Historic playing cards

Mars Hill University is a small college just a little north of Asheville. I was at an event there today in the library, and the library had an exhibit about historical games. Nina spotted this on one of the walls. Unfortunately, I didn't think to take a wider picture of the whole deck, and the lighting didn't allow me to get good quality photos of the individual cards. But you can still see the general idea.

Confederate monuments

I can recall only one unexpected encounter with a Confederate monument.

In December 2015, Nina and I went for a hike in Pinnacle Park, near the town of Sylva, NC. Afterward, we decided to poke around the town and see what was there. We quickly found our way to what seemed to be the highest point: the courthouse. 

From the front of the building, there's a spectacular view down the main drag, with mountains in the background, as seen below. If I took a photo of that view, I didn't save it, but here's a good one: 

(Source) 

From behind, I thought that statue was probably a WWI soldier. I went down the steps far enough to see it from the front, and was surprised by what you can see in the photo below: "Our Heroes of the Confederacy." 

I'm no PC snowflake, but the statue and its engraving instantly made me feel, well, icky. The Confederacy was the enemy of everything I cherish, ideologically; it was awful in every conceivable way, from its conception to the moment it was destroyed. 

A speech that Frederick Douglass gave in 1878 sums up the matter more eloquently than I ever could: 

Nevertheless, we must not be asked to say that the South was right in the rebellion, or to say the North was wrong. We must not be asked to put no difference between those who fought for the Union and those who fought against it, or between loyalty and treason.... 

I admit that the South believed it was right, but the nature of things is not changed by belief. The Inquisition was not less a crime against humanity because it was believed right by the Holy Fathers.... 

It was a war of ideas, a battle of principles and ideas which united one section and divided the other; a war between the old and new, slavery and freedom, barbarism and civilization; between a government based upon the broadest and grandest declaration of human rights the world ever heard or read, and another pretended government, based upon an open, bold and shocking denial of all rights, except the right of the strongest.... 

There was a right side and a wrong side in the late war, which no sentiment ought to cause us to forget, and while to-day we should have malice toward none, and charity toward all, it is no part of our duty to confound right with wrong, or loyalty with treason.

(See here for the whole thing.) 

I am not in the "tear them all down" camp--especially when that is decided by mob rule rather than through the processes of representative democracy. But neither am I in the "we need to honor our heritage" camp. It is preposterous to worry that we will erase the Civil War, the Confederacy, and its important lessons from our collective conscious if all the flattering monuments were to be hit by wrecking balls. 

But I'm not sure that's the right approach, at least not across the board. 

One of the most interesting things I saw on my one and only trip to Santa Fe, New Mexico, was the city's central plaza. It is home to an obelisk monument erected in 1868:

(Source.) 

The obelisk itself is forgettable, indistinguishable from a million others. But I was intrigued by the combination of the original inscription and the explanatory plaque added much, much later: 

(You will note that the word "savage" has been defaced out of the original, presumably after this plaque was added. This was vandalism, not an official act. I don't approve of it; your mileage may vary.) 

I like this general approach. It allows the visitor to see what was important to the people who erected the edifice, in their own words. But then it adds a modern comment, gently (perhaps too gently) expressing a collective, contemporary disavowal. 

Maybe the added plaque should go further, and express remorse over the entire genocidal enterprise, rather than being apologetic only for the use of two words that make those of modern sensibilities cringe. But my point is not that this one example is done exactly right; rather, I think the general approach is a worthy one, and it's one I don't recall having seen done anywhere else. 

I can imagine approving of a heroic-appearing Civil War monument, with its original inscription intact, but augmented by an updated perspective--one explaining that while we do not wish to erase the past, we also do not wish to condone or leave unchallenged the views that cloaked Confederate evil in the glory of a heroic public statue. It would not displease me one bit if some of Douglass's wonderful prose, such as that quoted above, made its way onto these new additions to the memorials. 

Those who built all these monuments did so in order to speak to people of the future. Fine, let them. We don't need to silence their voices in order to add our own. 

Pearl Harbor

Long before my six years in Vegas that recently ended, I lived there for two years, 1980-82. During that time, I got to know a man in Henderson named Ralph Briggs. He told me once that he had been a Navy radio operator. He said that several days before December 7, 1941, he had intercepted a message from the Japanese fleet about an attack soon to be launched. He dutifully passed the message up the chain of command, then was on leave when the attack occurred. He later learned that the message he had intercepted had been ignored, and, as a result, Pearl Harbor was not at all prepared for the attack.

