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July 28, 2010 could go down in history as the day that got the ball rolling to allow American citizens the freedom to play online poker after Barney Frank’s HR2267 bill was passed by the House Financial Services Committee with an overwhelming vote of 41-22-1.
It is usually the world of online poker that throws up controversy but in recent weeks it has been live poker that has hit the headlines and unfortunately for all the wrong reasons. First we had the EPT Berlin robbery where thankfully nobody was seriously hurt and all the suspects are now in police custody and this week the World Poker Tour (WPT) got in on the action with a story of its own.
Last week we heard the news that with regard to the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006, House Rep. Barney Frank does not believe there will be any further delays of the implementation of the final regulations. In other words, come June 1st — less than ten weeks away — it appears likely that Americans who play online poker will encounter additional difficulty getting money onto sites.
Yeah, I know. Everybody has that other bill on their minds — the Health Care and Education Affordability Reconciliation Act of 2010 — which has now been passed by both houses and is about to be signed into law. But while reading around yesterday I was reminded by Gadzooks64 of the UIGEA and that fast approaching deadline. And also the possible consequences.
According to those UIGEA final regs, U.S. banks and other financial institutions are being instructed to block transactions between their customers and online gambling sites (no matter if they are located outside the U.S.). Like the original UIGEA, the “Final Rule” does not define what “unlawful gambling” is. Indeed, it makes explicit that the law does not, in fact, provide that definition, noting that “The Act does not spell out which activities are legal and which are illegal, but rather relies on the underlying substantive Federal and State laws” to make those distinctions. (Of course, in many cases, those “underlying” federal and state laws are themselves full of ambiguity.)
The regulations acknowledge that the banks will likely find it difficult “to prevent restricted transactions without unduly burdening their processing of lawful transactions.” Nonetheless, the regs express hope that the banks will practice “due diligence” when it comes to identifying and stopping those transactions from occurring. Many have suggested that such “due diligence” will involve “overblocking” all suspect transactions rather than risk allowing a restricted one to go through.
One other important note — the banks and other institutions are not obligated to block transactions which involve a customer taking money off of an online gambling site. Rather, “[u]nder the final rule, the term ‘restricted transaction’ would not include funds going to a gambler, and would only include funds going to an Internet gambling business.” Meaning one is (theoretically) supposed to be able to cash out without hassle, but depositing money will be prohibited.
I think it is possible banks could block cash outs, too — that is to say, they aren’t obligated to do so, but it could happen that some do so, anyway. In fact, I’d say it is probably likely that will happen here and there, given the uncertain position the banks are in with regard to enforcing the UIGEA. Also, even though compliance with the finalized regulations is not mandatory until June 1, banks can already block transactions if they wish.
Gadzooks64 notes how “there is already a dearth of really bad players” such as were easy to find just a couple of years ago, and believes it will only get worse come June 1. Her post made me think of an observation made by Tom Schneider a long time ago — early 2007 — on the old Beyond the Table podcast regarding how the UIGEA could potentially affect the relative value of the money one has on poker sites. (I wrote a little about his comment here.)
Responding to the fact that a lot of U.S. players were pulling their money off of online poker sites then — and with Neteller having just pulled out we were facing additional trouble reloading — Schneider opined that the money on poker sites could become worth “more than cash.” He speculated that in some cases players could be ready to play “a premium” (a fee of some sort) to a third party to help them get money moved into their online accounts.
He was talking mainly about the higher stakes games, I believe, but I noted at the time what he was saying could apply to us small-timers, too. In any event, if, indeed, it becomes too arduous or even impossible for some of us Americans to deposit anymore, that should affect the player base considerably. It’ll also affect how some of us practice our bankroll management, too. Come June 1, a lot of us may suddenly be playing with our “case money” (so to speak) — that is, our last remaining funds with which to play.
In her post Gadzooks64 mentions that rather than play that way, she might just take her money out prior to June 1 and stick to them freerolls, avoiding the hassles altogether. I would bet others are probably thinking along the same lines.
