person to bet or play
at or upon any such gaming table or gambling device, or on the side of or
against the keeper thereof, shall be punished by imprisonment for a term of not more than 5 years. For the purposes of this section, the term
"gambling device" shall not include slot machines manufactured before 1952,
intended for exhibition or private use by the owner, and not used for gambling
purposes. The term "slot machine" means a mechanical device, an essential part
of which is a drum or reel which bears an insignia and which when operated may
deliver, as a result of the application of an element of chance, a token, money,
or property, or by operation of which a person may become entitled to receive,
as a result of this application of an element of chance, a token, money, or
property.

The term "gaming table" is further defined in section 22-1707:

All games, devices, or contrivances at which money or any other thing shall
be bet or wagered shall be deemed a gaming table within the meaning of §§ 22-
1704 to 22-1706; and the courts shall construe said sections liberally, so as to
prevent the mischief intended to be guarded against.

Interestingly, as far as I can tell, "gaming" itself is not specifically defined.

Poker is not specifically mentioned in either statute. However, my admittedly superficial analysis is that a court would be hard-pressed not to see it included.* True, one might succeed at convincing a court that poker is not a "game of chance," but is instead a game of skill. However, I wouldn't count on it, based on recent results in other jurisdictions. And even if one succeeded on that count, one would not be out of the woods, because the first part of section 1704 prohibits the keeping "any gaming table...for the purpose of gaming," without regard to the "game of chance" language. With the broad definition of "gaming table" in 1707 to include any game in which anything of value is bet or wagered, I can't see how a poker game could escape.

In doing a quick Google search on the subject, I came across a couple of places where people were claiming that having a poker game in the District is legal as long as there isn't a rake. As far as I can tell, that is just plain wrong. Inviting a couple of friends over for a penny-ante game with no house rake or profit taken, or hosting a poker tournament where all of the entry fees are redistributed back to the players without juice, is just as much a violation of the statute as operating a 24-hour, for-profit, raked game in a low-rent apartment somewhere. Pub tournaments in which the prizes are non-monetary items of some value or bar-tab credits would similarly seem to be prohibited.

Note, too, that all of these examples, being violations of the same statute, constitute felonies, punishable by up to five years in prison. That's right: Invite three friends over to your house for an evening of $0.01-$0.02 limit hold'em, and you're a felon. Makes a lot of sense, doesn't it?

The only way you escape the broad definition is if you run a game only for funsies and bragging rights, with absolutely nothing of monetary value at stake. (My friend Cardgrrl sometimes plays heads-up with a poker buddy here for practice and experience, with just such an arrangement, and that would seem to run afoul of no laws.)

The good news is that it appears that playing poker does not violate the statute. It is the keeping of the gaming table that is the criminal violation.

Using a free web site on case law, I am able to search only the last ten years, but in that interval I find no criminal cases in the D.C. appellate courts in which maintenance of a poker table or establishment has been adjudicated. It is possible that there exists older case law that clarifies or modifies the facial language of the statutes, but if so, I don't know about it.

I also have not yet dug into the status of the law in neighboring Maryland or Virginia. If anybody can point me to a definitive source for such information (i.e., not just "I heard that..."), so that I don't have to figure it out myself, it would be appreciated.


*That language about construing the language "liberally" is part of a trend over the past several decades. Courts have frequently held that criminal statutes must be interpreted narrowly or strictly, so that citizens are on fully fair notice of what is prohibited. That is, if it is ambiguous whether a particular action falls within the scope of the legal proscription, courts are generally supposed to find that the action is not criminal. Not surprisingly, legislatures didn't like this development, so many of them started incorporating language like you see here, directly instructing courts not to implement the so-called "strict construction" or "rule of lenity." But courts in many jurisdictions have simply ignored such mandates, on the grounds that narrow interpretation is a constitutional requirement as part of "due process," and legislatures simply don't have the authority to require otherwise. Courts in some jurisdictions, though, have capitulated. Kind of bizarrely, I had to research this in some depth in conjunction with a legal case I was involved in a few years ago. (No, I wasn't on trial for any criminal accusation, but the question was relevant to a civil case.) I found clear case law favoring the rule of lenity for penal statutes in 11 states (CT, FL, HI, IL, LA, NJ, PA, RI, TN, WA, WV), whereas at least nine state appellate courts have heeded the legislative mandate to the contrary (CA, DE, MI, MT, NH, NY, OR, SD, UT), though not always with great consistency. For others, including DC, I couldn't find clear declarations one way or the other. Fascinating, eh? I'm just chock-full of useless knowledge.

