Poker the parody of capitalism

contents Introduction part one the philosophy of poker The Ontology of Poker Anatomy of a Poker Hand 38 All You Ever Wanted to Know about Texas Hold ’Em but Were Afraid to Ask «i»ek 50 part two the poker economy Where Does the Money Come From? 75 Styles of Play in the Poker Economy 93 part three suckers, grinders, and players A Tough Way to Make an Easy Living 111 Why Do People Play Poker? 139 Losing It 165 part four poker and capitalism What’s in a Game? 189 10 The History of Poker 203 11 Poetry of Money 224 Conclusion: The Uncanniness of Poker 244 Notes 251 References 263 Index 271 ♠ ♣ ♥ ♦ Introduction Over the last decade, an almost explosive growth in the popularity of poker has taken place Rough estimates say there are 140–80 million regular players worldwide, and the turnover of major poker sites on the Internet is counted in billions of dollars.1 What used to be a typically American game has now become a genuinely globalized phenomenon Obviously, the growing popularity of poker is closely connected with the development and the spread of the Internet Yet technological innovations and clever marketing provide only part of the explanation for the “poker boom.” This book is written on the assumption that the sudden popularity of poker signi‹es a rich cultural resonance in the game When we look at a piece of art, read a piece of literature, watch a ‹lm, or listen to a piece of music, it is commonplace to think of them as cultural expressions of the society and historical context in which they are created Art, literature, ‹lm, and music are readily recognized as mediums of the Zeitgeist Poker and other gambling games are rarely thought of in the same fashion At best, they are considered meaningless entertainment, at worst self-destructive vices The idea of this book is to treat poker as a cultural expression in line with art, literature, ‹lm, and so on When so many people ‹nd poker interesting, it is because the game has an eminent capacity to capture a set of existential conditions of life in contemporary society and offer them to the players in a form that allows them to explore, challenge, and play with these conditions Furthermore, not only is the cultural resonance of poker • poker manifested quantitatively in the great amount of people playing the game, but the quality of individual players’ engagement is often very intense It is not uncommon for players to devote signi‹cant amounts of time, money, and mental energy to the game The signi‹cant cultural resonance of poker makes it a rich phenomenon in terms of meaning and therefore an intriguing object of cultural analysis In his seminal work Man, Play and Games, Roger Caillois formulates a program for a sociology of games that could also serve as a program for the analysis of poker in this book: It is not absurd to try diagnosing a civilization in terms of the games that are especially popular there In fact, if games are cultural factors and images, it follows that to a certain degree a civilization and its content may be characterized by its games They necessarily re›ect its culture pattern and provide useful indications as to the preferences, weakness, and strength of a given society at a particular stage of its evolution.2 The reason that poker, as well as other gambling games, generally receives less attention than art, literature, ‹lms, and so on as culture-bearing is not simply a matter of forgetfulness Jackson Lears, author of Something for Nothing, has noted: “Debate about gambling is never just about gambling: it is about different ways of being in the world.”3 Historically, the attitudes in society toward gambling seem to have been ambivalent for as long as these games have existed.4 On the one hand, gambling has been condemned as a vice or later on as a pathology; on the other hand, gambling games have been tolerated and sometimes even appropriated as sources of public revenue This ambivalent attitude is very much true today in relation to poker Poker seems to have an eminent capacity for producing a certain kind of Unbehagen in the collective body of society As a cultural expression, poker is not exactly an embellishment of society This is incisively captured in Walther Matthau’s famous quip on poker: “The game exempli‹es the worst aspects of capitalism that have made our country so great.”5 As we are going to see throughout this book, poker simulates core features of contemporary capitalism and displays these in a very pure form Poker functions as a parody of capitalism As we know from impersonations of famous and powerful people, the exaggeration of distinct features of a person has the effect of “desublimating” the image of this person For someone who wishes to maintain a certain image as being endowed with certain sublime or otherwise impeccable Introduction • qualities, parody can be very discontenting There is an element of truth in any good parody, not in the shape of accurate representation but in the effects on the original image of the object of parody As a parody of capitalism, poker produces certain truths about the economic organization of contemporary society Maybe this is why the game provokes Unbehagen in society, and maybe this is why there seems to be a reluctance to grant poker the status of a culture-bearing phenomenon When we experience times of great ›uctuation in the general economy, capitalism is sometimes compared to a gambling game The metaphor of “casino capitalism” is frequently used as a denigrative designation of the state of the economy For instance, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Muhammad Yunus comments on the recent ‹nancial crisis: “Today’s capitalism has degenerated into a casino The ‹nancial markets are propelled by greed Speculation has reached catastrophic proportions.”6 Although the intentions behind the statement are probably both fair and well-meaning in terms of the analysis of capitalism, the implied notion of what happens in a casino is at best inaccurate and at worst misleading This book proposes a corrective to the concept of casino capitalism First, it makes a clear distinction