Even though I judged him to be an exceptionally honest, honorable man, frankly I assumed that he must be pulling my leg--not because I knew anything about the subject, but just because it seemed astronomically unlikely that I happened to know the one guy whose message, if heeded, would have changed the outcome of the single most pivotal event in 20th-century history. There are always more pretenders than real heroes, more people claiming to have been watching the JFK motorcade in Dallas than were actually there, etc.

Many years later, I was watching a string of History Channel documentaries that they were showing on an anniversary date. (It was probably 2001, on the 60th anniversary.) There on the screen was Ralph Briggs, telling the same story, which was being treated as a fully credible and factual account. I'm not entirely sure which program it was, because now I know that he's been in at least a couple, but it may well have been this BBC-produced show, "Sacrifice at Pearl Harbor." Start watching at about 53:00 to hear Ralph. (The screen capture above is from this video.)

I have since learned that his story is hotly disputed. Some writers take him at his word, and accept that the lack of expected documentary evidence to support his account is because of later tampering with the records as part of a cover-up. See, for example, a relatively short book chapter devoted to the whole affair, readable via Google Books here. On the other extreme, some say that his account is "too full of holes to hold up to much scrutiny."

I have no way of knowing where the truth lies. Maybe he really was the Paul Revere of his time whose message was tragically disregarded. Maybe he was a crackpot, trying to claim for himself a place in history that he didn't deserve. Maybe he was sincere but wrong, as memories can become distorted by time and subsequent events. For example, maybe he really did intercept and pass on a message, but it was rightly ignored because it was not, in fact, anything of military significance, and he retrospectively imbued it with content and/or meaning that it did not have. Whatever the truth, it is, at least, an interesting story. In fact, that we cannot now know what really happened kind of makes it more interesting.

Absent strong evidence, which seems unlikely ever to come forth, I would never swallow the extreme conspiracy theory that Franklin Roosevelt had specific knowledge of the impending attack and squelched it so that Americans would be provoked into supporting his desire to get involved in WWII. However, I find it entirely plausible that, as with September 11, 2001, there were a multitude of clues which our various intelligence services failed to assemble and interpret correctly. I also think it's plausible that some such clues were later swept away to prevent political embarrassment. I certainly don't know that this happened, but it would hardly be the most nefarious thing the military brass ever did.

Today I got wondering if Ralph was still alive. It seemed unlikely. Sure enough, I found his 1998 obituary in the Chicago Tribune, here. So he was already dead by the time I was discovering that I was far from the only one who had heard his claims. It is, in fact, a well-known little curiosity among both conspiracy buffs and serious historians of that chapter of American history.

I spent a few hours again today watching some documentaries on Pearl Harbor, which is what prompted this little trip down memory lane. I think it's impossible not to be moved by the stories of both heroism and loss. To all those, living and dead, who experienced that awful day firsthand, and to the memory of Ralph Briggs, I offer my thanks.

Abraham Lincoln on gamblers

A political blog post I was reading today (here, in case anyone is interested) quoted something by Honest Abe about gamblers. It interested me enough to track down the original, which, thanks to Google, is almost ridiculously easy these days.

It comes from his speech to the Young Men's Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois, January 27, 1838, which can be found here. Lincoln is warning of the dangers of the increasing arbitrariness of mob violence in retribution for alleged crimes.

In the Mississippi case they first commenced by hanging the regular gamblers — a set of men certainly not following for a livelihood a very useful or very honest occupation, but one which, so far from being forbidden by the laws, was actually licensed by an act of the Legislature passed but a single year before.... Abstractly considered, the hanging of the gamblers at Vicksburg was of but little consequence. They constitute a portion of population that is worse than useless in any community; and their death...is never matter of reasonable regret with any one. If they were annually swept from the stage of existence by the plague or smallpox, honest men would perhaps be much profited by the operation.

Gee, thanks, Abe! Appreciate the compliment! Care to know what I think of members of your professions, i.e., lawyers and politicians?

Great story

Matt Savage posted on Twitter a link to this interesting story from the 2002 World Series of Poker, one which I had never seen before, well told by Jesse May. It contains important lessons for both players and tournament officials.

http://www.thegoodgamblingguide.co.uk/spotlight/wsop2002/wsop2002_jessemayreports.htm

Today's fun fact

The World Series of Poker Main Event buy-in was first set at $10,000 in 1972, and it has not changed since then.

In 1972 the consumer price index was 41.8. It is now 226. Therefore, if the Main Event buy-in had kept pace with inflation, it would now be about $54,000.