This all probably doesn't matter, though, for the case of poker, because the fact that wagering is involved puts it pretty clearly on the prohibited list, and there isn't much ambiguity for a court to have to try to resolve.

The Gospel of the Deuce-Four comes to D.C. (and other stories)

Yesterday I had a lovely day spent with Cardgrrl. We took a long walk in the afternoon, exploring part of her neighborhood in Washington, D.C. She lives within a few blocks of such institutions as the National Cathedral, Fannie Mae headquarters, the Sidwell Friends school (where attend children of U.S. presidents, senators, etc.--because public schools are good enough for eveybody else's kids, but not theirs), the Department of Homeland Security, and American University.

In the evening we started with what her blog readers will have come to know as the "A league," a well-organized home-tournament series in the northern Virginia suburbs. This particular one was held in the basement of one of the members, with "Rehab" playing in the background on the television. (I certainly knew of the Hard Rock pool and its reputation, but I had no idea that there was a reality TV show about it, nor had I even heard of the "Tru" network that it's on. What a dumb show.)

Cardgrrl did great in the tourney, taking second. She would have won it, if not for a super-ugly three-outer on the river during heads-up play, when she had her lone opponent just barely covered, and was too crippled to recover as a result. Her surprising reaction to this beat was to tell the other player, "You suck," to which he responded, "Yes, I do." It appeared that this was neither intended nor taken as an actual put-down, the two of them having played together for a couple of years now. She assured me in private later that such banter is routine for the group and not taken seriously by anybody, but it was still an odd and highly uncomfortable moment for me, as an outside observer.*

I admit that I had some difficulty adapting to the home-game milieu, what with players casually reaching into each others' chips for change, endemic splashing of the pot, no attempt whatsoever to enforce any rule against discussing the hand in progress, ubiquitous card-flashing, rabbit-hunting after most hands (really, I don't understand why anybody cares what might have been, but that's something I've ranted about before, so won't repeat here), the dealer button signifying actual dealing by that player (while the small blind shuffles a second deck for efficiency), etc. But it was all organized in its own slightly chaotic way, perfectly friendly, and actually a lot of fun.

Since everybody else managed to go with the flow, I'm sure I could learn to adjust to that environment as well, given a few more experiences with it. After all, the casino poker rooms of Vegas, with their rules and procedures, were once foreign and uncomfortable to me, too. There's nothing particularly wrong with the home-style version. It's just that the standard casino ways of doing everything are now completely second nature to me, so encountering different and unfamiliar ways of doing things is, at least temporarily, at the edges of my personal comfort zone. The people, though, were warm and welcoming, and did their best to make the new guy feel part of the gang. That's certainly something one doesn't get in a typical Vegas poker room. I am humbled by and grateful for that reception. I expect to be playing with much of the same group Sunday, and I'm genuinely looking forward to it.

I made it to the final table but not the money, exiting the tournament in one of the worst ways possible: by mucking the winning hand accidentally when I was all-in. It was instantly placed onto the list of The Top Ten Most Stupid Mistakes I Have Ever Made While Playing Poker.

It happened because, as another example of the non-casino, home-game way of doing things, the small main pot was awarded first to a player who had been even more short-stacked than I was. Of course, standard procedure is to award the side pot first. I was eligible for that, and had the best of the three hands that were competing for it. But because of the reverse way that they did the showdown, once the fourth player--the only one with a stack shorter than mine--showed a better hand than mine, I assumed I had lost. Put another way, the flipped order of showdown caused me to confuse, for a few critical seconds, which pot was the side and which was the main, and by the time I realized my mistake, my cards were in the muck. Of course, I should have just turned them face-up anyway, as I have preached here any number of times. The size of that side pot was such that it merely would have taken me back to where I was in chips before the hand started, which wasn't great, but it was still in rather than out. The final outcome still most likely would have been me out of the money, but I would have at least had a fighting chance. Stupid, stupid, stupid me. Fortunately, the entry fee was only $25, so I didn't kick myself as hard as I would have if more money had been at stake. Still, it was an inexcusable lapse for one with my level of experience.

