Shannon Elizabeth is as delusional as Jerry Yang

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

Jerry Yang and the questions still unanswered

I have written twice before about 2007 WSOP main event winner Jerry Yang and his unprecedented overt display of religiosity at the final table (see http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2007/07/mr-destiny.html and http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2007/10/more-on-religion-at-poker-table.html). You'll need to read those posts if you want to understand some of the details in this one, I think.

Last night some web surfing on another poker-related subject led me to the archive of articles that Gary Wise occasionally writes for ESPN (http://sports.espn.go.com/keyword/search?searchString=gary_wise), and there I noticed an interview he did in December with Yang (http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/poker/columns/story?columnist=wise_gary&id=3140073). Now I have to rant on this subject again.

This is the part of the article that first raised my hopes about getting a straight answer to the obvious question Yang's public propitiations raised:

The question I'd wanted to ask Jerry over those months since watching him
win was this: "If God isn't changing the order of the cards, why the prayer?"
Yang was instantly transformed into poker's holy champion by his calls to the
"Lord" on ESPN's broadcasts. It felt a little strange to me (and a plethora of
other observers) that he'd think a greater power would invest itself in any way
in the turn of a card. My mistake was in my perception of his acts.

"God doesn't love one person more than another person" Jerry answered,
assuring me there was no chance the Lord was intentionally pairing him up flop
after flop. "I pray to my God for the strength to make the right decision."

Time and again, Yang made tough calls at the final table, trusting his
gut instincts in doing so. It would have been easier to play it safe and make
folds in those situations, the money and exposure being what they were. In
calling out his prayers, Jerry was seeking the fortitude we all seek when faced
with those make-or-break moments at the table. "He's giving me the opportunity
to make my own choices." He also wanted to share the joy he was experiencing
with the being he saw as responsible for it.

Unfortunately, that's as probing as Mr. Wise got. He apparently did not confront Yang with the fairly obvious discrepancies between his answer here and what actually happened last July.

For example, in the hand that knocked out Lee Watkinson, Yang is heard saying this, after all the money was in and the hole cards were exposed, so that no further decisions by either player were possible: "Come on, Lord. You know your purpose for me.... You have a purpose for me today.... Father, in the name of Jesus Christ, c'mon, let me win this one."

OK, Jerry--explain to me how those words can plausibly be interpreted as pleading for God to help you make correct decisions, and not as a request for a conclusion to the hand favorable to you.

Similarly, in the hand that eliminated Lee Childs, Yang pleads, "Let people see your miracle." Again, I can't see any way to interpret that as a prayer for Yang to be given strength to play to the best of his ability, coming, as it did, after all of the chips were in.

As further evidence, here's what the Las Vegas Sun reported as happening before the final table:

Once, for instance, he risked a big chunk of his stack of chips with just
a pair of 4s and ran smack into an opponent's higher pocket pair.

It was then Yang - like a lot of poker players, including some who are
probably more reluctant to admit it - turned to prayer.

"I kept saying, 'Lord, give me a set,' " Yang said, using the common poker
term for three-of-a-kind. "And there was a 4 on the flop."

Another time, Yang needed an ace or a 4 on the final card to fill a
straight and extend his tournament life.

"I said, 'Lord, if you want me to win this, put the ace or the 4 on the
river,' " Yang said. A 4 came, and Yang lived to fight on.

(Note that the link to that story in my first post is now dead, but the article can be found here: http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/2007/jul/19/jeff-haney-on-how-the-new-face-of-championship-pok/.)

I don't know how Yang's own words could be any more explicit. "Lord, give me a set" and "put the ace or the 4 on the river" are not prayers to be helped in making correct decisions. They are overt, unambiguous requests for divine intervention to change the order of the cards being held in the dealer's hand.

With that in mind, let's look in more detail at what Yang said to Mr. Wise. Below is my transcript of the critical section of the interview, which you can hear in full at http://cdn.libsyn.com/roundersradio/12-05-07__Gary_Wise_Full_Show___Jerry_Yang__and_Chip_Reese_memories__.mp3. This portion occurs between about 28:05 and 30:10. I tried to be as accurate as I could be in making the transcript, and I'll take responsibility if I accidentally introduced any small errors.

WISE: The question that I asked you in our conversation a few days ago was one that was meant to clarify for a lot of people some misconceptions, and that was whether prayer could affect the result of hands, because at that final table obviously you prayed very long and very hard and very loud to God, and I feel a lot of people interpret that...