Doyle Brunson and the WSOP

Doyle Brunson has been frustrated at the World Series of Poker this year. Saturday he Tweeted, "@PokerLawyer Thanks, you might be watching my last tournament. If I don't play well (up to my standards), I may retire from tournament poker." A few hours ago, he busted out of the $50,000 "Players Championship" event and wrote, "Busted... Total nightmare... Goodbye WSOP." That was followed shortly thereafter by, "No main event for me. maybe the DOJ will stake me."

Pokerati then asked him, "will this be your first main event to miss ever?" Kevmath responded, "sure he missed some after jack binion left and becky took over?"

Dana Smith interviewed Doyle in 1998. The transcript is reprinted in The Championship Table at the World Series of Poker by Smith, McEvoy, and Wheeler (2nd edition, Cardoza, 2004), pages 48-55. The introduction to the interview says, "Brunson created some waves this year (1998) at the World Series of Poker when, after a 20-year hiatus from tournament competition, he made a triumphant return to the arena where he previously had won so many battles, including back-to-back victories in the championship event in '76 and '77."

The interview includes this Q&A on page 53:

You don't usually play the small events at the Series, but this year you did. What made you decide to play them?  

One reason was that some guys had passed me by and I wanted to keep my name towards the top of the list. Another reason was that they were putting out these lists (odds sheets) with the favorites on them--and they didn't even have me in the top eight! I have nothing against women poker players, but they had a few women in front of me. "I'm gonna have to do something about that," I said. So, instead of playing in the side games, I played in the tournaments for the first time in 20 years. 

Now, neither this claim from Brunson nor the one from Smith introducing the interview can be taken literally--a complete absence from all tournaments or even from just the WSOP--because the records show that Doyle cashed 13 times, including three bracelets, in the 20 years prior to his "return" in 1998 (i.e., 1978-1997). These cashes included three Main Event final tables. Furthermore, they included not just the Main Event (as might be suggested by Smith's distinction about the "small events"); he cashed in stud, deuce, ace-to-five draw, PLO, and Chinese, as well as no-limit hold'em.

In fact, looking at that record, it's hard to understand what either Smith or Brunson himself meant by characterizing that period as a 20-year hiatus from the Series. I can't easily answer exactly how many times Doyle has sat out the Main Event, but it is likely a good number of them in the 20-year stretch following his 1977 championship, if there is anything at all to be believed about his own words in this 1998 interview.

Nice touch, Ali!

In this week's installment of the NBC Heads-Up Championship, we see Erik Seidel paired against Andrew Robl. In their final hand, Seidel flops a full house and improves to a better boat on the river. Robl starts with pocket queens and has two pair on the river. Seidel moves all in. Robl is tortured about whether to call and possibly thereby lose the match. In the voiceover, Ali Nejad intones that Robl "cannot win this hand and yet he doesn't know it."

I laughed out loud. It was a wonderful tidbit of a reward for viewers who know their poker history. When Erik Seidel got heads-up against Johnny Chan, those were the exact words used by the TV commentator in their final pot, and Nejad even aped his tone and pacing. You can watch that hand play out here.

I heartily approve of such nods to history.

The only thing that's constant is change

Something got me thinking about how poker rooms have changed since I moved to town in July, 2006. I started down a mental list of casinos, and could think of only a handful in which there has not been an opening, closing, or move of the poker room in the time I've lived here.

What follows is my attempt to catalog such changes. This is all done from memory, and will undoubtedly have a few errors, but the point still stands: Nothing in Vegas is forever, including poker rooms.


Aliante Station: Opened, then moved.

Aria: Opened.

Arizona Charlie's--Decatur: Moved twice.

Bally's: No change.

Bellagio: No change.

Bill's: Opened, then moved.

Binion's: Moved.

Boulder Station: No change.

Caesars Palace: Opened.

Cannery: Moved three times.

Circus Circus: No change.

Club Fortune: Moved.

Eastside Cannery: Opened, then moved.

El Cortez: No change.

Excalibur: Moved; then fired dealers, went to electronic tables, then went back to live dealers.

Fiesta Henderson: Moved twice, then closed.

Fiesta Rancho: Closed.

Fitzgerald's: No change.

Flamingo: No change.

Gold Coast: Moved, then closed.

Golden Nugget: Moved.

Green Valley Ranch: Moved.

Hacienda: Closed.

Hard Rock: Opened, then moved.

Harrah's: No change.

Hilton: Closed.

Hooters (formerly San Remo): Opened.

Imperial Palace: Moved three times.

Jokers Wild: Moved.

Luxor: Moved twice.

M Resort: Opened.

Mandalay Bay: No change.

MGM Grand: No change.

Mirage: No change.

Monte Carlo: No change.

Orleans: No change.

O'Shea's: Opened.

