#581 - Clonie Gowen, Part III - Conclusion

Additional notes on Clonie Gowen

4. Is Clonie Gowen too nice for poker?

Clonie told me a story that I can’t recall whether I’ve used in the blog. I think it was last year, she was playing in a private game, a crazy game. It was $5-$10 or $10-$20 no-limit but the game was so wild that the guy running the game was raking $50 per hand, and no one complained. Players were buying in for huge amounts, shoveling away their chips, and rebuying for even bigger amounts. There were some players who clearly had no idea how to play and several who were drinking heavily.

One of the drunks was a friend of hers, a good player sober but an awful player when drunk. He was losing $10k at a clip and taking markers, all what so drunk he probably couldn’t even add up how much he was losing.

Clonie told me that she spent a couple hours trying to talk him into leaving the game but he wouldn’t hear it. Finally, even though she was winning in the game, she couldn’t stand to see him do this and quit.

I’m speculating but I think most top players would try to talk a friend out of throwing his money away. But I’m willing to bet that Phil Ivey would figure that once the guy was going to piss it away anyway, better him than anyone else in the game. And there are plenty of top players who would figure either (a) nobody at the poker table is your friend, or (b) they had a duty to feed him even more drinks.
5. Jury duty.

So two days after a big tournament triumph, Clonie Gowen is back in the Dallas area, reminded that some parts of life go on no matter how big you are on the tournament circuit. I haven’t found out whether they put Clonie on a jury, but I’m betting against.

There are certain kinds of people lawyers and even judges are leery of having on a jury. The most obvious example is the reluctance to put lawyers on juries. The almost-universally-held-belief is that a lawyer on the jury would either assert himself due to his education and/or expertise and wield extra influence, or other jurors would assume the lawyer knew more and unduly defer to the lawyer.

I’ve never heard of attitudes about poker players on juries. Maybe one side or the other might think a poker player’s ability to sniff out bluffs might make them overly influential on the credibility of witnesses.

But I think there’s a more important reason to strike a poker player. Poker players routinely make decisions based on incomplete information, decisions worth large amounts of money. Based on Clonie’s success making those decisions lately, she must have an overwhelming amount of confidence. Unless I was certain I had her vote, I wouldn’t want someone having that much influence - whether they seek to use it or not - over the rest of the jury.

6. The woman deserves a break, if for no other reason, because of how much I’ve abused her over the years. Here’s some of what I’ve written, just in this blog:

* The first time I tried to steal her underpants.

* The results of a quiz about emotions she took in Psychology Today.

* Her measurements.

* Watching her try to find “the perfect top” at the Fashion Show Mall.

* When she described busting out of a tournament as “I feel like I just had bad sex.”

* When I inventoried the contents of her bedroom and, while trying to steal her underpants a second time, got trapped in her shower.

* How I dismissed her biggest tournament win ever because she didn’t offer to let me use the shower of her new condo.

So I think it’s about time I take notice that Clonie Gowen is a good sport, a good friend, and a good poker player.