YANG: You're right, absolutely.

WISE: And I think a lot of people interpret that to mean that you felt that, y'know, if you called loud enough, you could get a better turn card.

YANG: [laughs] Oh, that's pretty funny, Gary!

WISE: But you see what I'm saying, this is the misconception that a lot of people have been operating under, y'know, so

YANG: [more laughter] Absolutely, yeah, you're right.

WISE: [Crosstalk makes it difficult to hear a few words here] c'mon, God, gimme an ace, y'know?

YANG: [more laughter] No. I did not say that. C'mon.

WISE: Well, no, you didn't say those words, but I think a lot of people interpreted your prayers that way. So why don't you, why don't you take this opportunity to straighten them out a little bit? What, uh, why were you praying to God?

YANG: OK. I wanted to, this is such a very, very interesting question, and I'd be more than happy to answer that question. First of all, I don't want the fans, I don't want anybody out there to, to think that I'm praying to God to give me the cards. That's not my intention whatsoever. I believe in my God. I pray to my God for the strength and the guidance to make the right decision. And at that point when I pray to my God I say, you know what, I leave everything in his will, I ask him for his guidance, his strength, to give me the strength to make the right decision for myself. That's all I'm asking from my God. I'm not asking God to change the cards.

To Mr. Wise's credit, he's the only one to date, as far as I have been able to learn, who has asked Yang directly about this apparent bit of bizarre theology. Unfortunately, though, he then let Yang off the hook with an answer that is obviously false, or at least woefully incomplete, and flagrantly inconsistent with Yang's own words immediately after the event.

My disappointment in having my hopes for an answer raised, then dashed, prompted me to do a Google search for other Yang interviews, to see if anybody else has pressed him on this point. As far as I can tell, nobody has. Here's the list of interviews I was able to find:

http://www.pokerlistings.com/poker-player-interviews/wsop/2007/jerry-yang-a-world-class-world-champion

http://www.holdemradio.com/media/kfa110107.mp3

http://www.bluffmagazine.com/magazine/readarticle.asp?aid=670

All of those appear to have nothing useful on the question at hand.

But in an ESPN radio podcast with Phil Gordon (http://ne.edgecastcdn.net/0000A6/espnpod2/espnradio/poker/poker070807.mp3), Yang makes this comment, at about 14:10:

"Winning this, this thing, this whole thing, I think I give all the glory and credit to God for obviously giving me some good cards...."

Then, starting at 26:05, he says, "God brought me through each step of the way. I believe that God had a plan for me and to win the World Series of Poker and win this amount of money. That is why I dedicate to giving back something back [sic] to the community. So I give the glory, all the glory and credit to God, because of him I won and I believe that there was a miracle hand that happened during the World Series. I was on the verge of being eliminated like three, four times, but the river card just happened to bail me out, so I believe that God and the Holy Spirit was [sic] there with me. I truly believe in that."

So he does unquestionably believe that God arranges the deck. I don't see how you can believe that precept, and that God answers prayers, yet not believe that one's prayers asking God for specific cards will result in the cards in the dealer's hand changing.

One other interview captures another piece of evidence: http://pokerati.com/2007/08/01/re-meet-jerry-yang/. Here, Yang is asked, apparently right after the WSOP, whether, on the final hand, he expected the river to bring the 6 that filled his inside straight. (He needed one of the four 6s or one of the two remaining 8s to win the hand.) He says that yes, he "absolutely" expected it. "I remember the second day, my chips went down, I started with 738,000 or so, and I went down, and I prayed for the 4 on the river, and the 4 came and gave me a wheel. And today I felt it, somehow I felt that. I say, oh please, either that 8 or that 6 at the river, and when the 6 came I was so excited."

Again, how can he reconcile this with the later claim that he does not expect God to intervene in order for him to win hands? Does he not remember what he said before? Has his theology shifted in the interim? Does he think that we're all too stupid to notice that he is now denying what he openly admitted to before?

Yang is being blatantly inconsistent in his responses to various interviewers.

I hope that this changes. I hope that at least one member of the poker media takes the initiative to press Yang with the hard questions that so far he has been allowed to duck. Quote to him what he has said, point out the contradictions, and keep nailing him with direct questions until he either admits that he really did intend his propitiations to affect the outcome of specific hands, or explains (if it is possible) how his repeated words that sound as if that's what he is doing can reasonably be interpreted in a way that is consistent with his post hoc explanations.