I’m not going to use the money in any of my online poker accounts to make that bet, though.
It’s been more than three years since the UIGEA act forced US Internet poker players away from the tables, virtual and real. Before UIGEA the 2006 WSOP Main Event hosted 8,773 players, then the mass exodus after UIGEA, and the paid entrants for the 2007 WSOP Main Event nose dived 28% to 6,358. The numbers for the 2009 WSOP Main Event was 6,494.
If the Nevada Gaming Control Board decides to crack down on the contractual relationships with Nevada casinos and online gaming sites the WSOP and other major poker tournaments will again take a hit, some could disappear altogether. The control board could decide to end all relationships between online gaming sites and Nevada casinos, even the .net website.
Does this mean no more .net gaming website ads on the table covers at the WSOP. Will player’s regress to wearing street clothes without logo? Can the online poker rooms come up with another clever way to keep the brand out there without upsetting gaming regulators; and, if not, will the online sponsorships dry-up and further erode the tournament entry numbers?
Remember when there was no UIGEA and every one was happy? Poker had finally slipped out of the smokey back rooms and moved to prime time on the widescreen TV in family homes around the world.
It’s been more than three years since the UIGEA act forced US Internet poker players away from the tables, virtual and real. Before UIGEA the 2006 WSOP Main Event hosted 8,773 players, then the mass exodus after UIGEA, and the paid entrants for the 2007 WSOP Main Event nose dived 28% to 6,358. The numbers for the 2009 WSOP Main Event was 6,494.
If the Nevada Gaming Control Board decides to crack down on the contractual relationships with Nevada casinos and online gaming sites the WSOP and other major poker tournaments will again take a hit, some could disappear altogether. The control board could decide to end all relationships between online gaming sites and Nevada casinos, even the .net website.
Does this mean no more .net gaming website ads on the table covers at the WSOP. Will player’s regress to wearing street clothes without logo? Can the online poker rooms come up with another clever way to keep the brand out there without upsetting gaming regulators; and, if not, will the online sponsorships dry-up and further erode the tournament entry numbers?
Remember when there was no UIGEA and every one was happy? Poker had finally slipped out of the smokey back rooms and moved to prime time on the widescreen TV in family homes around the world.
Have noted before how I consistently enjoy the Two Plus Two Pokercast, hosted by Mike Johnson and Adam Schwartz. Last week’s episode again featured a number of good segments, including a discussion with Andrew “LuckyChewy” Lichtenberger of that great “High Stakes Poker” hand from last week between Tom Dwan and Phil Ivey (mentioned here).
The featured guest last week was Mike Matusow, and as is often the case Johnson and Schwartz asked all of the questions of their guest that we’d like to hear answered — including some attempts at getting further details regarding provocative anecdotes from Matusow’s autobiography, Check-Raising the Devil (co-authored with Amy Calistri and Tim Lavalli). They also got Matusow to talk again about Russ Hamilton and UltimateBet, an exchange that also provided some interesting moments.
I wanted to focus a bit on one part of the conversation — the part where the hosts asked Matusow to comment on the whole “Isidur1 saga.” As most probably know, after that wild ride late last year, Isildur1 has recently resurfaced over on Full Tilt Poker with a replenished bankroll, seeking still more action.
“Everybody wanted us to ask this,” begins Schwartz, who then asks Matusow to comment on Isidur1’s apparent “death wish” or desire to keep playing the top players for the highest stakes, ostensibly until he loses all he possibly can.
Matusow’s response reflected some of the same cynicism about online poker we’ve heard him advance many times before, though I thought it was kind of intriguing to consider what he was saying in the context of discussing these super-high, “nosebleed”-stakes games. After confidently predicting Isildur1 will be going busto soon (again), Matusow went on to address the following topics…
On the Object of the Game
“Don’t you understand those games?” asked Matusow. “Those games are not real poker games,” he clarified, noting that those who play at those stakes are “degens” playing for a “ridiculous amount of money that are [primarily] trying to see who’s going to go broke first.”
