I was disappointed. I like Houston and they have an exciting team. I came into the year skeptical that Dwight could deliver--and I still am skeptical tbh--but he had a solid year and has been working to improve. So, yea, it was tough to see them go down.

I'd love seeing Durant get a ring. I'm very anti-Spurs, though, and I think Miami's the only team that can beat them, so...I may have to root for Lebron

another review of The Noble Hustle, this one in the context of poker nonfiction narratives--Alvarez to McManus to Whitehead. Parallels to McManus's Positively Fifth Street are inevitable, and so far Whitehead isn't faring too well.

http://www.themillions.com/2014/05/f...onfiction.html

I've immediately asked for it as a Father's Day gift. I look forward to your review in the meantime. Will be especially interested in seeing if you like it any better than the recent reviews you cite (especially, while there's still time for me to cancel my request.)

Although it is very close to (and arises out of) competition, I was thinking, after a short online session last night, that one can't ignore the pure addictive quality of an adrenaline rush.

Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen (Vintage, 1994)



“Interrupted at her music: as my life had been, interrupted in the music of being seventeen, as her life had been, snatched and fixed on canvas: one moment made to stand still and to stand for all the other moments, whatever they would be or might have been. What life can recover from that? “(167)

Amazon.com summary: "In 1967, after a session with a psychiatrist she'd never seen before, eighteen-year-old Susanna Kaysen was put in a taxi and sent to McLean Hospital. She spent most of the next two years in the ward for teenage girls in a psychiatric hospital as renowned for its famous clientele—Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, James Taylor, and Ray Charles—as for its progressive methods of treating those who could afford its sanctuary."

What is borderline personality disorder?

Based only on my impressions of how Kaysen present herself in the book, I’d say that it involves the following problems
• Depression and suicidal thoughts. Kaysen tried to kill herself—somewhat halfheartedly—by swallowing fifty aspirin.
• Time mixups, “slow time” vs. “fast time,” velocity vs viscosity
• Promiscuity—she’s involved with her hs English teacher, she had loads of boyfriends. Does part of this involve misandry? There are no positive relationships with men in the book—none at all.

At one point in the book--which contains short, episodic chapters--Kaysen quotes the clinical definition of borderline from the DSM IV. To her, the clinical diagnosis “is accurate but it isn’t profound” (150). It’s a set of guidelines, a generalization. Kaysen responds with a chapter called “my diagnosis” that annotates the clinical definition. Indeed, the whole book can be understood as an effort to offer particulars to a generalized condition. What, after all, does it really mean to have “borderline personality disorder?”

A few of her points.
• Doesn’t “a pervasive pattern of instability of interpersonal relationships, self-image, and affects, and marked impulsivity” sound like adolescence?
• “self-mutliating behavior (wrist-scratching) precisely identified a habit that Kaysen thought was unique to her.
• Her chronic feelings of emptiness or boredom stemmed from that fact that she was living a life based on incapacities—things like not wanting to ski, play tennis, write English papers, or go to college. In other words, it seems that acute family and social pressure—she came from an elite Boston family—contributed to her condition. This is something that Kaysen rarely discusses in detail, perhaps because of her negative impressions of her father and men in general (though she doesn’t talk much about her mom either).

Memorable Chapters/Scenes

Lisa, sociopath, power (“Security Screen,” 82)

How to talk to patients? (“Keepers,” 84)

Plato and the Cave. mental illness is the reality that's hidden beneath some shadow (a scowl, anger, crying) (122)

Repeated Motifs/Objects

“‘You have a pimple,’ said the doctor.” This is the first line of dialogue in the book. The pimple recurs; she calls men a pimple, esp the young boy who sells them icecream.

The daily routine is monotonous, invasive, tedious.

