Digital Cowboy

Patrick has done it yet again.

He said what I meant. What I meant to. What I tried to.

And what I needed.

(Or: Why I don’t dream of winning the main event at the WSOP anymore.)

Poker was never really big in Las Vegas until Benny Binion and his son Jack met Doyle Brunson, Sailor Roberts and Amarillo Slim. Sure, you could always find a game being spread in Vegas – that’s why Doyle, Sailor and Slim were there in the first place. They had spent the better part of a decade together as rounders in Texas before they went to Vegas. But they brought Hold’em with ‘em. OK. Not exactly. That’s mostly true with a little Texas legend thrown in. There were others including the legendary Texans Johnny Moss, Jack Straus and Bob Hooks. But the point is that these Texas boys made Hold’em popular in Vegas. Ever wonder why they call it “No-limit Texas Hold’em?” (Forget for now that “No-Limit Texas” is redundant.)

So in 1970, Benny Binion got the bright idea that he would create a tournament format for poker that would settle once and for all who was the best among these guys making their living at the game. It would be a $10,000 buy-in and the money would become a prize pool. He developed the format, named it The World Series of Poker and hosted it at his Horseshoe casino in Las Vegas. The first year there were 13 entrants.

(Everything in the preceding two paragraphs was written from recollection and I don’t feel like verifying at the moment. So. Take it as substantially correct and don’t bother whining to me if I’m mistaken somewhere.)

It caught on and by the time Doyle Brunson won it back to back in ’76 and ’77, there were ten times as many entrants and he won $220,000 and $340,000, respectively.*

The only other person to ever win it back to back was Johnny Chan in ’87 and ’88. If anyone ever does it again, I’ll give a grand to the favorite charity of the first person that calls me on this wager.

It’s all changed now. Moneymaker winning in 2003 was part of it, but that was more of a dam bursting. A dam doesn’t burst suddenly, even if it appears that way. In my opinion, the first crack in the dam was Johnny Chan becoming the first (and only) to repeat Doyle’s feat in over a decade. Then came Phil Hellmuth. Then came Scotty Nguyen. Then came Rounders. That movie is a cult classic that has now become a cultural phenomenon. (Ever noticed that the root of “culture” is “cult?”) |inline

This is probably going to become a mostly poker blog for the the next… ummm… while. It’s WSOP season. The 2005 World Series of Poker just concluded early yesterday morning.

In answer to Jamie’s question, no, I have not followed it closely. That was intentional. I didn’t want to, because I want to watch it. It would be like following a blog about the making of a movie that describes everything the actors did that day and then going to see the movie. If you followed the production, by the end, the film would be ruined for you.

Unfortunately, poker is not suited to live coverage. To create any flow and make it interesting, it requires massive editing. That’s because it’s a generally, slow, boring game to watch. For example, the WSOP this year took 8 days and when I say 8 days, I mean eight 10 hour days at minimum. Sometimes the days are 14 hours or more. I’ve heard (or, rather, read) that the final table alone in this year’s WSOP took something like 16 or 18 hours. They started some time late Friday morning with 9 players remaining and it finally finished some time around sun-up on Saturday.

ESPN’s coverage starts this week. Thanks to JamieR, I already know who won. Thanks for that!

I’m just kidding about that. Really. I don’t mind knowing who won. I just didn’t want to follow it daily, as I could have online. If I had done that, I would’ve been able to predict plays and outcomes of particular hands while watching. I would rather watch it unfold.

To answer Jamie’s second question, yes, I’ve thought about entering a competition “like that” about a dozen times a day ever since I started playing seriously and following the game a few years ago. Rather a silly question, don’t you think, mate?

I kid because I love, Jamie.

I have little desire to play in the main event at the WSOP anymore. That saddens me. It was once a dream but now it means little more than money and I don’t think the money’s worth the physical beating required to take the chance at such long odds. I’ll explain what I mean by that in another post later today. I will also begin my detailed analysis of the 2004 WSOP, touch on the 2003 WSOP a bit and in the process, you’ll learn some of the history of the WSOP and why I don’t care about ever winning it now.

A footnote: As Jamie found out last night, any comment on this blog that uses the words “poker,” “gambling,” “casino,” “WSOP,” etc. are automatically flagged for moderation and must be approved by me before they appear. Unfortunately, some of the worst blog spammers on the planet are unscrupulous people promoting fraudulent poker, gambling and casino sites. I’m sure you can imagine that this site attracts more than its fair share. One solution would be if you were all willing to register and login to comment… but I don’t want to require that.

I love movies. I once heard Quentin Tarantino say something like, “I’m looking for reasons to like a movie. Even if your movie is really bad, I’m probably gonna like it.” (That’s a paraphrase from memory, but the essence is accurate.) I agree.

I have a movie review system that consists of:

• I must own this. I’ll watch it many, many times.
• Good flick. I might watch that again someday.
• Not bad.
• Everyone involved with that owes me money. I’ll never get that part of my life back.

Not many movies have ever made that last rating. I just watched one that did. It was an older movie (1978) that I caught on Bravo, a channel I generally don’t like in the first place. It was Heaven Can Wait, starring Warren Beatty. Not only was he the star, he also co-wrote the screenplay, produced and co-directed the movie.