I hate the fact that I have to include this disclaimer, but I do: As far as I can tell, everybody who has had contact with Yang agrees that he is an incredibly nice, humble person, a good family man, generous with his winnings, with an amazing personal life story. I don't dispute any of that. I'm focused narrowly on trying to understand what I consider a weird, even borderline delusional, belief that saying the right things to the right deity in the middle of a poker hand will supernaturally cause a different outcome for that hand than would have occurred without the player uttering those magical words. I remain quite confident that Jerry Yang does actually believe that, despite his later denials.


Fitting comics below borrowed from http://goberude.blogspot.com/.

Addendum, February 3, 2008

1. I apologize for the weird line spacing in the foregoing post. Blogger does something mysterious to an entire post when there are sections that are block-indented. I haven't been able to figure out how to counter it. I hope the content is still worthwhile, even though the visual presentation is less professional than I would ideally like it. I'm slowly learning, and someday I expect I'll be able to set such things right.

2. Gary Wise was kind enough to not only write back to me (I sent him an email to alert him that I was talking about him--I figure that's the polite thing to do), and post a comment here, but quickly drafted a very thoughtful reply on his own blog. See http://www.wisehandpoker.com/blog/index.php/gary-wise/2008/02/03/an_interesting_debate.

I'm sympathetic to his dilemma: Press too hard, and you get shut out entirely in the future, because people such as Yang have no obligation to do interviews at all, and when they do, they have a lot of reporters lined up who want in, and they can cherry-pick the best and/or easiest ones. As I said above, give him credit for even broaching the subject, when nobody else has, as far as I know.

I agree with his observation that my role as an independent, unpaid writer (and one that precious few people in the big poker world pay attention to!) gives me the luxury of more freedom to be blunt than he can afford. I hope it's helpful that I put the hard questions out there into the ether, even if I don't have access to the only one who can answer them. Perhaps in some intangible way, more people seeing the hard evidence of the stark contradictions between what Yang actually did, and what he nows says that he did, will eventually seep back to him, and prompt him to reflect more on the whole thing, and maybe comment publicly about it at some point.

3. One commenter takes me to task for getting "worked up" about the whole thing. I'm not sure how to respond to that. First, I'm not "worked up" in any emotional sense. I'm intensely curious about the overt contradictions in Yang's statements, but I feel not one speck of personal investment in the matter. I don't expect that I could change Yang's mind about his beliefs, even if he were perfectly clear as to what his beliefs are (and I don't think he is; I think his thoughts on the matter are terribly muddled, and that he hasn't really ever wrestled with himself as to what he believes God does and doesn't do). Nor am I particularly interested in doing so.

But f'r cryin' out loud, this whole blog is devoted to my pointing out things in the poker world that I don't like, that I think should be done differently. That includes griping about things a whole lot more trivial than whether there is a supernatural being that controls the shuffle even more directly than the dealer does. Doesn't that seem like a rather important thing to know? If you are facing an opponent who has a omniscient and omnipotent being hovering over his shoulder, one who knows what you've been dealt and might whisper that information to your opponent, and one who can wiggle his nose like Samantha on "Bewitched" and change your aces into a 2-7 offsuit if it pleases him to do so, wouldn't you want to know that? I think I'd ask for a table change, if I knew that I were up against that kind of sorcery.

Conversely, if your opponent is so addled in his thinking that he believes that he will win any hand if he counts backward from 100 by sevens while twirling his left thumb clockwise, isn't that something you'd like to know? If there is no ethereal creature waving an omnipotent magic wand to rearrange the cards in the dealer's hand, but your opponent fervently believes that there is, isn't that information worth having?

I think, as a general rule, that truth and consistency are pretty important things. Yang is in a position to potentially influence how a lot of people view our game. If he were on the speaking circuit telling the world that there is a purple unicorn that he talks to--visible only to him--and that the unicorn talks back to him, and the unicorn uses its magic powers to put the cards that Yang needs on the board when he asks in just the right way, wouldn't it concern you that that's a pretty bizarre image of poker to be presenting to the world? Well, objectively there is no difference between that and what Yang is actually telling everybody. He believes in a powerful, invisible, supernatural being that wants Jerry to win, one who moves the cards around in the dealer's hand to make that happen, if Jerry just incants the right words at critical moments. That's weird. That's nuts, frankly. If he were to couch that idea in any way other than putting the specific label of the Christian god on it (the unicorn, for example), he'd get locked up in the looney bin and deemed unfit and unsafe to raise his own children until he got put on enough Thorazine to quiet his demons.

