The Holy Grail

The American poet Stephen Dunn has observed: "Good high-stakes poker players are neither noble nor greedy. They've sized up their fellow players, know a good deal about probabilities and tendencies, and wish like poets that their most audacious moves be perceived as part of a series of credible gestures." Dunn also points out that "the great gamblers, and there are not many, don't need anything. They simply wish to prevail. And we know how dangerous people are who don't need anything." As Cool Hand Luke handsomely drawled, "Sometimes nothin's a pretty cool hand."

To feel this dangerous ourselves, even for a couple of minutes, can be severely intoxicating. It makes both erotic and emotional sense to say that we love it, and sometimes we love it too much. "When I'm rushing on my run / and I feel just like Jesus' son" is Lou Reed's blasphemous apotheosis of going too far. (He's singing about heroin, of course, but it makes the same difference. Ask anyone chasing the dragon.) Another menacing quality of the rush is to make us want more of it, and getting more makes us want more. At the poker table, this can be good. Feeling both endangered and dangerous, we tiptoe barefoot along the business end of a scalpel and never get sliced, and it will quickly become impossible to imagine that our state of grace never will pass. Players use the expressions "playing my rush" or "having a horse-shoe up my ass" to describe surfing a wave of big hands and successful bluffs. They often report the experience to be more stimulating than amphetamines, barbiturates, alcohol, music, or sexual intercourse. Certainly synapses fire at the poker table, and serotonin drips faster -- or slower. Electrons and corpuscles rush to the pleasure centers of the cerebral cortex, and others rush lower. We blush. Pink and orange chips and green money, foot-thick wads of it sometimes, flood our burgeoning coffers. To moderate our breathing becomes a pivotal challenge, but surely we're up to it. Right? We haven't renounced all control of ourselves. Far from it, in fact. Dunn defines intoxication as: "That sensation of 'fine excess' Keats wanted from poetry, the adjective gracing the noun, keeping it alert." Focus, grace, poetry, black magic, fucking, too-muchness -- the feeling that I am invincible. Even if you kill me I'll come back from the dead, just like Jesus. And if Jesus made love, I'm his son.

McManus, James; "Positive Fifth Street" p 121-122

The Dark Art of the Bluff

No-limit hold-em has also been called a black art, requiring players to broadcast and decipher fake tells, master complex (mis)information and amoral psychology, all of it illuminated by bolts of hideous and beneficient fortune. Folding, the thoroughly passive gesture at the heart of strong play, can be understood in religious or spiritual terms -- as humble acceptance, for example, of a metaphysical order beyond our comprehension, sometimes known as the shuffle. While to not fold then backdoor a flush on the river after your all-in opponent filled an inside straight on the turn required voodoo theology and titanium nerves to get your mind around, not logic or math prowess. Thank Shango and Oloddumare as you rake in the pot, or perhaps your lucky stars. As my daughter Bridget has been known to explain rare phenomena: "Whatever whatever, okay?"

Despite poker's nonrational dimension, philosopher John Lukacs was moved to call it "the game closest to the Western conception of life, where life and thought are recognized as intimately combined, where free will prevails over philosophies of fate or of chance, where men are considered moral agents, and where -- at least in the short run -- the important thing is not what happens but what people think happens." With everyone's hole cards lying facedown on the table, the hand perceived to be strongest in effect is.

McManus, James; "Positively Fifth Street" p120

The Addiction of Genius

Lorca, Robert Bly, and, more recently, Edward Hirsch have called the leaping, scarifying, anarchically creative spirit duende, from the Spanish for "lord of the house," and Hirsch specifically refers to Plath "storming upward through the air" in the Ariel poems. "The furies were certainly loose and stalking," he writes in The Demon and the Angel, "when Plath wrote her ferocious last poems in England. The notoriety of Plath's suicide has obscured how dedicated she was to her poetic craft, how persistently she worked to shape experiences, even as she probed the depths -- braving taboo subjects, courting a wildness that defies control... It's as if the duende was struggling out of her body to become a spirit of pure air." Hirsch also clarifies the musical dimension of poetic acts, as well as the death-hauntedness of many great artists. Describing the Kind of Blue studio sessions, for example, he quotes pianist Bill Evans comaring the lunar former addict Miles Davis to Japanese brush painters: "These artists must practice a particular discipline, that of allowing the idea to express itself in communion with their hands in such a direct way that deliberation cannot interfere. The resulting pictures lack the complex composition and textures of ordinary painting, but it is said that those who see will find something captured that escapes explanation." In a similar context, Nola Dalla, who is completing a biography of Ungar, compares him to Bobby Fischer, another spellbinding persona whose artistry "escapes explanation." A player whose brains, paranoia, and other demons drove him in 1970 to the pinnacle of chess, Fischer soon vanished down the maw of pathology; Ungar and Plath each traced a similar, though steeper, trajectory.

Mental illness remains disgracefully misunderstood in our culture, yet it seems fair to say that the headlong talents of Fischer and Ungar and Plath (or van Gogh, Davis, Berryman, Lowell, Billie Holiday, Janis Joplin, et al.) stem from parallel habits of mind, which themselves spring from brain chemistry. In the back of their forehead, more specifically in the anterior cingulate of their frontal cortex, some humans have more vulnerable dopamine systems, "psyches" (as we used to call them) more easily hijacked by rewards like sex, dope, money, or laurels. Mstering the inherent unpredictability of any game or art form can trigger overpowering "pleasure," and this dopamine rush gets deeply embedded in the memory of some of the most talented practitioners. Normal brains work this way, too, but they tend to operate within narrower "mood swings," with smaller jolts (or squirts) of strange insight. "The same neural circuity involved in the highs and lows of abusing drugs," says Harvard neuroscientist Hans Breiter, "is activated by winning or losing money, anticipating a good meal or seeking beautiful faces to look at."

McManus, James; Positively Fifth Street, p82-83

Dramatis Personae

So this is my attempt at being anal retentive about my other blog, Diary of a Poker Slut. There's been several times where I wanted an page where I could put extra stuff without breaking up the text. I already confuse people with my super-sized super-rambling entries, and I'm being as ruthless as I can with myself. You know how Steven King (f'rinstance, there are certainly others) was a good writer who desperately needed a brutal editor. "What? You don't agree? Did you read both versions of The Stand?" Well, anyway, I'm like that. And the worst part is, if this works the way I want it to, I can now include extra stuff that even I don't think I should include!