between poker, on the one hand, and roulette, craps, and other gambling games of pure chance, on the other Second, it demonstrates that contemporary ‹nancial capitalism does indeed resemble a poker game, whereas it has little to with other casino games Third, and perhaps more importantly, the book raises the question of whether the equation of capitalism and poker is really a denigration of the former or perhaps rather a denigration of the latter As Yunus’s statement exempli‹es, it is common to think of gambling in general and poker in particular as degenerate forms of economic transaction The concept of casino capitalism is meant to designate a perverted form of capitalism However, once we move past the immediate moral depreciation of poker and venture into a thorough analysis of the game, arguably we ‹nd a more democratic, honest, just, and pure system for the distribution of value than in actually existing capitalist society In a 1974 Playboy article, G Barry Golson says about poker: The game is as perfect a microcosm as we have of the way a free-enterprise system is supposed to work, except that the rich don’t necessarily get richer Brass balls will [In a game of poker] a grocery clerk can humiliate an oil tycoon through sheer bravado—the object being, without exception, to bankrupt the bastard across the table.7 • poker A symptom of the reluctance to give poker the status of a culture-bearing expression is that the vast majority of research-based texts on gambling are analyses of different aspects of problem gambling Although problem gambling is certainly a serious issue with tragic consequences for those individuals suffering from the disorder, the focus on the detrimental aspects of gambling often stands in the way of exploring and understanding its wider cultural meaning Fortunately, in recent years there has been a growing interest in the cultural signi‹cance of gambling, and a number of brilliant books on the subject have been published.8 As none of these works deals with poker speci‹cally, many of the analyses of this book venture into virgin territory Actually, David Hayano’s seminal study of Gardena poker players in Poker Faces: The Life and Work of Professional Card Players from 1982 stands out as the only serious academic work on poker within the ‹eld of anthropology, sociology, and philosophy.9 As a result, the analyses of this book have found great inspiration and support in the rich body of nonacademic literature on poker that has been growing steadily with the increased popularity of the game.10 As poker is a fairly virginal phenomenon in terms of academic analysis, it still has not found its proper place in a speci‹c ‹eld of research Within the framework of the book, this indeterminacy constitutes both a dif‹culty and a liberty Instead of ‹xing poker within a particular ‹eld of theories and methods, the analyses of the book move into various disciplinary ‹elds: philosophy, sociology, psychology, economy, and history The purpose of the study is to intervene in several ‹elds of knowledge at the same time and, by doing so, force these ‹elds to open up toward each other These ‹elds of knowledge are cultural studies of gambling, popular literature on poker and poker strategy, gambling studies of compulsive gambling, and social theory on contemporary capitalism The ambition of this multidisciplinary approach is also to invite a wide range of readers with different interests to explore different topics in the book The book is divided into four parts, each subdivided into two or three chapters Part is a philosophical analysis of poker In chapter 1, poker is positioned in relation to other games with regards to the ontological structure of the game Slavoj «i»ek’s distinction between three different ontological orders, the symbolic, the real, and the imaginary, is presented This triad provides the basic analytical framework for much of the thinking about poker in the book Chapter continues along the same lines Using a single hand played by poker professional, Gus Hansen, as an example, it demonstrates how a particular variant of poker, Texas Hold ’Em, is actually Introduction • played, and the basics of strategic reasoning in poker are introduced Chapter concludes the philosophical analysis of Texas Hold ’Em by using «i»ek to unfold the challenges of poker strategy Part analyzes poker empirically as an economic system for the circulation and distribution of money In this part, the analytical focus is gradually shifted from the game of poker to the poker players Using data from an online game provider, chapter maps the relative proportions of different categories of winning and losing players In chapter 5, data on different styles of playing are included, and ‹ve classes of players are identi‹ed in a statistical latent class analysis In part 3, the analytical focus is also on the players, and different forms of subjectivity in poker are investigated Based on qualitative interviews, chapter investigates the particular skills required to succeed as a professional poker player In chapter 7, three ideal typical approaches to poker are developed, using again Slavoj «i»ek’s distinction between the real, the symbolic, and the imaginary The three orders correspond to the three types: Sucker, Grinder, and Player Chapter looks into problem gambling in poker Using qualitative interview data, the chapter develops a map of four different types of problem gamblers in poker Part investigates the cultural meaning of poker and the relation between poker and capitalism Chapter takes the analysis to a very general level by inquiring into the relationship between game and society; it proceeds by presenting Jean Baudrillard’s de‹nition of game as “parodic simulacrum” as a way of conceptualizing this relationship In chapter 10, this concept is applied to a historical analysis, demonstrating the parallel development of poker and capitalism I argue that the evolution and succession of different forms of poker, Flat poker, Draw poker, Stud poker, and Texas Hold ’Em, correspond to the evolution and succession of different paradigms of capitalism Chapter 11 