Yeah, I think that having one of the currently most visible players of the game announcing, basically, that he's borderline hallucinatory, is kind of important, as subject matter goes in the poker universe. It's probably more important than whether casinos give too-small and watered-down servings of Coke, or whether Phil Hellmuth is occasionally way off in his on-the-spot odds calculations, or whether a particular poker movie was a waste of $6 to see, or whether the El Cortez poker room is worth visiting, or whether David Apostolico made an error in how he recounted a specific WSOP hand in a magazine article, or how annoying it is to have poker players leave stuff under the table that I end up stepping on. Yet all those, and a couple hundred others, have been the targets of my musings here. Look at it like this: If Yang really did start publicly recounting a unicorn theory, would you think that worthy of attention from poker bloggers? If yes, then why should I, or we, ignore what he says because he phrases it in a more common supernatural vein than in a less common one? I can't see that the commonness or uncommonness of a delusion--if indeed it is a delusion--makes it any more or less valid a topic of discussion. Conversely, if it is not a delusion, if Yang really does have the key to access omnipotent powers on behalf of his poker game, should I deem that an unimportant topic of conversation? Seems pretty important to me to know whether that's really true or not.

Finally, I will invoke what I assume is a tenet of Yang's own faith: "[B]e ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you." (1 Peter 3: 15, King James Version.) Shouldn't Jerry Yang be willing to live up to this, assuming he views it as a directive from the God he worships?

More on religion at the poker table

I previously wrote about some of the strange (in my view) things that Jerry Yang did at the final table of the World Series of Poker main event: http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2007/07/mr-destiny.html At the time, I had watched the event live. Now, though, I've seen ESPN's broadcast. I taped it last night, so I can transcribe some things accurately, instead of relying on memory. Moreover, ESPN's multiple cameras and microphones caught things that weren't shown on the live broadcast. In terms of overt religiosity, there was even more strangeness than I knew.

In the hand in which Jerry Yang eliminated Lee Watkinson, Yang raised pre-flop with A-9, then Watkinson moved all-in with A-7. While Yang was thinking about what to do, Watkinson's financee, whose name is Timmi Derosa (see http://pokerdb.thehendonmob.com/player.php?a=r&n=56512), is seen on the sidelines. She says, "If he calls, he's gonna double Lee up. No weapon formed against him shall prosper."

This appears to be an allusion to Isaiah 54:17: "No weapon that is formed against thee shall prosper; and every tongue that shall rise against thee in judgment thou shalt condemn. This is the heritage of the servants of the LORD, and their righteousness is of me, saith the LORD." (King James Version.)

So apparently Lee Watkinson is, according to his fiancee, a servant of the Lord, and as a result, he can't lose a hand of poker.

She repeats this a few seconds later, after Yang announces his call. Looking upward, she yells, "Come on, Father. In Jesus's name. No weapon formed against you shall prosper."

Note the little change of pronoun there, from "him" to "you." Now she is saying not that Yang is a weapon against Lee, the Lord's servant, but against God himself! Wow! I wonder what Yang did to deserve being accused of being a weapon formed against God, and how Derosa knows whatever this deep, dark secret is. But either way, whether one conspires to defeat the Lord or just the Lord's servant, one is obviously destined to fail.

Except that--OOPS!--Yang won the hand, and Watkinson was bumped out of the tournament. Hmmm. I guess that makes Ms. Derosa a false prophet. And what does the Bible say about false prophets?

But the prophet, which shall presume to speak a word in my name, which I
have not commanded him to speak...even that prophet shall die. And if thou say in thine heart, How shall we know the word which the LORD hath not spoken? When a prophet speaketh in the name of the LORD, if the thing follow not, nor come to pass, that is the thing which the LORD hath not spoken, but the prophet hath spoken it presumptuously.... (Deuteronomy 18:20-22, KJV.)

I'm not sure if that bit about the false prophet dying means that the religious community has an affirmative obligation to off Ms. Derosa, or if the good Lord will take care of that himself. Assuming, though, that she believes this passage to be true, she ought to be sure she has her affairs in order.