Style and Structure
In what ways is an author’s writing a reflection of her personality? Of “borderline personality disorder?”

o Disjointed. Taking difference cracks at explaining her condition—through dialogue, analogy, visuals (patient charts), art (Vermeer)
o Willing, even demanding, to confront taboo subjects like sex, fecal jokes, suicide, ugliness
o Slipping into a “parallel universe”
o Shifting point of view—the doctor’s vs. the patient’s (39). Arguments over time, details (“do you believe him or me?”) (71).
o Disjointed time, chronology
Velocity vs. viscosity

The patient charts. Does this lend authenticity to the narrative? How does it change the narrative?

Hospital vs. anti-hospital, William Styron vs. Kaysen

Humor and promiscuity, “ice cream” (53)

Are men needed? Is their function always predatory, paternalistic, authoritarian?
Daisy’s father (32)
“oh, who needs them” (67)


Vermeer's Girl Interrupted At her Music



She initially sees the girl's face as a warning—“don’t sleep with your highschool English teacher” (she does).

Sixteen years later she returns, again with a man, her boyfriend. The girl in the painting “had changed a lot in sixteen years. She was no longer urgent. In fact, she was sad

Kaysen recognizes now, in her mid-thirties, that she is the girl. “I see you,” she says. “All you ever think about is yourself,” replies her boyfriend.” You don’t understand anything about art” (167). Who’s right? Is Kaysen able to see more clearly now? Is she “cured” from her previous self? Or, as her boyfriend suggests, will she always retain traces of her illness?

but only in part. The man in the painting, perhaps her music teacher or lover (a dark painting of Cupid hangs in the background), hovers over her and darkens the room. The woman is illuminated by the light from the window—but only in part. “The girl at her music sits in another sort of light,” writes Kaysen, “the fitful, overcast light of life, by which we see ourselves and others only imperfectly, and seldom” (168).

I should get to the book by this weekend/early next week. Just in time for Brooks Haxton's memoir, which comes out on the 13th/14th, I think. when it rains it pours. here's more media:

NPR's Fresh Air interview: http://www.npr.org/2014/05/07/310412...e-noble-hustle

"the republic of anhedonia."
he played with a "Robotron," Ryan Lenaghan, a pro from new orleans.
*many similarities between writing and playing poker. describes vegas as "disneyland for hermits." a kind of "existential malaise" sets in when you've been in Vegas too long
*part of the book has to do with his divorce, growing into a more mature role as a father

a favorable review: Whitehead proves a brilliant sociologist of the poker world. He evokes the physical atmosphere vividly, “the sleek whisper of laminated paper jetting across the table” as the dealer shuffles. But he also conjures the human terrain, laying bare his own psychology and imagining his way into the minds of others. His book affirms what David Foster Wallace’s best nonfiction pieces made so clear: It’s a great idea for magazine editors to turn a gifted novelist loose on an odd American subculture and see what riches are unearthed.

...By the end of the book, you understand the perverse psychology that pulls so many to the game: “Stop. This is insane. Feels great.”
(http://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/book...campaign=sm_tw)

an interview: http://www.mensjournal.com/magazine/...poker-20140506

Why haven't there been more poker novels?
I'd guess it's because there's so much you have to explain to the reader about hands – 'you should be really excited because I have a pair, here!' – to keep them with you. To make sure they understand how it's moving. Plus, it's a very visual game. The hotels, the personalities, it lends itself really well to movies. You know, some guy blinking like mad when he has a good hand, the jingling machines, the glittery lights. The gratifying part about writing it, though, is finding the metaphor. That moment when you land on why poker is just like life, or sadness, or hope. You call upon your novelists toolkit to generate suspense from this pretty abstract experience, and get the reader to see the bigger picture.

