Still the Biggest Game in Town
Sunday, March 29, 2009 - Gene Bromberg
Tens of millions of Americans play poker every year and so it comes as no surprise that the game fits nicely within our cultural mainstream. But with poker facing so many legal and political challenges the last few years it’s always good to be reminded that people play poker, people love poker, and people are fascinated by poker, across just about every demographic line you care to draw.
This past week The New Yorker featured an article by Alec Wilkinson about poker, one that focused primarily on Chris Ferguson but also discussed the UIGEA and the legal issues surrounding the game (you need to register to read the full article). That the pre-eminent literary magazine in the land published a positive article about poker doesn’t mean the UIGEA will repealed this afternoon (there are members of Congress who probably balk at reading so much as the back of a cereal box) but it adds to the groundswell of support poker has received in the media the last year or so.
The New Yorker has actually published a number of major articles about poker in the past, most notably two pieces by the English poet/critic A. Alvarez that he later expanded into The Biggest Game in Town, one of the leading works in the poker canon. If you haven’t read Alvarez’s articles, or The Biggest Game in Town, and you consider yourself a poker fan, shame on you.
Alvarez wrote those articles (and the book) in 1983. In 1994 he returned to World Series and wrote about fulfilling a lifelong dream–playing in the Main Event. These days it almost seems quaint that taking a seat in the Main Event would seem like such an ambitious gamble, but this was long before you had online qualifiers swelling the field into the thousands. That year there were 268 entrants and many of the players Alvarez writes about (Chan, Ungar, Hellmuth) are still well-known in the poker world today.
Alvarez wrote that article a bit less than fifteen years ago, a fact that hit me broadsides because reading that piece planted the seeds of my later love affair with the game. I actually clipped that article out of the magazine and kept it in a folder with other poker stories I came across over the years. And it was eight years later, in 2002, that I read an article that transformed my interest in poker into something akin to an obsession. Joseph Epstein reviewed Andy Bellin’s Poker Nation, Epstein first writing about his own experience playing poker while growing up in Chicago before turning to Bellin’s examination of underground New York card clubs and the current poker universe.
I devoured Poker Nation (several times, actually) and later that year something called the World Poker Tour debuted on the Travel Channel. As I watched the WPT from week-to-week I learned that thousands of folks were playing poker online, and as I considered dipping my toe into that vast aquarium some guy named Chris Moneymaker won the Main Event and $2.5 million. Poker may have suffered some legislative and political bad beats the last few years, but I think the perfect storm of the WPT, the advent of the digital world, and the Moneymaker Effect rather makes up for that. Should the UIGEA be repealed (and allegedly Barney Frank will be introducing just such a bill in early April) it might not usher in a new Golden Age of Poker…it might just help perpetuate the one we’re in right now. Five (or fifteen) years from now some budding poker player may read Wilkinson’s article and find all this UIGEA hullaballo rather silly. Let’s hope so.
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Tags: a. alvarez, al alvarez, alec wilkinson, andy bellin, biggest game in town, Chris Ferguson, moneymaker effect, new yorker poker, poker nation, Poker Poker Poker, the new yorker, the new yorker poker, uigea, World Poker Tour
