The Poker World is Flat - Part II

Editor's note: This syndicated article by James McManus first appeared in The New York Times and is being published unedited by Card Player for your reading enjoyment.


As I noted last week, Thomas L. Friedman's best-seller "The World Is Flat" reveals how a convergence of Internet technology with economic and political developments has leveled the global business playing field.



The book rightly emphasizes the role people from India play in this process. Even so, it never mentions Anurag Dikshit (pronounced DIX-it), the software whiz educated at the Indian Institute of Technology who in 2000 created the platform for PartyPoker.com.



PartyPoker quickly became the world's busiest card-playing Web site, enabling tens of thousands of players around the world to compete in real time at virtual nine-handed tables. The site supercharged a vast industry, creating many thousands of jobs and an 11-figure stock valuation for its shareholders.



Friedman's book also mentions Bill Gates 17 times but poker not once, in spite of the game's huge influence on Gates during his two years at Harvard. In his 1995 memoir, "The Road Ahead," Gates recalled marathon dorm sessions that he found at least as productive and intellectually stimulating as his time spent in class.



"In poker, a player collects different pieces of information," he wrote, "and then crunches all that data together to devise a plan for his own hand. I got pretty good at this kind of information processing."



The planet's reigning e-businessman – and most copious philanthropist – Gates also won a significant portion of Microsoft's start-up costs in those games, but it wasn't just dollars being accumulated; it was "the poker strategizing experience."



Leaving such stories out of an otherwise comprehensive survey of the flattening world extends a long pattern in which historians, biographers, memoirists and dictionary editors tend to strike gambling from the record.



They often do so in the face of abundant evidence that poker playing helped numerous movers and shakers make their way in the world – that it was essential to the development of their character, education, bankroll and modus operandi.



"He played poker all through his presidential career for money." That was William Tecumseh Sherman writing in 1889 to the president of Harvard about Ulysses S. Grant, who had died four years earlier.



Sherman well knew of Grant's lifelong penchant for risk-taking in battle, business and politics, and of his keen feel for poker. Yet Grant's majestic 1,200-page "Personal Memoirs" made no mention of poker, or of any gambling. Nor do most prize-winning works of Civil War history.



Several generations of Americans therefore never realized that during the conflict most officers and enlisted men on both sides played the game avidly, learning to apply its tactics in commercial, diplomatic and military contexts as well.



The habit of sweeping poker under the rug persisted in the 20th century. Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson, Dwight D. Eisenhower and both Roosevelts – along with many of their biographers – played down their affection for poker.



Historians and politicians have numerous motives, of course, but it's clear that quite a few of them still saw poker as either a dirty secret or "just a game," not a key to achievement.



And then there was Richard M. Nixon. As a young Navy lieutenant, Nixon took home almost $8,000 – a genuinely whopping haul in the 1940s – from shipboard games in the Pacific.



Once, while holding the ace of diamonds, he drew four cards to make a royal flush, about a 650,000-to-1 shot. "I was naturally excited," he wrote on page 34 of his autobiography, "RN." "But I played it with a true poker face, and won a substantial pot."



In the 1,136 pages of "RN," that's the second and final use of the p-word, and one he's at pains not to highlight – even though he was about to use this $8,000 to finance his first congressional campaign, in 1948, which he won.



In "Nixon Agonistes" (1970), Garry Wills peeled back the rug. He noted that his subject "got to know his fellows, not in foxholes but across the tables, in endless wartime poker games."



Since most American fighting men played, Nixon's participation could be seen simply as an effort to be a regular guy, but Wills showed how much more to it there was: "His Quaker mother did not approve of gambling, but he had eased his way into the military past her scruples. The war became a moral hiatus. Besides, motive is what matters, and Nick's motive was pure, was puritan. He was not playing games; with him it was a business."



Long one of our most penetrating historians, Wills was a pioneer in making the ethos of poker a window into the soul of our 37th president.



He quotes the fellow officer who had coached "Nick" on five-card-draw strategy: "Out there Nixon passed over the traditional Quaker objections to gambling. Why? He needed money. He learned poker and mastered it to such a degree that he won a sizable amount, and it became the sole financial foundation of his career."



Looking ahead a few decades, Wills adds, "It helps, watching Nixon's 'ruthless' single-mindedness when bigger pots have been at stake, to remember those poker days."



Sometimes, in other words, the game is more than just a game. And with Yale and Harvard competing in annual hold'em tournaments and Sheriff Bill Hickok's final table morphing into Anurag Dikshit's, maybe it's time we owned up to this vital, if often less than heroic, facet of our national character.