Poker: Bets, Bluffs and Bad Beats

During the Cold War, few political commentators could resist pointing out that the defining game of the Russian national character was chess, while Americans were poker players. Whether or not this had any real bearing whatsoever on geopolitics, it was a neato thing to say.

In fact, it remains a neato thing to say, and there are few who wouldn`t nod sagely if, during a discussion about Saddam Hussein, you were to note that Americans are poker players, whereas Iraqis grow up with backgammon.

Poker, like baseball and room-temperature-I.Q. quiz shows, is a deeply American game. It must, therefore, have inspired any number of terrific lines from our great writers and wits. Books, movies and folk literature are surely loaded with them.

But a casual, then an increasingly frantic search through no fewer than seven reference books - "Bartlett`s" included - yielded but one decent quote, from Tennessee Williams in "A Streetcar Named Desire": "Poker shouldn`t be played in a house with women."

That was in 1947 - and in Stanley Kowalski`s dingy apartment, it was a pretty good rule of thumb. (I think it was Mitch who was concerned for the women; Stanley had a line about nothing belonging on a poker table except, as I recall it, cards, money and whiskey.) These days, of course, women compete furiously and successfully in the top poker games in the world.

What to do, however, about that dearth of quotes?

One suggestion: Pull a few dozen lines A. Alvarez includes in "Poker: Bets, Bluffs and Bad Beats" (Chronicle Books). Here are but a few:

"A good gambler can get money out of a lamp post. In poker, money is power." - Titanic Thompson

"Never try to bluff a mug." (An old poker maxim, Alvarez informs us.) "Money means nothing. If you really cared about it you wouldn`t be able to sit down at a poker table and bluff off fifty thousand dollars." - High-stakes player Chip Reese.

"Not the way I play it." - W.C. Fields, in "My Little Chickadee," when asked if poker is a game of chance.

Without money on the table you simply can`t play the game, because poker isn`t really about playing cards. There is, in fact, very little playing of the cards in a poker game. With the exception of one exchange of cards in draw poker, there isn`t much a player can do to manipulate them to his advantage, aside from making, time and again, the crucial decision of whether or not to continue to throw simoleons into the pot. What he does instead is manipulate his opponents. He plays them. He plays them by frightening and/or suckering them out of their money.

Novelist and critic Alvarez has written about poker before, most notably in his classic "The Biggest Game in Town," about the World Series of Poker. There are World Series stories here, as well, but Alvarez also provides a brief history of the game, from its modern beginnings aboard - yes, indeed - Mississippi riverboats, through the development of draw poker, the introduction of wild cards (which, for some of us, marks the beginning of the decline of Western civilization) and preposterous variations such as Anaconda (an indication that the decline is irreversible). Probably for no other reason than he`s a classy guy, Alvarez doesn`t even mention the existence of Indian Head poker (evidence that the obliteration of Western civilization would probably be for the best).

And, for Steve McQueen aficionados who`ve been bothered by this for years, Alvarez recaps the experts` assessment of the last hand in "The Cincinnati Kid." It was, they conclude, a cheat - not a crooked deal, but a mathematical near-impossibility that, for true poker players, soured the ending of the movie. (The Kid bet all wrong, too.)

Engagingly written, crammed with famous scams, gutsy bluffs and celebrated characters, and slickly illustrated with movie stills and historical photos, "Poker" ends with a line from casino owner Benny Binion: "Trust everyone but always cut the cards." How can the "Bartlett`s" crowd have overlooked that?

(c) Copley News Service

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Author: Arthur Salm