The Poker World is Flat

How flat is the poker world these days? As flat as the so-called Meadows of the Mojave Desert sprinklered into bloom by Las Vegans, or as the smogbound pavement of Los Angeles and the felt on the thousands of tables in its hangar-sized cardrooms. It's even as flat as the alluvial mud of Shreveport and Tunica, more humid poker capitals. It's also exactly as flat as those Mercator projections of earth near the back of airline magazines, the ones with the route lines connecting hub cities that look like they're drawn with a protractor. But of course those are drawn by computers.



The poker world is certainly as flat as anything in what Thomas Friedman calls Globalization 3.0 in his optimistic best-seller The World Is Flat. Friedman uses flat as a synonym for connected – digitally, that is, by fiber-optic cables. His exuberant, well-informed book makes a compelling case that a "triple convergence" of Internet technology with economic and political events at the dawn of the 21st century has generated "more horizontal and collaborative" means of creating value. While warning of several dangers lurking in this global topology, Friedman celebrates the more level playing field and breathtaking variety of opportunities for those with the imagination and training to seize them.



His book rightly emphasizes the role Indians have played in this process. Even so, in 608 pages it never mentions Anurag Dikshit (pronounced Dixit), the software whiz educated at the Indian Institute of Technology who in 2000 created the platform for PartyPoker.com. Party quickly became the world's busiest site by enabling tens of thousands of players to compete in real time at virtual ninehanded tables. The site supercharged a vast industry, creating numerous jobs and an 11-figure stock valuation for its shareholders. The industry is currently under fire by the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act, but whether or not playing our national pastime online turns out to be legal, Internet poker is without question among the "killer apps" of Globalization 3.0. You'd never guess it, however, from reading Friedman's book.



A more glaring oversight is mentioning Bill Gates 17 times, always in a positive light and often quoting him at length, but poker not once, this despite the game's famously seminal influence on Gates during his two years at Harvard. In his 1995 memoir The Road Ahead, Gates recalled marathon dorm sessions that he believes were at least as productive and intellectually stimulating as his time spent in class. His dorm-mate Steve Ballmer elsewhere reveals that Gates "played poker until 6 in the morning, then I'd run into him at breakfast and discuss applied mathematics." Ballmer calls Microsoft's early organization and business plan "basically an extension of the all-night poker games Bill and I used to play back at Harvard … Sometimes whole divisions would get moved just because someone bet two pairs against an inside straight. People were always wondering why [co-president] Jim Allchin ended up with so much power. What can I say? He bet big and won big. It's not always pretty, but it's not a bad way to keep the troops from getting complacent. And I can't say I'm unhappy with how things have worked out for me. I did pretty well one night and ended up becoming President myself." Chairman Gates puts it this way: "In poker, a player collects different pieces of information 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." Yet, Friedman ignores all such testimony, as well as this crucial detail: The planet's reigning e-businessman – and most copious philanthropist – won a significant portion of Microsoft's startup costs in those dorm games. And it wasn't just dollars reaped to be parlayed a millionfold; it was mainly, says Gates, "the poker strategizing experience."



Censoring such milestones from an otherwise comprehensive survey of the flattening world extends a long pattern in which historians, politicians, biographers, and editors do their best to strike poker from the record. Terms that don't appear in the latest edition of The New Oxford American Dictionary include flop (as a poker term), hold'em, Omaha (as a game), World Series of Poker. Terms that do: floptical, holdall, Pokemon, World Heritage Site. Such blind spots persist in the face of poker's exploding popularity as well as abundant evidence that it has helped numerous movers and shakers make their way in the world – that it was essential to the development of their character, education, bankroll, and business m.o., not to mention their network of contacts and friends.



"He played poker all through his presidential career for money." Here we have 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 his comrade-in-arms' penchant for risk-taking at West Point and later 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. Bruce Catton's The Civil War and James McPherson's The Battle Cry of Freedom have one fleeting reference apiece; Stephen Sears' Gettysburg and Jeff and Michael Shaara's fictional Civil War Trilogy, zero. Generations of Americans were therefore unable to appreciate that 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.



Two strains of our heritage are forever in conflict. The Puritan work-and-save ethic has taken us at least as far as the risk-loving frontiersman's urge to light out and seize the main chance. In balance, though, they've made us who we are. Yet the most avid proponents of either m.o. refuse to credit the other with anything positive. Huggers of the shore don't praise explorers, and riverboat or financial-services gamblers remain unimpressed by those who husband savings accounts. Nineteenth-century Puritans naturally tried to scrub poker from history, mainly because the game wasn't virtuous. It involved gambling, for one thing, often in combination with hard liquor, foul cigars, loose women, and concealed weapons. You either lost money or took other people's – not by hard, honest toil but by cunning and ruthlessness. Perhaps their most legitimate reason was that during its first several decades, poker was accurately called the Cheating Game.