Part of Matusow’s assessment of the games, then, seems to concern the approach the players take towards them — an approach seemingly guided by that “death wish” idea Schwartz had mentioned. “All it is… it’s no real money,” said Matusow. “The only reason why it looks like real money is because you got people… [playing in the games] like Ivey and them that have uncountable amounts of money that don’t care. The people that play are people that, you know, they don’t care until they go broke.”
Matusow then spent some time talking about a specific live hand Tom Dwan played versus Phil Ivey in which Matusow believed Dwan played much too loosely when calling a check-raise from Ivey with nothing but an inside-straight draw.
The hand was from that Full Tilt Poker Million Dollar Cash Game, and I’m assuming it was one where Matusow himself was present. I haven’t seen that hand and thus am not sure what the context was or whether Dwan may have been planning a later-street bluff. In any case, for Matusow the hand exemplified the “don’t care”-attitude toward money he says Isildur1 and his opponents are demonstrating.
On Endorsements and Their Effect
Schwartz then asked Matusow “How much do the Full Tilt disbursements kind of drive these games and turn it into this sort of circus?”
Matusow had no concrete answer to this question. In fact, he started off saying “no comment,” but then added “you think it [i.e., the fact that some of the players are FTP pros and thus are being compensated in some way for playing in these games] kind of has something to do with it.”
A good question, actually. Kind of reminded me of a discussion that came up in the comments to a post over on Pokerati from last December. One commenter asked “is there any possible way these players actually are not playing for that much and it is merely b.s. so the poker site can get more traffic…?”
The subsequent discussion suggested most thought it was a bit outlandish to think Full Tilt would “invent” a player like Isildur1 and have its pros play him for what appeared to be real high stakes but what in actuality was not — all for the sake of attracting some publicity and (potentially) some more action on the site.
Schwartz isn’t suggesting that the money isn’t “real,” of course (I don’t think). But he is implying that some — perhaps a significant percentage — of it isn’t really coming out of the players’ pockets, and that the site itself is the reason why this is the case. If you think about it, the idea isn’t that different from that of the commenter who wondered if “these players actually are not playing for that much.”
On the Difference Between Live Money and Online Money
Later in the show, Matusow comes back to this issue of online poker not being “real poker” — and I think ultimately adds yet another idea or theory to (try to) support that thesis.
Matusow is asked about his current business venture, Deep Stacks University (an online training site). After discussing Deep Stacks a bit, Matusow noted that for him a primary motive for getting involved with the business was simply to get out of the house and stop playing online poker.
We’ve heard Matusow talk before about the negative influence online poker has on him. As he told the hosts, “it takes over my life, it destroys my life… it totally consumes me.” He quickly moved on from talking about Deep Stacks, though, and instead mentioned how he recently had a very successful three-week period of live play at the Commerce Casino. That then led him back into the subject of online poker not being “real.”
“It’s a video game,” said Matusow. “If you watch those big games… where is the skill? They’re just shipping in $200,000 on 60/40s over and over and over. I mean, it’s an absolute joke. It’s comical. I mean, people look at it as real money, but it’s really not. They’re just numbers. And it’s not real money. If them guys had to use their real money — like if they were playing in a live game with those kind of moneys — you think they’d be throwing it in like that?”
Of course, earlier in the conversation Matusow had referred to a live hand in which Dwan had done just that, but no matter. I think we can now list at least three reasons why Matusow (or others) might regard the super-high, “nosebleed”-stakes games as not “real poker”:
1. The object of the game is different from that of “real poker.” (That is, the object is primarily to see who can avoid going broke first, not necessarily to make as much money as possible).2. Site endorsements (and/or other staking arrangements) make it less likely players are playing with their own money, thereby making the game less “real” in a relative sense.
3. The nature of online play — where real money can be so easily be regarded as “just numbers” — makes the game different from “real” (i.e., live) poker.
