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#586 – BlogChild of Thursday, November 6 – Part IV
Of Presidents and Poker Players
One of the reasons I’ve been cranking out the blogs today is because I’m jealous. Two of the poker writers I hold in the highest esteem – James McManus and Anthony Holden – are turning out some great stuff in high-profile places. I don’t know if I can match them for quality – who can? – but maybe I can out-word them in quantity. (Even that doesn’t matter much, though, unless I can get Uncle Tilty to pay me by the word.)
James McManus, author of Positively Fifth Street and the soon-to-be-released history of poker, Cowboys Full, just had a piece posted on ESPN.com. The lengthy article is titled “Zero and Counting.” In Jim’s usual masterful way, he tells the story of his eight-year struggle to win a bracelet. That struggle brought him $750,000 in tournament cashes, a best-selling book, and a lot of TV exposure – but no bracelet.
The really great thing about this article – and it feels funny saying “I like it” because it’s about losing – is his descriptions of how tournament poker makes you feel like a worthless loser living in an unfair world. I might even go so far as to say that his article is the first example I know of a readable bad-beat story.
Tournament poker is such a tough way to make a living – or mount a quest. The emotions resonate especially strong with me because, after my own successful 2007 World Series, I went 1-for-19 in 2008 and feel like I have to explain to people that I’m not a loser, or worthless, or that the poker world is not so unfair that I should give it up. (I also know that it’s extraordinarily difficult to explain this to someone because NO ONE wants to hear about losing. But that’s the beauty of McManus’s article: he makes it readable.)
Jim puts the words on the emotions in a way everybody coming to terms with losing in poker – which means everybody who plays poker – can understand. Because the hardest-to-acquire poker knowledge is knowing ourselves, I consider this a must-read.
I’m lucky to count Jim McManus as a friend. The way I learned of the ESPN.com article was through a mass e-mail he sent. What a list: writers Peter Alson, Nolan Dalla, Anthony Holden, Al Alvarez, and a varied group including Poker Hall of Famer Crandell Addington, Chris Ferguson, Harvard Law Professor Charles Nesson … and one bobama@ [I won't disclose the rest of the e-mail address]. I had heard that McManus was friendly with the President-Elect and that Obama had played some poker, but I didn’t realize the extent of the connection.
This leads me to Anthony Holden’s just posted article, “Poker Returns to the White House.” The piece appears in TheDailyBeast.com, the news site that promisese to be “a smart edit of the web from the merciless point of view of what interests the editors … the omnivorous friend who hears about the best stuff and forwards it to you with a twist.” Media mogul Barry Diller provided the start-up cash and legendary editor Tina Brown (The New Yorker and Vanity Fair) is running it.
Like anything Tony Holden writes about poker, he brings the full force of decades of knowledge and historical perspective on the game. Holden explains that the President-Elect returns poker to the White House after 35 years, though some people have tried to keep Obama’s interest in the game under wraps.
Look how far we’ve come, says Holden, disapprovingly. “Expertise at poker used to be an unwritten job requirement for all would-be U.S. presidents.” He summarizes the history of poker players in the White House, and explains why that’s a good thing, not just for poker players but for the entire nation. (N.B. Tony’s strategy manual, according to his bio at the end of the article, Holden on Holden, is published this week by Little Brown.)
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