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#851 – 2009 WSOP Revisited #10 – The Great PearlJammed Caper, Part I
PROSPECTUS
A poker player is supposed to be difficult to read. But Jon Turner takes inscrutability to a new level. I spent an evening with Jon during the World Series of Poker and came to a pair of inconsistent conclusions: (1) All my stereotypical notions of the 27 year old online tournament poker legend are wrong; and (2) the experience of trying to learn about Jon Turner was so difficult that I am sometimes doubting whether we actually met.
This is not without precedent in my poker career. Erik Seidel is a nice man and I consider him a friend, but when I interviewed him for a collaborative project on Full Tilt – in which he agreed to participate – he was maddening un helpful. He was nice, friendly, and polite, but trying to actually pin him down proved nearly impossible. Yet this experience did nothing to hurt our relationship or the esteem in which I hold him. Seidel can’t help it if trying to grab a hold of him is like trying to get a revealing answer out of him is like trying to grab a wisp of smoke.
But at least with Seidel, I had physical proof that we met. I can say, “Here is a forty-five minute audio file of questions and answers. It is devoid of useful information, but it physically exists.”
With Jon Turner, I’m struggling to find even that much.
It took me three tries to hammer out this profile. This Prospectus and the Afterward have been written within the past few days. The part that follows consists of my notes from July 9, the off-day during the Main Event. Shauna and I had dinner with Jon two nights earlier and this was my only break from playing in and writing about the Main Event, so I used it to make sense of that meeting.
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