Poker: A Narrative of Mainstream Living

I. The brat has a point!
“No, he didn’t!” he screams incredulously, “He called me with a five-seven…idiot from Northern Europe…God, they play so bad.” Phil Hellmuth, “The Poker Brat,” as he is referred to as on TV, goes on one of his infamous tirades as arguably the best Hold ‘Em player in the world gets beat by a hand that no real or established player would have played.
I couldn’t stand the guy when I first started watching poker, he’s brash, rude, and when he gets beat at the poker table, he begins to yell at everyone. It’s comparable to watching the school bully get beat up and left crying on the playground by a girl who proves that she isn’t scared of him by unmercifully kicking him in the nuts.
It’s kind of funny to watch him slumped over in agony, in that “he deserved it,” sort of way, until you’re old enough to look back on things and realize that the bully was the way he was because he was getting abused at home…The bully was just trying to vent in a room with no doors and no windows. Phil Hellmuth is the bully and the poker table is his playground, and he’s admirably fighting the fact that he and his posse of pro’s aren’t big enough to keep all of the other kids from playing.

II. Fanny pack having, bad-hand playing tourists…
I’m by no means an expert on poker. I mean, I’ve won a couple home games with people who actually play regularly…but we played for burritos. I once lost 40 dollars the only time I’ve sat at a real casino table smoking cigarettes while waiting for “legitimate cards” and losing my mandatory antis (minimum amount required to play every 5 turns) until I had nothing left.
I’m no expert, but I’ve paid enough attention to know that the 2008 World Series of Poker’s (WSOP) Main Event is the biggest ever, and where I used to be able to recognize a lot of faces at the last couple tables, 8 of the final 9 players at this year’s final table have “real” jobs. If things don’t pan out for them, they have another life to go, a safe cushion to go home to after spending their vacation days in Las Vegas living their once-in-a-lifetime dream.
For the poker pro’s, they’ve committed themselves to a game that requires a special kind of mental fortitude, a type of mental fortitude that rivals Ghandi or Nelson Mandela's. The game requires a wealth of knowledge about percentages and the subtle nuances of learning other player’s habits. But the game isn’t only played professionally at the table, a big $50,000 win for a pro doesn’t allow them to go buy a new car and new clothes, because they have to account for past losses and predict future losses as well. Consistency and accountability in their everyday life are a big factor in their ability to “play” poker for a living.
This is important to know because in this game that still requires an intangible element called luck, the need for luck is amplified as the tournament fields become increasingly saturated with players. The reason, bad players don’t know the percentages and will bet—and win on big dollars on hands that won’t typically yield favorable results. The pros who play with routine and consistency, their chances of leaving a big tournament at the hands of a “bad-beat” are about 100%.
For Hellmuth, a player who has dedicated his life so much to poker that he has made it an art form, watching the big tournament year after year be won by someone who has been playing mostly at home with his buddies over a football game and some brews has to be like the eternally starving ghost of Vincent Van Gogh watching how much money is being made off of “Starry Night” postcards.

III. Rheem: The great hope, Neo in the poker Matrix, Bastion of Truth.
This is what I realized as I watched David (Chino) Rheem’s run at the final table. The pros band together because in these big tournaments, it’s about proving to the world that poker is a game of skill, like basketball, like baseball, like chess, like engineering, like accounting, and like being a doctor or a lawyer.
If Rheem won, the pros could chalk one up for the guys who risked everything and were brave enough to do what they love, that the game they love can be won with skill. While the story of the amateur beating a pro used to be one of David vs. Goliath proportions, Matt Damon’s character in the movie, “Rounders,” depended on the fact that he took money from poker icon Johnny Chan, the tables have indeed turned on the pros.
“God! THEY play so bad.” The Brat exclaims. He won’t even call the amateurs by their names, he probably just doesn’t care because they are deconstructing the nuances of the game on poker's largest stage. They are insulting his life, and his job. He’s not mad at the northern European “idiot” as he so exclaimed, he is mad at the concept of the amateur, the conquistador who travels to the unknown and brings his bad-hand playing buddies to rape and pillage the sanctity of his game. Now, in the days where about 7,000 players enter the main event, the poker pro has become a perennial underdog as ratio of pro to idiot can only be described as heinous.
I’m proud of Phil Hellmuth speaking his mind in defending poker as a genuine sport not to be tainted by luck, but it’s also nice to see the complete anti-thesis, the Chino Rheem’s who will say “nice-hand” and quietly make a 7th place exit from the final table. Because he knows that consistency in this game is key, and that when he’s not surrounded in a sea of proverbial noobs, he can be taking all their money at the tables on normal days, in regular casinos. I was genuinely rooting for Chino as I saw his short-stacked Ace-King lose to an Ace-Queen, it was a little gut-wrenching because he played his hand correctly, but as irony would have it, the last pro of the tournament would leave on a bad-beat.

IV. So why do I care about poker, and why does it even matter?
Because much like hip-hop music, poker is now subject to the effects of entering mainstream culture. As it continually gets more popular, the true poker players who study the game and know its ins and outs will fade into obscurity as amateur after amateur will win the big tournaments. This will effectively dumb down the quality of play, because as tournaments get bigger, luck will increasingly be a factor for the winner. When only poker pros played the tournaments, the WSOP bracelet meant that you were the best player in that tournament. Now, for some it means you were the best and luckiest, and for some—the idiots that Hellmuth speaks of—it just means that they were the luckiest over the span of a tournament.
Same with hip-hop music, it becomes formulaic, a recipe for financial success is found so it is quickly duplicated and mass-produced to maximize profits. But this is a whole other topic of debate that everyone who reads this site is aware of.

So this is the conclusion to this exposition about poker as related to life. Appreciate what you see, because if you like it, chances are you’ll never see it in its original beauty again.