What writers, journalists or fiction writers, influenced your approach to The Noble Hustle?
For me, literary inspiration came from books that weren't necessarily about poker but about little obsessions. They served as models, like Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air or Geoff Dyer's Zona. Both cases are authors trying to translate a private enthusiasm to a public audience. Heat is a book written by a former New Yorker editor who left his job to work in one of Mario Batali's kitchens. It deals with learning how to work on a line at a restaurant, big chef personalities, the history of Italian cuisine. It's a great example of a writer explaining a subculture to people who may not understand it in a way that’s relatable and funny.

from Dave Hickey's review. a nice overview of how Alvarez, McManus, and Whitehead represent three phases of the WSOP (and a odd rant against tournament poker, at the end of the essay). what comes next?

There are three decent books about the World Series of Poker. Al Alvarez’s The Biggest Game in Town recounts the first World Series held at Binion’s in Las Vegas in 1981—a ragtag gathering of clever cowboys jousting with one another for bragging rights. James McManus’s Positively Fifth Street captures the breaking wave in 2000, when the poker fad was expanding exponentially, the cowboys were sliding back into the foamy soup, and the bourgeois techies and digital corporations were rising into ascendancy. The book under review here, Colson Whitehead’s The Noble Hustle: Poker, Beef Jerky, and Death (Doubleday, $25), presents the corporate apotheosis of the 2011 World Series of Poker in golden light, as if the wave were on the beach at sunset.


Simple truth: The more you know about your opponents, the less you know about their play, because poker is not self-expression. It’s all hustle and dazzle. Every poker player has a deceptive poker persona and an even more deceptive game.

http://www.bookforum.com/inprint/021_01/12977

Dutch Boyd wrote a book: http://www.pokerlistings.com/dutch-b...preciate-71254

How did the writing process compare to playing poker?
It’s a lot different. It was nice. I felt like I was creating something for a change, rather than taking something away. That’s basically what poker is. One of the problems is that people lose. As a result we’re in an industry that’s all about taking and not creating.

Praise tha lawd, some live pokerz!

Played for the first time in a while. I played ABC more or less and practiced what I think is the golden rule of low-limit poker: don't slowplay strong hands. That requires making hands, which I did.

Hand One

Hero limps A3 utg, donk-reg (200$) raises to 10, three calls including a black dude who's "earned his 10K seat to the Main Event" (225$ish), hero calls and we see a K58 flop (50$).

Checks to World Series who bets 10, hero c/r to 35, folds to WS who says, "I've been check/raised!" and calls.

Turn Q (120$), hero bets 75$, World Series calls.

I like limping ace-high flush draws sometimes because others will limp along with dominated FDs. If I don't bink this turn I'm probably betting something goofy like 15$.

River 4, hero shoves, World Series calls and shows 88.


Hand Two

loose-passive station (500+) limps, hero (covers) raises to 12 with 9T, donk-reg calls, station calls.

Flop J99 (36$), hero bets 20, donk-reg (125$) raises to 50, hero shoves and gets called, mhig.

Etc.

Hand three

Hero raises 56 to 7 UTG

I think this spot depends a lot on table dynamics. In a lot of games I think this should probably just be a fold, this one included. Sizing is also questionable, limping might be ok. Not sure

Nit (175$) calls from cutoff and we see a 698 flop, hero bets 10 nit calls.

Turn A, hero bets 25 nit calls

I'm semibluffing here, maybe he folds a better pair. again, not sure about betting or sizing. This is mainly a bluff although JT/QT/QJ type hands will call.

River 4, check/check, nit wins with AK

Hand four

three limpers to hero on button who limps with 9T, we see a QJJ flop, same nit as above (175$) checks, loose-passive bets 10, hero calls, nit calls.

Turn K (40), checks to hero who bets 35, nit sighs and calls other guy folds.

Nit checks dark, River 8 (120), hero shoves and get snapcalled by KQ.

This could be a dicey spot, but playing against transparent villains makes it easy to get value where it might not otherwise exist.

Will play more in the next day or two and will post some more live hands while I have the chance. Happy Mother's Day!

review of TNH in the Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/09/bo...head.html?_r=0

pretty funny that, after pointing out McManus's Positively Fifth Street as an example of "memorable memoirs about serious poker," the reviewer mentions Double Down, which has almost no poker content.