All three of these reasons have to do with money and its significance. That is to say, for Matusow the online game — especially the highest-stakes variety played by Isildur1 et al. — introduces way too many mitigating factors that upset the meaning of the money involved to allow it to be considered “real poker.”
All of which I found intriguing, if not entirely convincing. It all depends on how you look at it, yes? While I’m sure Matusow is not the only one thinking these thoughts about those games on Full Tilt, I can readily imagine rational responses to each of his theories that would constitute hard-to-refute defenses of the “reality” of the poker being played.
Is it “real” poker being played by Isildur1 and his opponents? Who can say for sure?
Is real interesting, though. Both the games and what people say about them.
When it comes to “legal stuff” and online poker, I never feel entirely comfortable offering my opinions. Or even simply reporting what the hell is going on. I mean, I think I am a decent reader and even once in a while stumble on a good ideer or response to this or that. But when it comes to commenting confidently on this particular subject, my first instinct is usually to try to change it.
The fact is, current state and federal laws regarding online poker/gambling here in the U.S. are ambiguous at best, and the process by which new laws and regulations come to be is often also mysterious for most of us. Rarely does anything seem perfectly clear, and when it does, such moments of clarity are often frustratingly fleeting. There’s always an appeal, it seems. And an appeal of the appeal. And so forth. Never mind “running it twice.” These guys appear willing and able to run it a hundred times if they have to, with the rules changing each time along the way.
This week came a couple of stories regarding some of many ongoing legal machinations, neither of which necessarily offered any further clarity for us on this subject. Or comfort. One was a ruling from the Kentucky Supreme Court on the Commonwealth’s efforts to seize 141 domains hosting online gambling sites. Sounds like that one has turned the other way once again. For now, that is. (It’s always “for now.”)
If you recall, it was back in September 2008 that we first heard that a Circuit Court judge had granted Governor Steve Beshear’s order to “seize” the domains which hosted sites allowing Kentucky residents to gamble online. Seemed like a pretty obvious usurpation of authority, as though somehow Kentucky could rule the entire interwebs and take control of sites according to its own predilections.
A hearing was held the following month, and the Circuit Court ruled in favor of Beshear et al. If the offending domains didn’t start blocking Kentucky from accessing the sites they were hosting within 30 days, the domains would be forfeited to Kentucky. A “forfeiture hearing” was then scheduled, then delayed. Then the case wound up in the court of appeals, where it was determined Kentucky wasn’t king of the internet after all.
The sucker then went to the state’s Supreme Court — an appeal of the appeal — where it has been for the last long while. Finally, this week the Supreme Court ruled that, in fact, the ruling in the Court of Appeals didn’t hold “due to the incapacity of domain names to contest their own seizure.”
In other words, the owners of the domains — who remained “anonymous registrants” and were represented by others — have to come forward and defend themselves (says the Ky. Supreme Court). So the decision in the Court of Appeals has been reversed. (Full decision here.)
The Poker Players Alliance has commented, saying it “understands the technical nature of the decision” made by the Supreme Court, and that it “remains confident that, once that issue is cured, the Supreme Court” will see the light and uphold the previous decision of the Court of Appeals to deny Kentucky the right to seize the domains. I like the choice of metaphor there — what we are looking at here is in fact an illness than needs to be “cured” before we can go forward.
Is this incurable, though? Who knows?
The other item of special note this week concerned House Representative Barney Frank (D-MA) telling PokerNews that he did not anticipate another delay would be granted for implementation of the final regulations of the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006.
Another story that sounds, well, a little sick-making.
If you recall, those final regs were set to go into effect on December 1, 2009, but the feds granted six more months to consider other legislation, meaning the current deadline for U.S. banks and financial institutions to start blocking transactions with online gambling sites is now June 1, 2010.
Earlier this year, Rep. Jon Kyl (R-AZ) — one of the first authors of the legislation that ultimately became the UIGEA — decided to use his standing in the Senate to start blocking the President’s nominees to fill positions in the Treasury Department. Frank told PokerNews that Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner has said he wouldn’t allow any further delays specifically because of Kyl’s tactics.