demonstrates how the circulation and distribution of value in No-Limit Texas Hold ’Em simulate the circulation of value in postindustrial capitalism Furthermore, it shows how the ideal types of poker players correspond to class positions in postindustrial capitalism Even though the book is written with the intention of being read from beginning to end, it is also possible for readers with particular interests to approach the different parts of the book in an order other than the one immediately suggested by the disposition A scholar of contemporary social theory might want to begin with part and then turn back to part A poker player with an interest in the game in its own right will probably want to start at the beginning Chapters and are, however, the most de- • poker manding chapters to read because of the extensive use of philosophical terminology An alternative option is to skip forward to parts and before reading part A reader with a particular interest in problem gambling might want to start with part and perhaps even approach the chapters through in reverse order Scholars of the culture of gambling will want to read the book from beginning to end In other words: shuf›e up and read! one ♠ ♣ ♥ ♦ The Ontology of Poker Is poker a game of chance or a game of skill? This has been a controversial issue in much debate about poker in the wake of the poker boom We might provide a quick answer to the question by paraphrasing the Marx Brothers joke, where Groucho answers the standard question “Tea or coffee?” with “Yes, please!” So: Yes, poker is a game of chance or skill! The question about whether poker is a game of chance or skill does indeed raise interesting epistemological issues However, the reason that this question stirs up controversy is not because there is a widespread interest in such philosophical issues It is rather the fact that the categorization of poker within law, politics, morality, and even public health has hinged on the outcome of the controversy The line of reasoning seems to be that if it were determined that poker is a game of chance, it could be placed in the same category as roulette, slot machines, and other familiar gambling games The game would thus be subject to the same legal and political regulation, it would have the same dubious moral quality, and it would require the same preventive and therapeutic measures in relation to problem gambling as these games If, on the other hand, it could be proved that poker is a game of skill, it would fall into the same category as chess The game should thus be exempted from the legal and political restrictions pertaining to gambling games Great poker play ought to be considered an expression of virtue rather than a vice And it might even be justi‹ed to deny any possible connection between poker and problem gambling From a philosophical point of view, many of these debates about poker 10 • poker in recent years, in the media, in political debates, and in the courtrooms, have been a mess And the primary reason for the mess is that the initial question itself is fallacious To ask whether poker is a game of chance or a game of skill is to assume that it is either-or Yet the essential characteristic of poker is precisely that it is both Poker is a game that requires a very particular set of skills related to the art of navigating in an environment that is ultimately governed by chance Once it is recognized that there is an intricate interrelation between skill and chance in poker, and that the game does not ‹t unambiguously into either category—game of chance or game of skill—it also becomes evident that poker does not really ‹t into the usual classi‹cation schemes of law, politics, morals, and public health The object of the current chapter is to a philosophical analysis of poker Analysis is here understood in the original meaning of the word as separating an entity into its parts in order to study its structure The outcome of a game of poker is determined by three elements: chance, mathematical-logical deduction, and psychological empathy In the actual play the three elements are interwoven in a way that makes them almost indistinguishable in practice The analysis separates the three elements of poker by associating each of the elements with a particular game The three games are chess, roulette, and Rock-Paper-Scissors The argument is that, philosophically, poker is a hybrid of these games z& i z e& k and poker analysis In order to the analysis of poker, a philosophical framework is required A philosophical theory is a reservoir of concepts, de‹nitions, and analytical distinctions The theory is a tool for thinking that sharpens our understanding of the object of analysis The analysis of poker, not only in the current chapter but throughout the entire book, is almost exclusively structured by the philosophical theory of one particular thinker, Slavoj «i»ek The choice of «i»ek as the analytic master ‹gure of the book is not justi‹ed by any work he has done on the subject of poker In fact, even though few subjects are strange to «i»ek’s relentless explorations of contemporary culture in all its manifestations, I have not found a single reference to poker in all of his oeuvre Nevertheless, the initial idea for this book was sparked by a sense of striking resemblance between the functioning of analysis in «i»ek’s works and the way a game of poker proceeds The philosophical infrastructure of «i»ek’s analytical perspective is made up by the distinction between three different ontological orders: the ... perspective of the game is of course that of the symbolic order The interpretation of chance through probability theory is precisely an example of the transposition of the real into the order of the. .. color of the piece but rather from the way the king moves in the game and its particular role in the determination of the outcome of the game.5 The mere designation of a particular piece as the. .. is an element of truth in any good parody, not in the shape of accurate representation but in the effects on the original image of the object of parody As a parody of capitalism, poker produces