After the flop and turn haven't helped Watkinson's inferior hand, and only the river can save him, Derosa closes her eyes and says, "C'mon. Make him a believer. Make Lee a believer, Father." I don't know how to interpret this. Is this rhetorical, or is Lee not of the same faith as his fiancee? Well, if he wasn't, I doubt that this hand converted him.

Making this hand even more bizarre was Yang's simultaneous prayers for a contrary result: "Come on, Lord. You know your purpose for me.... You have a purpose for me today.... Father, in the name of Jesus Christ, c'mon, let me win this one." Norman Chad picked up on the strangeness of these dueling prayers, and said, "I'm not sure who the Lord is listening to."

I'm just speculating here, but perhaps Derosa's prayers were less effective than Yang's because God was offended by her vanity. Based on the shots of her on the ESPN broadcast, it appears that she has had way too many collagen injections to plump up her lips, a visual effect that is accentuated by her use of dark lip-liner. Or maybe she got stung by a bee, or maybe Watkinson smacks her around. Who knows? Whatever the cause, it looks awfully strange and unnatural. "Surely God will not hear vanity, neither will the Almighty regard it." (Job 35:13, KJV.) "Who shall ascend into the hill of the LORD? or who shall stand in his holy place? He that hath clean hands, and a pure heart; who hath not lifted up his soul unto vanity" (Psalms 24:3-4, KJV.)

But back to the Dueling Christians. I can't help thinking of one of the coolest stories in the Bible: Elijah and the priests of Baal (1 Kings, ch. 18). Elijah sets up a contest between him and the priests of Baal, to see which deity will better respond to entreaties and an animal sacrifice, by miraculously lighting a fire under the sacrificial altar. The priests of Baal pray all day, even cutting themselves with knives in an apparent show of devotion. But nothing happens. Then Elijah takes his turn. In a showy display of confidence (and, I suppose, to ensure that nobody thinks he was cheating and somehow had fire hidden away), he has servants come and dowse the entire altar with barrels of water three times, then dig a trench all around the altar and fill that with water, too. Then he utters a simple prayer, and WHOOSH! Fire leaps down from heaven and consumes the whole thing. Then, of course, he has the priests of Baal slaughtered, because no showdown is really complete without that. When you go all-in against the Lord, he apparently takes it very seriously, man.

The difference here is that, presumably, Derosa and Yang were praying to the same god, which makes the whole thing sort of a "Heads I win, tails you lose" situation. No matter how the cards fall, one camp or the other can say that Jesus was on their side. Which makes the bizarre incident a heck of a lot less compelling than successfully calling down fire from heaven. Oh well--maybe the god Yang and Derosa were praying to isn't really the same one that Elijah had on his side. Or maybe his powers have weakened over the centuries, and now all he can manage as a manifestation of his power is a little card trick. If Elijah had been at the WSOP final table, I assume that he would have stepped back, invoked a curse on his opponents for daring to stand in his way, and the whole table would have been consumed in a massive inferno from above. That would have been a lot faster than the 14 hours or so that it took Yang to defeat his opponents the hard way--and it would have been a lot cooler to watch.

Moving on, we have the hand in which Yang's J-8 outdrew Lee Childs's J-K to eliminate the latter. Again we get to eavesdrop on Yang's praying: "Father, I will glorify your name.... Let people see your miracle. I believe in your name." Of course, he only says this after the "miracle" 8 hits on the turn to give him the winning pair. But again, what a weak, pathetic kind of "miracle" this is, compared to, say, turning water into wine, healing the blind, raising the dead, feeding 5000 people with one loaf of bread, making a mule speak, sending manna from heaven, bringing down the walls of Jericho, etc.

Later, Yang calls an all-in bet from Alex Kravchenko before the flop. The latter has pocket 3s, and makes a set of them on the flop. Yang has just an offsuit K-Q, and is drawing dead. That is, by the usual rules of poker Yang cannot win the hand no matter what cards come on the turn and river. And in this situation there is a conspicuous absence of praying from Yang. Why? Does he have so little faith in his deity that he just assumes that he has lost? Even without going so far as to consume the entire table in a fiery blast, surely the Lord could, for example, make the dealer put out on the turn or river a card that was an exact duplicate of one already there (or of one in one of the players' hands). If there were found to be, e.g., two 8 of clubs in the deck, it would be declared to be a "fouled deck," and all the money put into the pot on that hand would be returned to the players. It's like the poker version of a children's "do over." Can't Yang's god perform even so trivial a miracle as that?*