In the 20th century we saw presidents Nixon, Johnson, Eisenhower, both Roosevelts, Warren G. Harding, and others downplay or even deny their affection for the game. Historians and politicians have numerous motives, of course, but it's clear that quite a few of them viewed poker as either a dirty secret or "just a game," never as a key to achievement. Whereas if a famous man played football or shot a buffalo, we got to read a chapter about it, with more than a few Gipper or White Hunter moments sprinkled in thereafter.



The habit of sweeping presidential poker under a carpet of virtue was finally broken in 1970, when Garry Wills' Nixon Agonistes peeled back the rug. Long one of our most enlightened historians, Wills used wartime poker to illuminate the character of our 37th president. As a Navy lieutenant, "Nick" Nixon took home $8,000 – a fairly whopping haul in the '40s – from games in the Pacific. Once, while holding the ace of diamonds, he drew four cards to make a royal flush, about a 650,000-1 shot. "I was naturally excited," he wrote on Page 34 of his autobiography. "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.



Wills zeroed in on the Quaker lieutenant's "iron butt" and the fact that he "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 have been seen simply as part of his lifelong campaign 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." He quotes a 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 to that checkered career, Wills adds: "It helps, watching Nixon's 'ruthless' singlemindedness when bigger pots have been played, to remember those poker days." Sometimes, in other words, the game is more than just a game.



Wills also showed that while Lt. Nixon played ruthlessly, Gen. Dwight Eisenhower was even better at poker, perhaps because he was more of a natural – and played with a greater sense of virtue, to boot. "Like Nixon, he made large sums of money in the long games at military bases," writes Wills. "Unlike Nixon, he was so good he had to stop playing with enlisted men; he was leaving too many of them broke." Even so, when he chose Nixon as his running mate in 1952, both men stopped playing or even mentioning poker, fearing voters would think it unsavory.



Writing after Wills, Robert Caro revealed how much LBJ learned playing poker. Carlo D'Este did the same for Eisenhower, as did Doris Kearns Goodwin for FDR. David McCullough's Truman teased out the pokeraticious elements in its subject's rise as an artillery officer, businessman, judge, and politician, clarifying how poker defined our most mainstream president. "He never learned to play golf or tennis, never belonged to a country club. Poker was his game, not bridge or mah-jongg," writes McCullough. Truman's Monday night sessions with old Army buddies "had a 10-cent limit. A little beer or bourbon was consumed, Prohibition notwithstanding, and the conversation usually turned to politics. Such was the social life of Judge Harry Truman in the early 1930s, the worst of the Depression."



With George W. Bush's Iraqi Most-Wanted poker deck still in play, Yale and Harvard competing in annual hold'em tournaments, the World Series being broadcast on ESPN, 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.



Numbers count, too. Though estimates vary, there may be more than $30 trillion – one hundred million players worldwide with an average bankroll of $300 – annually in play on live and virtual poker tables.



Several factors make online poker appealing: speed, convenience, game selection, weak competition, no need to tip dealers. Novices can compete for pennies or play money only. The big sites let us choose among thousands of games, from freeroll tournaments up to the $1 million showdowns on Full Tilt. And with action a click or two away around-the-clock, there's no need to deal with two airports, drive to a casino, or even put on a clean shirt. Some sites provide hand histories to help us track tendencies and plug leaks in our game, and to profit from those of our opponents. Even more crucial is the absence of physical tells, so that reckoning pot odds and betting patterns replaces raw psychological acumen. There's no intimidating eye contact here, either. Comments in the chat box may be withering or sophomoric, but it's easy to shut them off if we want.



Blogs and chat boxes also teem with allegations of dealing programmed to give multiple players good hands, thereby increasing the bets and the rake, and of sites rigging the deal to prevent new players from losing so quickly that they become discouraged. No hard evidence, however, has ever been produced to support such claims. Plus, the 6 percent to 10 percent rake the sites take is more than sufficiently juicy, and nonrandom dealing would slaughter that platinum goose. Those who claim to see far more bad beats online should remember that virtual dealers pitch about four times as many hands per hour; and the more hands you play, the more bad beats you will suffer. Sophisticated software also lets the sites check hand histories and IP addresses for evidence of player collusion.



The world seems very tiny, and timeless, while playing online. My opponents this evening on FullTiltPoker.com include Energeni, destiny7, Marco Traniello, and iw1n. As we chat and compete, they could be playing on a desktop computer in Hong Kong, a laptop in a dorm room, or three gates down the concourse from me. A lot of folks besides federal prosecutors wonder exactly where all of this virtual action takes place – in orbiting satellites or cables beneath the Pacific? In the case of Full Tilt, the home office is in Dublin, the players in 24 time zones across all six inhabited continents and scores of ships at sea.



As millions more live and virtual hands are dealt every day, poker seems poised to become the world's game. The World Series has already crowned champions from China, Iran, Vietnam, Ireland, Spain, and Australia, more proof that our national pastime remains a sturdy crucible – though also a flat one – in which folks from all over the planet find themselves welcome contenders.



Next: Return to the Civil War.