Frank remains confident, however, that even after compliance with the UIGEA becomes mandatory in June, its standing will be tenuous. “Once it goes into effect, banks are going to raise hell,” he told PN, anticipating the banks’ subsequent complaints will lead to the UIGEA’s repeal.
As I have written about numerous times here, even if the UIGEA is an ambiguous, murky law that probably couldn’t hold up to any court challenges, its going into effect is nevertheless going to have consequences on U.S. players of online poker, knocking many out of the game due to increased difficulties getting money onto the sites.
When I appeared on Lou Krieger’s “Keep Flopping Aces” podcast last month, he asked me what I thought would happen with regard to the UIGEA during 2010. I told him my sense was that I did not feel very confident that it would be repealed this year, nor did I think any other legislation would likely be passed.
By way of explanation, I said hoping for either a repeal or the passage of new legislation was sort of like pulling for a poor player in a poker tourney to win. He’d need a lot of breaks just to reach the final table, then still more examples of good timing and fortuitous cards to win in the end.
Of course, using that analogy served a particular purpose for me — it enabled me to avoid speaking more particularly about things about which I have little clue.
In fact, I suspect most of us are essentially short-stacked when challenged to understand “legal stuff” and online poker.
A new issue of Bluff Magazine arrived in my mailbox this week (March 2010), containing an article by Mike Caro in which he shares what he calls “My Least Popular Poker Opinions.” As we all know, Caro has had a lot of opinions over the years regarding not just poker strategy, but the rules and functioning of the game, too. And being the iconoclast he is, his ideas generally tend to illustrate genuine attempts at rethinking traditional approaches — one reason why I always find Caro one of the more interesting poker writers.
One of the ideas Caro briefly discusses in the article was his campaign back in the 1990s to introduce a four-color deck — i.e., a deck featuring blue diamonds and green clubs to go along with the red hearts and black spades. The piece notes how players immediately objected to the attempted innovation, thus forcing him to add it to his list of “failed” ideas.
The story of Caro’s campaign has been told many times in many places over the years. Apparently it was at the World Poker Finals at Foxwoods in 1992 that Caro first successfully persuaded tourney organizers to employ the four-color deck, the colors of which had been determined following a vote among students at one of his seminars. Incidentally, Caro has insisted that he didn’t “invent” the four-color deck — in fact, he believes the two-color deck was itself an “innovation” of sorts, borne from a desire to save money on printing costs.
In any event, the new deck was not appreciated at Foxwoods, partly due to the fact that the colors hadn’t been properly shaded, causing some confusion to go along with the general opposition to change. By the second day of the tourney, the decks were removed and the traditional two-color decks restored.
In the Bluff piece, Caro makes reference to a later attempt to introduce the four-color deck, a story that Diane McHaffie describes in more detail in a 2006 article in Poker Player Magazine. There McHaffie tells how Caro tried once more to introduce the four-color deck in early 1995, getting 65 different cardrooms to employ the decks on a single day — dubbed “C-Day” (or “Color Day”) by the Mad Genius of Poker.
“Although most players seemed impressed,” writes McHaffie, “some were indifferent and then there were those who voiced their discontent rather loudly.” And, in predictable fashion, losing players “took this opportunity to blame their misfortune on the color change” of the decks.
McHaffie quotes Caro explaining how he’d “spent years lobbying, cajoling, and publicizing an event [C-Day] that was intended to change the very nature of playing cards forever and it just resulted in two hours of agony.” The decks were thrown out, and thus ended the experiment. In live poker, anyway. Online poker — which allows players to modify the playing experience individually in numerous ways — makes the four-color deck an option which I would venture to guess most players choose to take.