Nevada Palace: Casino closed (later reopened as Eastside Cannery).

Palace Station: No change.

Palms: No change.

Paris: Moved, then closed.

Planet Hollywood (formerly Aladdin): Moved three times.

Plaza: Closed (I think).

Poker Palace: No change.

Railroad Pass: Closed.

Rampart: Opened, then closed.

Red Rock: No change (opened shortly before I arrived).

Rio: No change.

Riviera: Moved.

Sahara: No change.

Sam's Town: Moved.

Santa Fe Station: Moved.

Silverton: Moved twice.

South Point (formerly South Coast): Moved.

Speedway: Closed.

Stardust: Casino closed.

Stratosphere: Moved.

Suncoast: Moved.

Sunset Station: Moved.

Terrible's: Opened.

Texas Station: No change.

Treasure Island: No change.

Tropicana: Closed (reported to be reopening soon).

Tuscany: Closed, then reopened.

Venetian: No change. (Opened shortly before I arrived.)

Wynn: No change.


That's 66 properties I've listed, of which only 22 I classify as "no change" in the past 4 1/2 years. (Of course, they've all had changes in personnel, in games spread, in rules, number of tables, tournament schedule, etc. I'm talking about opening, closing, or moving, plus the one unique type of change listed for the Excalibur.)

Adapt or die

This week I started reading a book my sister gave me for Christmas: The Gun by C. J. Chivers. I first learned about this book just before its publication date in October, when the author appeared for a long, fascinating interview on NPR's "Fresh Air," which you can listen to here.

The book is a history of the AK-47, and how dramatically this one weapon changed the way that wars are fought. As an owner of two of the myriad derivatives of the original form (I have a Romanian-made semi-automatic rifle chambered for .223, and a Russian-made semi-automatic 12-gauge shotgun variant, the Saiga-12), I was eager to learn more about this story. However, the book's first 140 pages are spent laying out the 80 or so years of history of automatic weapons prior to Kalashnikov. This was completely unfamiliar ground to me.

What I found most interesting was how astonishingly slow even the most sophisticated armies of the day were to adopt their tactics to the new weaponry. Chivers asserts (page 113):

Military bureaucracies, as they considered incorporating machine guns into their armies, dawdled indecisively in every Western country but Germany. The thinking was fully blinkered. Senior officers recognized the effects of withering bursts of fire upon massed combatants, having heard reports of the felling of heaps of Arabs and Africans who advanced in formation toward machine guns. They were somehow unable to accept what might happen when such fire was directed against their own ranks.

Lest the reader disbelieve Chivers's claim that the world's most sophisticated military commanders were incredibly slow to figure this stuff out, he spends the next 25 pages providing the proof. His mention of "Arabs and Africans" is in reference to stories he has already told about how European colonizers in the 1880s and 1890s effectively annihilated more primitive armies of vastly larger numbers by simply mowing them down as they charged forward with their spears. It was slaughter of an efficiency and ferocity these opponents could not have even imagined when heading into the battle, with those at the rear having to clamber over piles of the bodies of the dead in order to take their turns at being gunned down.

So military commanders certainly understood the power of automatic weapons. But, as Chivers said, it somehow just could not sink into their skulls that their own men were just as vulnerable. In 1904, the Japanese skirmished with the Russians in Manchuria. Even after seeing wave after wave of men cut down, never getting anywhere near the Russian machine guns, the Japanese commanders kept ordering more troops to follow them until there were none left.

OK, so the Japanese are rather notorious for cherishing suidical acts of "courage" in warfare. They're an exception to how modern armies dealt with opponents' automatic weapons, right?

Nope. In World War I, despite having literally decades of experience with machine guns, the mighty British army was still training each recruit that the bayonet affixed to the end of his single-shot rifle was his most important weapon; practice with it constituted the majority of pre-deployment training.

Two years into the first major machine-gun war, the British had still not changed the basic tactic that they had used to attack an entrenched enemy for as long as anybody could remember: sending masses of men charging at the defended positions. This was done knowing that those in front would suffer high casualty rates. But given how long it took to reload older rifles, a sufficiently large number of soldiers would eventually be able to overrun the enemy. In retrospect, it is blindingly obvious that this same approach was sheer folly when the enemy had guns that spat out hundreds of rounds per minute. Somehow, though, this self-evident truth just could not penetrate the concrete, old-fashioned thinking of senior military types, and they kept trying the same thing over and over again, despite repeated heavy losses and little gain.