I noticed that frequently after winning a hand, Yang and/or his family could be seen and heard saying "Hallelujah," which presumably means, to them, something akin to "Praise God." (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallelujah.) But oddly, we never see that happen when he loses a hand. I don't know how to interpret this discrepancy. Perhaps they declared their praise exactly the same either way, and it was edited out--though that seems unlikely. Assuming that they praised God when winning but not when losing, I have to wonder about the theological implications. Do they attribute winning hands to God's intervention, but not losing hands? If so, on what basis? Don't they believe that God is controlling everything that happens, for good or for ill? Wouldn't consistency require that they praise God for making Yang lose hands, too, since that presumably fulfills whatever his mysterious purposes might be? Hey, if Kevin Bacon in "Animal House" can choke out a "Thank you, sir, may I have another?" after getting whacked with a paddle (see http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=351627), surely Christians can respond to the small adversity of losing a poker hand with praise for the being that they believe controlled how the cards were shuffled and how the betting went down, right?

Overall, I'd have to say that if the best evidence for God's intervention in poker that so-called Christians can muster is that a mediocre player (and after watching the final table, there is no doubt that that's what Yang is) can get lucky and win the WSOP main event, then I'm going to have to hold to my conclusion that prayers such as Yang's and Derosa's are just a showy, weird, embarrassing, and slightly demented version of rubbing a lucky rabbit's foot--and precisely as effective.

Too bad ESPN cut out Norman Chad's great line during his post-match interview with Yang: "Do you think this is the most poker the Lord has ever watched over?"


* NBC ran an interesting invitational poker series last year: the "Pro-Am Equalizer," in which celebrity amateur players were given a substantially larger starting stack than the pros at the table. In one event, Penn Jillette (of "Penn and Teller" fame) was playing. With the river card yet to come, he was drawing dead in a hand in which he and his opponent were all-in. He said, "The only way I can win now is if they let me deal." This was a very funny line, coming from a man who is a genuine expert on slight-of-hand and card cheating. (He has even published a book on how poker cheaters work. See http://tinyurl.com/yrun4s.) I assume that if he were inclined to show off, in a situation in which nothing was at stake (so that it wasn't really cheating), that's one of the ways in which Penn, handed the deck of cards to deal the river, would resolve the dilemma in his favor. He can't win, but he could at least force the hand to be nullified by slipping a duplicate card into the deck. It doesn't say much for Yang's god if he isn't even as powerful a conjurer as Penn Jillette.

Mr. Destiny

Yesterday was an interesting day. It's the first time I have shelled out for the pay-per-view live feed from the World Series of Poker main event final table. I watched all 15+ hours of it.

It's hard to know for sure until we see the broadcast with the hole cards, but it looks like in Jerry Yang we've just crowned our most unskilled player ever as world champion. It appears that he's a far, far worse player than the other two relatively unprepared amateurs, Robert Varkonyi and Chris Moneymaker. I think that when those two won, they were both better players than I currently am, though they have taken licks from all around because they simply weren't in the same league as the poker world had become used to seeing in the title role. I'm no poker genius; I think I have a pretty good handle on where I am in the poker food chain, and it's just barely high enough to be a long-term winner at low-stakes games rather than a loser or a break-even player. I wouldn't consider myself a better player than anybody I saw at yesterday's final table, except for Jerry Yang.

So how did he win? Well, to hear him tell it, God ordained it to be so.

From early in the final table, when he was all-in with another player, he could be heard saying things like, "Lord, you have a destiny for me today," and "Father, I will use the money to glorify your name." He gave the Big Dealer in the Sky further credit in his closing interview with Norman Chad.

I have to wonder about this. Does God really care who wins poker tournaments? If so, does he actually make his picks not only during the course of the tournament, but right at the very moment that a hand is being played out? If not, then it would seem to me that entreaties made while waiting for the last cards to be dealt out are pretty useless; the deck has already acquired a particular arrangement, and that has already determined what cards will be coming. There would, then, seem to be little point in pleading to God to favor one person over another that late in the course of things.