I have trouble coming up with a good reason not to use four-color decks in live play, though I assume some have objections that go beyond the uncritical appeal to tradition. I suppose one could argue that poker is a game that rewards attention to detail, and thus requiring players to make the extra mental effort of distinguishing hearts from diamonds and clubs from spades is yet another way to test that skill. Then again, one could find ways to make the cards even more difficult to read (remember those “Poker Peek” cards from the 2007 WSOP?), providing an even greater challenge — something no one could rationally argue for, I wouldn’t think.
Printing costs probably remain a factor here, although probably less a factor than in the past. So what other reasons might there be not to use the four-color deck?
Earlier this week I had an opportunity to attend a talk by Gloria Steinem, the feminist and political activist whose name is synonymous with the women’s liberation movement of the ’60s and ’70s.
Younger folks don’t necessarily recognize Steinem’s name or her once iconic cultural status the way those of us of a certain age do. Ask those who were around a few decades back, and we’ll instantly associate Steinem with women’s lib, Ms. Magazine (which she founded in the early ’70s), N.O.W. (the National Organization of Women), her support of “reproductive freedom,” and the (ultimately unsuccessful) fight for the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment.
The talk was thought-provoking. Actually Steinem herself was suffering from laryngitis and so a younger woman delivered the speech while Steinem (now in her 70s) sat next to the podium. There were a few observations made in the lecture regarding cultural attitudes toward the older generation — thus did those points about ageism sound a little funny being delivered by a woman in her 20s. Steinem did step up to the mic for the Q&A afterwards, though, and gamely answered questions for at least half an hour despite her ailment. In both the lecture and her answers to questions, Steinem was highly engaging, witty, smart, and even occasionally inspiring.
Steinem is a controversial figure, of course, who has been and who continues to be opposed by many for her views. Not being fully acquainted with all of her writings or positions, I’m not ready to endorse her without qualification, although I will say I respond well to her general message to avoid prejudging people on the basis of categories like sex, race, class, age, or faith.
Listening to Steinem got me thinking a bit about that piece I wrote recently for Woman Poker Player. I mentioned last week how I’d written half of a “He Said/She Said” column with Jennifer Newell in which we discussed the issue of women and online poker site sponsorships. I believe the plan is to write more of those columns going forward. Here are links to those again — He Said: Women and Sponsorships / She Said: Women and Sponsorships.
Writing that caused me to think more specifically about stereotyping in poker — both in terms of the way men and women poker players are differently treated and judged in the media (and thus in the sometimes mysterious world of online site sponsorships) as well as how a person’s sex potentially is given a certain significance at the poker table. Indeed, while many of us instinctively resist stereotyping others — or at least try not to and/or are aware that it is wrong to do so — at the poker table such stereotyping is not only understood as acceptable but some would argue essential.
Those who play a lot of live poker develop certain ideas about, say, women players, or those of a certain race or ethnicity, or older people, and so forth. Such ideas are difficult to resist, and in some cases prove useful when up against a new opponent for whom one has little or no information about his or her playing style.
When this topic comes up, I can’t help but think about a book like Play Poker, Quit Work and Sleep Till Noon! by John Fox, originally published in 1977, in which Fox includes a chapter early on about game selection. (Click here for more about this historically significant poker book.) Amid his advice about picking tables at which to play, Fox unashamedly delivers his “general rules for identifying weak players,” many of which involve stereotyping.
In the list of “desirable opponents” that comes at the end of the chapter, Fox includes some benign-sounding categories like “drinkers,” “nervous opponents,” and “players who expose cards.” However, many of his categories directly evoke — in a decidedly pre-PC way — the categories of sex, race, class, age, and even faith as useful indicators. Thus does his list include “rich people,” “young players,” “people displaying religious symbols,” and “ghetto residents.” And women? Important enough to list twice, with both “beautiful women” and “women in general” being desirable opponents for Fox.
Times change, and the significance of these categories evolve. Seems to me, though, that while we might think differently today about categories like sex, race, class, age, or faith, thereby assigning each different meanings to them than we might have back in the ’70s or earlier, we humans still nevertheless find it hard to resist prejudging others, with our prejudgments often affected by whatever ideas we possess about these categories.