The insanty reached its zenith on July 1, 1916, in the Battle of the Somme:

Watching from behind their machine guns, German soldiers were amazed. They had weathered fear and frustration through the shelling, waiting for the immense attack they knew was coming. As they peered over their parapets in the sudden quiet, the sights astonished them: thousands upon thousands of men, strolling exposed in neat lines.... "The English came walking, as though they were going to the theatre or as though they were on a parade ground," one German soldier said. "We felt they were mad." Another saw waves in which the men were so densely packed they "were like trees in a wood." Some of the Germans whooped. They were professional soldiers, the product of a German military system in which conscription was nearly universal.... They had never seen such targets before. The time for killing was at hand. One German machine-gun team alone would fire at least twenty-five thousand rounds.

In this withering fire, a Yorkshire battalion, Company A of the Seventh Green Howards, lost 108 of 140 men in minutes. An even more galling destruction fell upon the Tyneside Irish, a brigade of three thousand men, which had to cross almost a mile of open ground behind its own front-line trenches just to reach the British edge of No-Man's-Land. It took twenty minutes under fire to complete this march. Bullets slammed into the soldiers the entire way. The surviving Irish were ordered on, to press the attack across five hundred yards of open space.... Of the three thousand men who had stepped off, fifty fighting men remained. The New Army, Lord Kitchener's grand two-year project to replace the battered British Expeditionary Force with volunteers from all walks of British life--the mines, the factories, the clerks, the schoolhouses--was being cut down in an hour. The Dervishes had fought this foolishly. So had Japanese soldiers, who saw duty in death. Now the British army was doing it, too.

A darker hour for England would be hard to measure. By one estimate, 30,000 British soldiers were killed or wounded in the first sixty minutes. The midday tally reached 50,000. By the end of the day, 21,000 British soldiers were dead, 35,000 wounded, and 600 more had been taken prisoner. The survivors were emotionally devastated. One lance corporal, a signaler who had not been assigned to advance, watched his friends try to cross, only, he said, to be "mown down like meadow grass." He stayed back, weeping.

(Chivers, pp 133-134.)

This colossal failure finally, finally caught the attention of the Allied commanders. It slowly dawned on them that maybe charging massed men across open fields into the teeth of machine gun batteries wasn't the best idea.



Why this historical reflection? Well, even those who have disdain for overly casual or frequent analogies between poker and life in general must admit that poker and war have much in common, and much to learn from each other. One particular truth that they share is this: If you do not adapt your tactics to those of your opponents, you will be defeated.

I see this as having both micro and macro applications. In the micro setting, you have to adapt to the players currently at the table. As an extreme example, I remember a guy who used to come in to the Hilton poker room occasionally. His approach was extreme: He would buy in for $100, then repeatedly move all-in blind--without looking at his cards--until he had either built up $400-$500, or had lost about the same amount. If the former, he would move to an aggressive but at least fairly rational style of play. If the latter, he'd laugh it off, decide it wasn't his day, and go home.

This immensely frustrated some of the other players--particularly the older, nittier crowd. It both offended them as the "wrong" way to play poker, and intimidated them. Their desire for a slow, conservative, low-variance approach was utterly frustrated by this tactic. In the presence of such a wild player, it is clearly a mistake to respond by tightening up even further, but that is exactly what they would do. They would welcome the chance to call his blind all-in, but only if they had aces or kings in the hole. But by doing so, they left lots of money on the table. In order to profit from that extreme degree of looseness, you have to loosen up yourself. A hand like K-J offsuit is a substantial favorite over a random hand, and one you should be willing to take against him (at least one on one; having other players also calling complicates things, however).

As more familiar examples, if you repeatedly try to bluff a calling station, you are just giving away money. If you back down to an aggressive, bluff-happy bully every time, you might as well just hand him your wallet and go spend your time doing something more enjoyable than watch your stack of chips erode.

Maybe the poker situation that most resembles the history related by Chivers is the unwillingness to let go of pocket aces or kings in the face of unmistakable evidence that they are no longer good. When the table rock calls you on the flop and check-raises you on the river when a third diamond falls, aces dwindle in stature to nearly nothing. But time after time you can see people react to such a counterattack by stubbornly moving all-in, throwing good money after bad, refusing to accept the reality of the situation. They might as well be a British recruit trying to charge an entrenched German machine gun with a bayonet.

Then there is the macro sense of adaptation, too. Poker is a game that evolves over time, and one must change with it. The first poker strategy book I ever read (because of its prominence in James McManus's Positively Fifth Street, which was the first poker book of any kind that I read) was Cloutier and McEvoy's Championship No-Limit and Pot-Limit Hold'Em, published in 1997. Consider some of the advice that the authors give on pages 152-156 about how to play ace-king. (The "I" here is clearly Cloutier, with McEvoy acting sort of as his amanuensis.)