And, by the way, does it really help your case to tell God what you plan to do with the money? That is, can an omnipotent being really be bought off with a bribe? Isn't he able to bring into existence all the money he might need to carry out whatever his plans are, without needing 10% of Jerry Yang's winnings? What if Yang's opponent at the same time promised God to donate, say, 20% of the prize money to noble charities, or to "glorifying God's name" (whatever that might mean)? Does he then decide on whose behalf to intervene based on who will be giving him the biggest cut? If so, then why didn't Barry Greenstein win, a guy who would have donated 100% of the money to children's charities? (Oh, I know: God hates Jews because they killed Jesus, right?)

Does Mr. Yang actually believe that if he says just the right prayer, God will miraculously change the order of the cards in the deck that the dealer is holding? This is just as nutty, frankly, as Shannon Elizabeth invoking the "law of attraction" in an attempt to make it more likely that cards favorable to her will be dealt out (which absurdity was shown clearly on NBC's "Heads-Up Poker Championship"). And if God really does step in in this manner, it seems to me that it's a pretty clear violation of the one-person-to-a-hand rule. After all, if it's illegal to ask a friend in the stands whether to make a tough call or to fold, how much more wrong is it to get an omnipotent supernatural being to alter the order of the cards in the deck after the shuffle?

On the other hand, maybe God really does help Mr. Yang. Maybe that's how he knew to call Lee Watkinson's all-in reraise with just a stinky little A-9: God was whispering in his ear (in a voice like that of Charleton Heston, no doubt), "He's only got A-7, so you're about 75% to win. And besides, I've peeked at the deck with my x-ray vision, and there's no 7 coming. Go for it." That would be a pretty darn handy way to win poker tournaments, all right. Maybe it's the only way Mr. Yang can win. In fact, come to think of it, maybe that's what is meant by the "glorifying your name" business: Having him as the game's ambassador for the next year tells the world, "Look, God is so powerful that he can even make a really, really bad player the world champion! Walking on water is child's play next to that kind of miracle!"

But if so, I still have to wonder how God goes about picking his winners. After watching Mr. Yang, it certainly isn't on the basis of skill and preparation. Nor is it based on conduct at the table. He wasn't over the top or downright rude, but the loud cheering every time a card fell that was favorable to him just isn't cricket, as the Brits say. When you see Phil Ivey, Chris Ferguson, Doyle Brunson, Dan Harrington, Greg Raymer, Allen Cunningham, John Juanda, T.J. Cloutier, or other classy guys start doing this, then you'll know that the rules of conduct have changed (for the worse), and it's OK. Until then, keep a lid on it, dude. It's obnoxious and annoying.

Look, I have nothing against people in general, or poker players in particular, being religious. Daniel Negreanu has said several times in his blog that when he feels his relationship with God is out of sorts or taking a lower priority than it should, his poker results suffer. OK--so be it. I certainly can't prove that that's not so. And believing that God will help you win a tournament is, objectively, no crazier than, say, Gavin Smith thinking that not cutting his hair gives him better luck than when he cuts it. On the other hand, it is, objectively, no saner and no more rational than thinking that a certain fat denizen of the North Pole brought the presents under your Christmas tree in a magical sleigh pulled by eight flying reindeer.

But putting your slightly nutty beliefs on international display in a manner that opens all sorts of unanswerable questions of logic and theology just isn't smart. It just makes you look foolish, as if you haven't given more than passing thought to what you're doing and its implications for how you think divinity operates. Keep it to yourself.

Addendum, added 7/20/07:

I just saw this article in the Las Vegas Sun:

http://www.lasvegassun.com/sunbin/stories/sports/2007/jul/19/566665723.html

More evidence for Yang's peculiar thoughts about how God works is found therein. Note that apparently divine omniscience doesn't mean that God necessary understands poker, because he needs Mr. Yang to tell him what specific cards to have the dealer pull out of the deck in order to make him a winner.

Once, for instance, he risked a big chunk of his stack of chips with just a
pair of 4s and ran smack into an opponent's higher pocket pair.

It was then Yang - like a lot of poker players, including some who are probably more
reluctant to admit it - turned to prayer.

"I kept saying, 'Lord, give me a set,' " Yang said, using the common poker term for three-of-a-kind. "And there was a 4 on the flop."

Another time, Yang needed an ace or a 4 on the final
card to fill a straight and extend his tournament life.
"I said, "Lord, if you want me to win this, put the ace or the 4 on the river,' " Yang said. A 4 came, and Yang lived to fight on.

"I've seen miracles," he said.