Away from the poker table, many of us make a conscious effort to resist such stereotyping. However, at the poker table — where we meet strangers in order to compete with them — it’s a different story.
Earlier this week I had an opportunity to attend a talk by Gloria Steinem, the feminist and political activist whose name is synonymous with the women’s liberation movement of the ’60s and ’70s.
Younger folks don’t necessarily recognize Steinem’s name or her once iconic cultural status the way those of us of a certain age do. Ask those who were around a few decades back, and we’ll instantly associate Steinem with women’s lib, Ms. Magazine (which she founded in the early ’70s), N.O.W. (the National Organization of Women), her support of “reproductive freedom,” and the (ultimately unsuccessful) fight for the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment.
The talk was thought-provoking. Actually Steinem herself was suffering from laryngitis and so a younger woman delivered the speech while Steinem (now in her 70s) sat next to the podium. There were a few observations made in the lecture regarding cultural attitudes toward the older generation — thus did those points about ageism sound a little funny being delivered by a woman in her 20s. Steinem did step up to the mic for the Q&A afterwards, though, and gamely answered questions for at least half an hour despite her ailment. In both the lecture and her answers to questions, Steinem was highly engaging, witty, smart, and even occasionally inspiring.
Steinem is a controversial figure, of course, who has been and who continues to be opposed by many for her views. Not being fully acquainted with all of her writings or positions, I’m not ready to endorse her without qualification, although I will say I respond well to her general message to avoid prejudging people on the basis of categories like sex, race, class, age, or faith.
Listening to Steinem got me thinking a bit about that piece I wrote recently for Woman Poker Player. I mentioned last week how I’d written half of a “He Said/She Said” column with Jennifer Newell in which we discussed the issue of women and online poker site sponsorships. I believe the plan is to write more of those columns going forward. Here are links to those again — He Said: Women and Sponsorships / She Said: Women and Sponsorships.
Writing that caused me to think more specifically about stereotyping in poker — both in terms of the way men and women poker players are differently treated and judged in the media (and thus in the sometimes mysterious world of online site sponsorships) as well as how a person’s sex potentially is given a certain significance at the poker table. Indeed, while many of us instinctively resist stereotyping others — or at least try not to and/or are aware that it is wrong to do so — at the poker table such stereotyping is not only understood as acceptable but some would argue essential.
Those who play a lot of live poker develop certain ideas about, say, women players, or those of a certain race or ethnicity, or older people, and so forth. Such ideas are difficult to resist, and in some cases prove useful when up against a new opponent for whom one has little or no information about his or her playing style.
When this topic comes up, I can’t help but think about a book like Play Poker, Quit Work and Sleep Till Noon! by John Fox, originally published in 1977, in which Fox includes a chapter early on about game selection. (Click here for more about this historically significant poker book.) Amid his advice about picking tables at which to play, Fox unashamedly delivers his “general rules for identifying weak players,” many of which involve stereotyping.
In the list of “desirable opponents” that comes at the end of the chapter, Fox includes some benign-sounding categories like “drinkers,” “nervous opponents,” and “players who expose cards.” However, many of his categories directly evoke — in a decidedly pre-PC way — the categories of sex, race, class, age, and even faith as useful indicators. Thus does his list include “rich people,” “young players,” “people displaying religious symbols,” and “ghetto residents.” And women? Important enough to list twice, with both “beautiful women” and “women in general” being desirable opponents for Fox.
Times change, and the significance of these categories evolve. Seems to me, though, that while we might think differently today about categories like sex, race, class, age, or faith, thereby assigning each different meanings to them than we might have back in the ’70s or earlier, we humans still nevertheless find it hard to resist prejudging others, with our prejudgments often affected by whatever ideas we possess about these categories.
Away from the poker table, many of us make a conscious effort to resist such stereotyping. However, at the poker table — where we meet strangers in order to compete with them — it’s a different story.
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