Say that you have raised with Ace-King from a front spot and one or two people have called. The board comes with 9-7-3, three suits. What do you do with your A-K? I don't care whether or not I've raised before the flop, I never bet A-K when the flop comes three rags....

By betting you have shut off your opportunity to get a free turn card and
possibly make your hand. If you check-check, you have found out information without it costing you anything. An aggressive player like Phil Hellmuth [Grump notes: It is a separately amazing thing that Hellmuth--now taunted for being overly passive--was once considered to be an unusually aggressive player.] may have a tendency to fire on the flop head-up; that's his style of play. But you can burn up a lot of chips that way. I don't continue with A-K unless I flop a hand that relates to it in some way, a hand with some strength in it....

Now, let's change the scenario: The action is two-handed, but you're sitting behind the other player.... The flop comes three rags and your opponent checks to you. You don't bet: You check right back at him. That way, you're not shutting yourself out. For example, what will you do if he checks, you bet, and then he raises you? What are you going to do with your hand then? So, you may as well take this opportunity that his check has given you and get a free card by checking along....

A lot of players will fire at the pot one time in these types of situations. When they see a baby flop, here they come! But I think they're making a mistake when they do that: You have to give an opponent credit for having something to have been able to call your raise to start with....

If a guy bets in front of me against that nine-high flop when I'm holding A-K, he wins the pot. It's that simple. I don't care what he has, he wins it right there.

Perhaps that advice constituted "championship" play in 1997; I don't pretend to know. But I do know that trying to play either a cash game or a tournament today by following that recipe will get you run over by nearly every player at the table. They will quickly figure out your transparent strategy, bluff you out of your shorts, and not pay you off when you actually do make a hand. You will not win the tournament. You will not make the final table. You will probably not even cash. You will have circles run around you. This is not just bringing the proverbial knife to a gunfight; it's bringing a knife to a machine-gun fight, and you'll be shot to pieces. There is a reason that you don't hear about Cloutier winning any tournaments lately.



Now if you'll excuse me, it's Saturday night of Super Bowl weekend, the Guest Gauge is "very busy," due to the confluence of that game, a UFC match at Mandalay Bay, and the Chinese New Year. I go off in search of poker players foolishly charging across open fields with their pocket aces.

Today's fun history lesson

I'm shocked, SHOCKED, to find that gambling was going on in our prisons.

http://www.lvrj.com/news/prison-casino-is-history-110786919.html

Hat tip: Mrs. Lederer.

Best read of the week (no poker content)

Reason magazine's "Hit and Run" blog today points to an astonishing blog post about an episode of history I had never heard about before--the meeting of some of the victims of the Hiroshima bomb with the co-pilot of the Enola Gay, on live network TV, in 1955. The post telling that story in exquisite detail is here. I'll second Reason blogger Jesse Walker's advice:

I recommend reading the whole thing, though not all in one sitting; you
might occasionally want to get up to scream "holy fuck" or "what the fuck?" or
"fuck on a fuckity fucking stick" while beating your head against the
wall.

Poker gems, #376

Mike Caro, in Bluff magazine column, May, 2010, p. 37. He is recounting how Gardena, California, gained and then lost its status as a poker center.


Players took turns dealing, and everything that's popping into your head right now happened. Making a living as an honest player was tough, and I had to choose games carefully.... Cheating wasn't the only obstacle. There were other annoyances, such as murder.

Poker gems, #365

Steve Fischer, author of When the Mob Ran Vegas, in an article on the demise of Binion's Horseshoe, in Poker Pro magazine, June, 2010, p. 43. The background is that Benny Binion owns the casino, but has to rent the land on which it sits from the Silvagni family, represented by Bill Coulthard. They renegotiated the rate every ten years--this time in 1972.


"You want how much rent, you sum'bitch? declared Benny. "If you think there's anyway in hell that I'm going to sit still for you doubling my rent for the next ten years, you better think again, shyster!"

Coulthard told him he didn't mind if Benny wanted to pack up his casino and get out when their current ten-year agreement expired later in the year. And then Benny told Coulthard what he could do with his new rent. And Bill Coulthard walked out of the Horseshoe into the heat, walked across the street to his car in the parking garage, sat down in his car, turned on the starter, and Bill Coulthard and his nice new 1972 Cadillac were blown all over the second level of the parking garage. The Metro police and the FBI were in agreement that it was probably four sticks of dynamite that blew him and his car to Kingdom Come.

