One of my favourite David Mamet essays is Things I have learned from playing poker on the hill. You can find it in his essay collection Writing in Restaurants, but I understand a part of it was published in The New York Times Magazine.
Mamet writes: "Poker is a game of skill and chance. Playing poker is also a masculine ritual, and, most times, losers feel either sufficiently chagrined or sufficiently reflective to retire, if not with grace, at least with alacrity."
Poker is a game of skill and this is why we see the same faces at the championship table year after year at the World Series of Poker. There is no World Series of Roulette or World Series of Blackjack. That's either because those two games are based on luck or because the mechanics of those games lack the drama of poker. Probably both.
Now I love poker and I have only lost big once. This is not because I am a great poker player, it is because I don't play it very often.
I discovered poker from two sources. One was my collection of magic books. I became obsessed with magic when I was 10 and, in my studies, learned quite a few routines that revolve around poker.
The second source was my father who, at least once a month, would host a poker game at our house or travel to another house to play. I always loved it when the game was at our house because those men intrigued me. I never saw them at church or at school or when we went to the mall, they seemed to exist only to play poker with my dad. I doubt my father had anything to do with them that wasn't poker related and this, I think, is the correct approach when it comes to poker friends. One cannot be too attached to them because then, if they have a bad night, you might take pity on them. "I can't believe I lost that hand. How will I pay my rent this month? How will I put food on the table for baby Suzie?"
Well, one cannot take pity on your poker friends because they will use that against you when you play next. Why not bluff on this hand? If I lose, I can put on a sad face and get my money back. No. You cannot be merciful at the poker table. It is the exact opposite of the temple of the Lord.
To quote Mamet again: "I have seen many poor winners. Most are eventually brought back to reality. The game itself will reveal to them that they are the victim of an essential error: they have attributed their success to divine intervention."
Guilty, I say. Guilty.
Listen, I started playing poker with my dad and his friends when I was still in high school. The first time I played, I walked away with $20. The next time I was the big winner and I won $100. I was convinced I was God's favoured son, that I would never lose when I played poker with my dad.
And then came the day when I got cleaned out.
I'd been playing less than twenty minutes. I lost it all on a game of guts, which is a terrible game where each player is dealt two cards (deuces are wild.) The very best you can do is get dealt two aces. An ace and a deuce is second best. I had an ace and a deuce and some nameless bastard at that table had two aces.
Got cleaned out. I retreated to my bedroom to lick my wounds and read a Mickey Spillane story. All night long, I heard the sounds of poker in the next room. Conversation. Cards shuffling. Coins being tossed and raked in. I hated it. I wanted to deal myself back in but I had no money. The next morning, at the breakfast table, my dad said: "You sure got cleaned out at poker last night, son." I think there was an element of reproach in there. My dad was warning me not to play poker with the big boys. They understood the game better than I did and, if I persisted in deluding myself that I was their peer, that I would discover that getting cleaned out was the norm, not the exception.
But what can we say about luck?
Some Christians believe that nothing is left to chance - that every toss of the dice is predetermined by God. To them, trusting in luck is idolatry.
And yet...
Another time playing guts with my dad and his friends, I had a feeling that I was going to get dealt two aces. And I was dealt two aces. And when it came time to bet, I threw my cards face down on the pot, which meant I thought my hand was good enough to win the whole darn thing. Guy next to me told me he could feel it coming, that luck had been radiating off me.
Mamet says: "Any mathematician will tell you that the cards at the poker table are distributed randomly, that we remember the remarkable and forget the mundane, and that "luck" is an illusion. Any poker player knows – to the contrary – that there are phenomenal runs of luck which defy any mathematical explanation – there are periods in which one cannot catch a hand, and periods in which one cannot not catch a hand, and that there is such a thing as absolute premonition of cards: the rock-bottom surety of what will happen next."
My younger brother – who, for a while, nursed an obsession with Texas Hold 'Em and won quite a bit of money in the odd tournament – said he trained himself not to act on these premonitions. "You play the odds and you play the people at the table," he said. He was really saying that, when it comes to cards, prayer is ineffective.
Now I don't like Texas Hold 'Em but the whole world loves it and, if you have satellite television, you can probably catch a poker telecast any time of the day. Poker has become a spectator sport but the kind of poker I like is dealer's choice. Guts. Auction. Spit in the ocean. Chicago. Smoke. Joker's wild. Baseball ("Deal me out," one of my dad's friends would say when this game was announced.) You never know what you're going to play when someone else is handed the deck. The only thing you could be assured of was that it wouldn't be nearly as boring as playing the same game over and over again.
I'd love to play poker with David Mamet and I promise I would resist all urges to quote lines from his plays as they occurred to me. I would not, however, play with his friend, Ricky Jay, who I despise. I hate him because there are three things that I tell myself I do moderately well at – writing, acting, magic.* Ricky Jay may be the only person in the world I know of who could kick my ass at all three.**
Better yet... I want David Mamet to come to Calgary when I am there. I'll invite him to my father's house and he and I and my dad and his friends will play poker all night long and David and my dad could talk about American politics and David and I could talk about theatre and we'd eat way too much sausage and drink way too much beer and later I would walk away from that masculine*** ritual and feel refreshed and – if I came out a winner – redeemed.
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* People who know me say that I am very good at designing impossibly intricate townwide treasure hunts for teenagers. I do not mention it here because I doubt Mr. Mamet gives a tin shit about treasure hunts, but he's very passionate about acting, writing and magic.
** False modesty aside. I'm probably a better writer than David Copperfield, a better magician than Al Pacino and a better actor than Kurt Vonnegut. Still, if I were to meet any of those three, I would remain silent and listen to any pearls they might drop me.
*** I think that I am sexist in that I don't enjoy playing poker with women. I don't begrudge them for their presence in the international poker scene but I don't think I want them in my father's basement. Sorry. Planet Man and all that.
