Why we play
The thin line between passion and compulsion
Worm: You know what always cheers me up, when I'm feeling shitty?
Mike McDermott: No, what's that?
Worm: Rolled up aces over kings. Check-raising stupid tourists and taking huge pots off of them. Playing all-night high-limit Hold'em at the Taj, "where the sand turns to gold." Stacks and towers of checks I can't even see over.
Mike McDermott: Fuck it, let's go.
One of the reasons we love Rounders — if not the greatest poker movie ever, certainly the most quoted — is because it speaks to our obsession with this game.
The scene where Worm persuades Mike to make a trip to Atlantic City inspired my first column at Orlando CityBeat, an entertainment website where I wrote under the pen name, Joe Carswald.
Originally published October 19, 2004.
Decision time again for the Thursday boys. Jump in the car now and we can take a seat at the $2 Hold 'em table at the Seminole Hard Rock Casino in less than two hours.
If we play all night, we can cash out at 7 a.m. and be back in Orlando in time for work the next morning. That sounds good to everyone except Jonny Swede, the only one of our Thursday night poker group without a regular 9-to-5 gig. He wants to squeeze a couple extra hours into this spur-of-the-moment road trip.
We have this same conversation at least once a week. Most nights, we talk about it for an hour and then find some excuse to stay put.
"Finish those beers and I'm in," Beaver1 says, nodding toward a bucket of Miller Lites on ice. "I'll get fired but …"
That's when it occurs to me I have no idea what Beaver does for a living. I'm not even sure why we call him Beaver.
I've known him for seven months and played thousands of hands of poker against him but I don't know anything about him.
Ask me about Beaver and I'll tell you he's a stone-cold bluffer with a crooked, 100-watt grin, but I can't tell you where he grew up, how old he is or what he likes to do besides play cards.
What else is there to talk about, beyond our last bad beat?
All that really matters is that we're poker players. We love the game — play it three, four, five times a week, without fail, except for a week in August when Hurricane Charley2 intervened.
We're part of the new poker nation. Is there anyone who isn't? Poker — specifically No-limit Texas Hold 'em — is the biggest game in town.
I can find a seat in Orlando any night of the week. And if I can't find a game, I can make a few phone calls and have one going in my living room within a half-hour.
Often, I wonder where it ends. Can poker get any bigger? Or will it implode under the crush of its own insane popularity, slipping quietly into pop culture oblivion, along with cigar bars and swing dancing?
A quick glance at the TV listings finds poker seven nights a week on four different channels — six if you count a History Channel documentary and Carmen Electra's Strip Poker Invitational (and who wouldn't?) on pay-per-view. TV poker goes to a whole different level in January when ESPN debuts Tilt,3 a dramatic series about the "sometimes glamorous and sometimes dangerous" professional poker circuit.
Online poker has bloomed into a $2 billion a year industry. Casinos across the country can't expand their card rooms fast enough. Everyone with a baseball cap and pair of sunglasses thinks they're the next Chris Moneymaker, the Tennessee accountant who came out of nowhere to win the 2003 World Series of Poker, becoming an icon to a new generation of players in the process.
How big is Hold 'em? So big that when I suggested a biweekly poker feature to the folks at Orlando CityBeat, de rigueur surfing for the tragically hip, no one laughed.
Most of my non-playing friends have two reactions when they hear I'm writing a feature on poker. First, they're mightily impressed that I found a way to combine my professional endeavors with my biggest vice. Then, almost inevitably, they wonder what I could possibly find to write about each week.
I put on my best poker face and tell them I have a long list of story ideas. Really.
Beaver was the first (of three) from our poker crew to abandon their 9-to-5 gig to chase the poker dream. He moved to Las Vegas in October 2004, a week after I wrote this column. The Orlando Sentinel featured him in the story, “Beaver Leaves It All for Las Vegas.” Unfortunately, the story is behind a paywall. While Beaver never hit it big on the poker circuit, he had a few fleeting seconds of fame — including a spot on the Howard Stern Show — for a book he wrote on how to pick up women. You can still find “Copy, Paste and Bang” on Amazon for $6.66.
Hurricane Charley made landfall in Florida on Aug. 13, 2004, knocking out power for weeks in Orlando. The biggest loss was the destruction of the giant backyard storage shed where we played poker every Thursday night. The shed smelled of spilled beer and was big enough that we could run three or four full tables at a time, which we often did. I learned to play Texas Hold ‘em in that shed and still run a home game today that we call Shed Poker.
Despite high hopes for Tilt, a show created by Brian Koppleman and David Levien, the co-writers of Rounders, and starring Michael Madsen, it was pretty awful. ESPN did not renew it for a second season.