With Coulthard out of the picture, the Binions and the next of Silvagni's relatives sat down with Benny to discuss the terms for the next ten years. For some reason, the Silvagni family, who didn't much like Bill Coulthard anyway, was very eager to reach a new rental agreement with the Binions. It took less than ten minutes to agree to terms.

"Damn shame what happened to Coulthard," Benny said. "Just a damn shame."

Bracelets

I went to the Rio yesterday to say hi to some of my blogger friends who landed jobs reporting on the World Series of Poker for various news outlets, to look around the new facilities they're using this year, and to play a little poker.

The first new thing I saw, just outside the Pavilion Room, was a display of the history of the bracelets awarded for winning WSOP events. I took pictures, knowing that many of my readers might find it interesting but won't be able to get here to see it in person.

Unfortuately, the display is not very photo-friendly. The lighting is not bright enough to work well without a flash, but a flash from just a foot away, through glass, is a disaster. Lacking a tripod for slow exposures, I did the best I could, but there was no way to avoid ugly darkness. Still, you can see the items and read the accompanying cards. It's not pretty, but you can take a look anyway.

Here's this year's bracelet:






The next display case is supposed to contain three of Billy Baxter's bracelets, showing various styles of bracelets over the years. One of them was missing, for reasons that weren't explained.








The next case contains a bit of WSOP history that I don't think I had ever heard before: For one year they gave out platters instead of bracelets:






Here are Johnny Chan's back-to-back Main Event bracelets:






Finally, here are Doyle Brunson's latest two bracelets:

Chan and Seidel--once more unto the breach

Having another insomnia night. It might have something to do with having heard six gunshots in rapid succession just outside my apartment complex as I was going to bed at about 1:30 a.m., followed by sirens and a police helicopter circling overhead. (Speaking of which, Nevada has been crowned the #1 state in crime for the seventh consecutive year! Go team!)

Killing time, I was jumping around the PokerWorks web site. I noticed a link to something about the famous final hand of the 1988 World Series of Poker, featuring Johnny Chan and Erik Seidel. I wondered if they would get it right, since, as I've chronicled here ad nauseum, writers have a nasty tendency to screw up the facts.

As Britney Spears might say, oops, they did it again.

Here's the entirety of the very brief piece:

At the WSOP 1988 final table, Johnny Chan was dealt J♣ 9♣, and Erik Seidel
was dealt Q♣ 7♥ pre-flop. They both limped.

The flop came Q♠ T♥ 8♦, giving Chan a straight and Seidel a pair of Queens.
Chan bet $40.000 and Seidel raised $50.000. Chan called.

The turn came the 2♠, which didn't change either player's hand. Chan
checked and Seidel moved all-in, the trap was set for Seidel; Chan called.

The river brought the 6♦ and Johnny Chan was crowned the Champion.

The cards are correct as stated. The action, however, is all messed up, except for the true statement that both players limped pre-flop.

Here's what really happened: Chan had the button and was therefore last to act on each round after the flop. Seidel checked, Chan bet $40,000, Seidel check-raised another $50,000, and Chan called. The action was check-check on the turn. On the river, Seidel open-shoved, and Chan called.

I have written about this hand, and the almost countless ways that poker authors get the facts wrong, on three previous occasions: here, here, and here. The anonymous PokerWorks writer joins at least ten other well-known poker authors that have misstated in print or online the basic facts of how the hand played out. (I'm guessing that whoever wrote this for PokerWorks is European, based on the use of periods in the bet amounts, where we Yankees would use commas.)

This is so astonishing to me because you can watch the whole hand on YouTube. It could not possibly be easier to see exactly what happened. This hand has been seen by tens of millions of people, between rebroadcasts of the event, the clip being shown in various poker shows, featured in Rounders, and available on the web for viewing at any time. It may well have been seen, in total, by more people than have viewed any other poker hand in history. And still writers continue to describe it erroneously. Why, why, why??? How can so many people be so sloppy about such readily verified facts?

To quote myself from the last time I addressed this subject, "I remained completely unable to explain this baffling, annoying, and disturbing phenomenon. If authors get facts wrong when they are this easy to check, one cannot help wondering what else they are screwing up."

Incidentally, it has now been more than two years since Gary Wise told me via email that he would correct the errors that appeared in a piece he wrote for his web site here. I first wrote about the Chan-Seidel hand in January, 2008. My friend Shamus submitted a comment in which he pointed me to Wise's note. I emailed Wise to alert him to the errors, and he responded with a note saying that he would fix them, though I didn't write anything about it in my blog post at the time. However, by August, 2008, when the subject came up again as a result of James McManus getting things wrong in an article in Card Player magazine, I took the opportunity to chide Wise for not having corrected his mistakes. I do so again now, more than two years after he said he would fix the problems.