From there we went to what Cardgrrl refers to in her blog and tweets as the "Crime Scene Game," so designated because of the bloodbath she experienced the first time playing there after having started her blog. We started playing around 10:30 p.m. and stayed until 2:30 a.m.

Late in the session I was almost back to even after taking a long time to dig out of an early hole, when I found the 2s-4c in early position. I limped, as did several others. The flop was 3d-5d-7s, giving me an open-ended straight draw. I thought that flop likely missed all or nearly all of the other players, and I had acquired an image as the tightest player in the game (mostly because of an unbelievably long string of unplayable cards), so I thought a bet might take it down. I think I made it $10. It did reduce the field to one opponent--the guy who had built up the largest stack at the table, with some $800 in front of him. (Buy-in for this $1-2 NLHE game is capped at $300.)

The turn was the As, completing my straight. I bet $25. My opponent min-raised to $50. I popped it an additional $75 on top of that, and he called. The way he had been playing, I was pretty sure that (1) he would have raised on the flop to defend against the flush draw, and/or reraised me all-in on the turn, if he had 4-6 for a higher straight, and (2) he would only call my turn reraise with top two pair or a set. The river was the 8h, which changed nothing; this guy absolutely would not have played the hand this way with 6-9. I moved all-in for my last $125. He thought a while, called, and asked, "You got a straight?" Well, of course I do, sir--it's the deuce-four! The biggest pot of the night came my way. He did not show his hand.**

I snapped a picture of the result, though it appears that I had an ugly fingerprint or something on the cell-phone camera lens, resulting in a smudged appearance to the whole thing:





Cardgrrl, of course, had figured out what I was playing, but none of the other players knew about me or this blog or the 2-4. She told my unfortunate opponent that he was playing with a disadvantage, not knowing that about me. I explained to the table that the 2-4 is the most powerful hand in poker.

Cardgrrl sent out the following Tweet: "@pokergrump wins huge pot playing the 2-4. I still do not believe." It's true--she doesn't. She's a stubborn woman. (She also made a crack about how I was going to be "insufferable" after winning this monster pot with that hand. She may be right about that, though there's an argument to be made that I'm pretty damn insufferable at baseline anyway.)

Apparently one guy believed my preaching. Just a couple of hands later, while I was still stacking the chips, he played 2-4 (in crubs, no less!) after another guy had raised with A-4. The original raiser moved all-in on a flop of 2-2-4, and was insta-called by the brand-new convert to the Holy Order of the Deuce-Four, who was understandably quite pleased to learn of its magical properties:




Everybody at the table had a good laugh about it. Well, all but one. Can you guess who did not find it amusing? That's right: Mr. A-4.

So I have, like a good missionary, spread the Gospel of the Deuce-Four to the Washington, D.C. area poker world, where I am confident it will flourish, having found highly fertile soil.



*I just wouldn't make a very good "good ol' boy." It seems completely backwards to me to have a relationship in which insults are taken as part of the fun. If a stranger tells me that I suck at poker, I brush it off. His opinion is both uninformed and unimportant to me. If a close friend said the same words, it would be much harder to dismiss and far more hurtful. I just don't get the whole dynamic there. But I am apparently the oddball in that regard, as in so many others.

** I wrote the above before noticing, during proofreading, that the photograph shows one of his hole cards exposed: a four. I did not see this when it happened, being too busy with the pot, taking the picture, etc. If my conjecture about his holdings is correct, it means he had a set of fours. However, it seems unlikely, in retrospect, that he would then show one but not both of them. That makes me think that I gave him too much credit, and he actually had A-4. But I'll never know for sure now.