He now owes me money and has made the Kevin Costner list of talentless hacks that need to get a job.

This was a movie so bad that I began composing this blog post in my head while there was still about 45 minutes of the movie left. I only watched the entire movie as an exercise in discipline and so that I could justifiably criticize it without the fear that I had jumped to my harsh judgment unfairly.

Everything about it sucks. It’s a stupid story. It’s metaphysically, logically, and theologically ridiculous. Adding insult to injury, the story was told poorly with bad writing, bad acting and horrible directing.

I’m probably going to have to watch Tombstone or Casablanca again now just to get this horrible taste out of my mouth. I wish I had To Have and Have Not on DVD.

Actually, the evidence is that the parties themselves did get over it. In 2000, there was a much greater attempt to win people’s votes. In 2004, the Dems and Repubs forgot about winning the most votes around the US and went simply for the electoral college count. That was why there was such an insane focus on the “swing” states – those small and medium size states who might go either way. Who cares if the Dems pick up 5 million more votes in Cali? They concentrated on the 5 electoral votes in West Virginia instead. So the Dems running the election got this.

As for why many haven’t given up the 2000 thing, remember that lefties and righties are just people. Gore got more votes by Americans (not an issue of recounts and such, just more votes across the nation), but lost because of the way that our consitutional system is set up. Everyone knows this is how it is set up, so they don’t think it is illegal, it is just as upsetting. You will never convince me that many on the Right would not be as upset if Gore and Bush had switched positions. Imagine 1) Bush gets more national votes, 2) the deciding electoral votes are in a state governed by Gore’s brother, 3) the secretary of state in Florida supervising the election displays markedly partisan behavior from the beginning, so much so that the political capital she gains from it allows her to run for higher offices later, 4) throw in a Court deciding that they shouldn’t count votes anymore, when the state is THAT close, and don’t tell me there would not still be conservative radio talk show hosts still going on about the Gore presidential steal 5 years later.

I gotta hand it to ya, pacatrue, you made quite an objective argument there. I don’t fully agree with it but I sure wish there was someone coming out of a journalism school in America today that could be that balanced.

I only have two real disagreements with you. First:

You will never convince me that many on the Right would not be as upset if Gore and Bush had switched positions.

The “Right” went through about 3 or 4 decades of that and kept their decorum. JFK “stole” the election from Nixon in ‘60 with the help of Chicago’s corrupt Mayor. They didn’t whine, they didn’t cry, they didn’t call for recounts. They moved on. They did it in ’92 and ’96, too. You might recall that Bill Clinton won both of those elections without so much as a “simple majority” of the “popular vote.” (Has he ever won a majority in an election?) Bill Clinton not only never won a “popular vote” for president, his results also don’t measure up to GW’s. If George is not legitimate, ’92-2000 was a major travesty.

I’m not right or left, Republican or Democrat. I don’t like any of them. But it’s clear to me that the Democrats are evil to the core. The Republicans are only mostly evil.

Also, you’re mistaken in your assumption that the electoral college was ignored by the parties until 2004. Bush won, in spite of Gore’s cheating, in 2000 because he focused his campaign efforts on the states “that mattered.” In 2000, Florida decided it. In 2004, Ohio decided it. (Are the DNC/Kerry lawsuits over in Ohio yet?) In both cases there are many states that Gore and Kerry “won” that were very, very close and there were no investigations or recounts. I would posit that Gore and Kerry both lost bigger in the electoral college than was reported, or will be recorded in the history books.

I thank God and the Founders of this country almost daily for the wisdom they showed with the electoral college. I’m not sure of their intentions, but Al Gore and John Kerry both demonstrated its necessity and the danger of a tyranny of the minority. The vast majority of the American people, in this generation, are rejecting the foreign, traitorous “ideas” of the DNC. Thank God that the ignorant masses that congregate in cities don’t have the power to choose a president.

Second:

Gore got more votes by Americans (not an issue of recounts and such, just more votes across the nation), but lost because of the way that our consitutional system is set up.

No. He probably didn’t. At the very least, you don’t know that to be true. You missed completely what I said about the votes not all being counted. In both 2000 and 2004, Bush won so decisively in many states that there was no need to count all the votes. To illustrate, if Bush is ahead by ninety thousand votes in any given state with only eighty thousand left to count, what’s the point in counting the rest? The same is true in states where Gore had a huge lead, even though there weren’t many.

There has not been a presidential election in our lifetime in which all the votes were counted. (Despite the hypocrisy of the Gore camp harping about “making sure every vote is counted” while simultaneously working to exclude tens of thousands of Florida military ballots that were never counted once.) That’s what I meant when I said that there is no such thing as a “popular vote” in a presidential election.

There is no need to count all the ballots because “the people” don’t elect the president, the states do. Each state has the right to make that selection however they choose. It just so happens that the states have all chosen to let the people vote.

Do you know why the states choose the president?

Because democracy is evil, the Founding Fathers were aware of that, they despised democracy and established this country as a Republic.