For the record, I'm embedding below a version of the video clip from YouTube that is somewhat easier to see clearly than the one I used in my first post on this subject.


(See here if you don't know the origin of the "once more unto the breach" used in the title of this post.)

Poker gems, #317

James McManus, in Cowboys Full: The Story of Poker, being released October 27, as excerpted in Card Player magazine May 9, 2007 (available online here). (Thanks to my friend Shamus for reminding me of this in an email this morning.)


By the 1870s, as the nation tentatively recovered from the bloodiest conflict in human history, genuine and self-proclaimed experts began publishing books on the new poker variants brought home by veterans. Among the most lucid of these was math professor Henry T. Winterblossom's The Game of Draw Poker (1875). The 72-page primer begins with a brief history of cards, followed by caveats about the morality of playing for money: "Poker, unfortunately, is one of the few games that cannot be played so as to afford any pleasure, without the interchange of money. Indeed one might as well go on a gunning expedition with blank cartridges, as to play poker for 'fun.'" He puts its corrupting potential on a par with faro and betting on horse races, even warning prospective readers: "If they have never indulged in the game, they are earnestly exhorted at this point to seek no further information, but to remain happy in their innocence" - which sounds like a quaintly Victorian selling point similar to warning viewers about the Strong Sexual Content of an HBO series. "It is unnecessary to say that the game should never be permitted to enter the family circle, no matter how trifling the stake proposed may be," he tut-tuts, all part of his wobbly balancing act. "Those who have winked at [the morality of poker], and those who have denounced it, may both be in the wrong. It must be admitted, however, by its most bitter enemy that, as a source of recreation, when moderately indulged in, and stripped of its objection-able features, it presents advantages not to be obtained in any other amusement."

...

[H]e advises readers to "keep steadily in view the principle of conservatism." He admits that while this strategy "may perhaps to a limited degree be open to the charge of timidity, no one will regret in the end having pursued it. The most brilliant play is rarely satisfactory when it terminates in a loss."

As one of the first pokeraticians to focus on psychology, he notes that "a thorough exhibition of each individual character is revealed at every step of the game." More than that, "even the most casual observer cannot help perceiving that the commodity known as selfishness predominates to an unlimited degree, notwithstanding the various contrivances the players adopt to conceal its presence." In keeping with Adam Smith's and Alexander Hamilton's insights about market capitalism, he makes clear that poker is "not only a selfish game, but one that every subterfuge that can be brought to bear is introduced; every artifice that the laws of the game will permit, is pressed into service; and all directed at one object, viz: to win your money."

"Viva Las Vegas"

I just finished watching "Viva Las Vegas" (1964) for the first time ever. I know--I'm slightly behind the times.

There's not much point in a full review. After all, you've either already seen it or can make a darn good guess about what you'll get if you sit down to watch it: dumb plot that is just an excuse for Elvis and Ann-Margaret to sing, dance, and flirt.

What I enjoyed most was how it captured Old Vegas: for example, the car race downtown, zooming east on Fremont Street, then turning south on Casino Center, as you can see in the shots above. (Notice that when the race finally ends, a finish line has mysteriously appeared on the street at the intersection of Fremont and Casino Center where there was none before!) It would be rather difficult to do that today....

There are also nice shots of the race going over Hoover Dam, though the desert, and to a forested area that I have to assume is probably in the vicinity of Mt. Charleston. And, of course, strewn throughout the film are many shots of downtown, the Strip, and casino interiors. (Elvis has to visit every show in town in one night to locate his dream girl, whose name and working location he failed to get upon meeting her.) There's also a small part with actor William Demarest, whom I knew growing up only as Uncle Charlie on "My Three Sons."

I don't know how you could not like this stuff. Then again, I'm kind of a sucker for cheese.

Poker gems, #287

Winston Churchill, in his famous 1941 speech at Harrow School, available in full here.


Never give in. Never give in. Never, never, never, never--in nothing, great or small, large or petty--never give in, except to convictions of honor and good sense. Never yield to force. Never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.

Poker gems, #233

Gabe Kaplan, on the 4/5/2009 installment of "High Stakes Poker." (For more on Hickok and his final hand, see here. To see the biggest pot in televised poker history ($919,600 cash), watch part 2 here.)


I had a big rivalry with Wild Bill Hickok. Bill used to come over the top of me all the time. I was sad when he got shot, not because he got shot, but the flop on that hand came A-10-8, and I had A-10. I thought I was gonna win a lot of money finally, y’know, and boom, and it was over. Flop top two pair and the guy gets shot in the back.