"...there is something yin-yang about watching a writer being handed a laughably great assignment — “Here’s $10,000, go try to win a couple million with it in Vegas” — and then mope in the vaguest of terms about existential despair for 234 pages."

I'm around 60 pages into the book, will finish in the next couple days.

Interesting review, and some of his reservations make sense -- but I've pretty much decided to read the book. My poker-playing, small-publisher buddy just finished it and emailed me to recommend it for its "Witty energetic writing."

Yes yes, read it! I'm halfway through and will have more to say soon, but the books def worth your time

our friend Steven Barthelme (http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/sh...&postcount=173) wrote a favorable review of The Noble Hustle:

http://www.arcamax.com/entertainment...iews/s-1516929.

"Gambling, truth be told, is one of the dullest pastimes there is to read about. This is not true of playing."

he mentions Jack Richardson's Memoir of a Gambler, which I've never heard of: http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2...-of-a-gambler/

Living in the land of Anhedonia: David Foster Wallace and literary journalism



"Hal isn’t old enough yet to know that this is because numb emptiness isn’t the worst kind of depression. That dead-eyed anhedonia is but a remora on the ventral flank of the true predator, the Great White Shark of pain."
— David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest.

Colson Whitehead's The Noble Hustle follows in a tradition of literary journalism that stretches back to (at least) Tom Wolfe in the mid-20th century. Before I get to Whitehead, I want to say something about one of literary journalism's great practitioners, David Foster Wallace. The pair has much in common: they're both wicked smart--Whitehead, despite lots of self-deprecation, is the recipient of a MacArthur "genius" grant and Wallace is, well, David Foster ****ing Wallace!; they both use techniques common in literary journalism; and they're both citizens of Anhedonia. Wait, what? an-he-do-nia, we learn from the preface to The Noble Hustle, is "the inability to experience pleasure." Most of Wallace's admirers know that he spent much of his own life battling depression, and that this depression had led to his suicide: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2...urrentPage=all. And though he doesn't go into details, Whitehead--or at least his narrative persona--has been a longtime Anhedonian: "Once you go bleak, you never go back."

Infinite Jesting

Let's be clear: Wallace is above all a novelist. If you like fat messy books that try to say something about everything, look no further than Infinite Jest. Wallace's panoramic portrait of American culture is a marvel of linguistic improvisation, delighting in spoken language with its playfulness, its happy mistakes, its revealing quirks and oddities, its fascination with the American idiom:

"Alls I know is I put a Hunt’s Pudding Cup in the resident fridge like I’m supposed to at 1300 and da-da-da and at 1430 I come down all primed for pudding that I paid for myself and it’s not there and McDade comes on all concerned and offers to help me look for it and da-da, except if you look I look and here’s the son of a whore got this big thing of pudding on his chin."

The whole novel is like this: perfectly paced and placed like a volley from one of the prodigies at Enfield Tennis Academy, the Boston school where much of the novel’s action happens. But Wallace’s most common stroke—easy to miss amidst the overabundant prose, fractured narrative, and 300 pages of endnotes—is the simple, descriptive touch of workaday realism: “the sun still pale and seeming to flutter as if poorly wired”; “the ball’s high heavy arc that of a loogy spat for distance”; “his hands were tiny and pink and hairless and butt-soft, delicate as shells."

Throughout the novel, American culture appears as a spiral of obsessions and compulsions, a labyrinthine system from which there is no escape. Objects have become commercially overdetermined; everything's for sale. Dates of the year are routinely sold to the highest bidder. In the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment, the “Libertine Statue” wears “some type of enormous adult-design diaper.” Nothing, not even the Statue of Liberty, is immune from a good sales pitch.

Clever commercials, Hunt’s Pudding snacks, colossal diapers—there’s something funny about all this, sure, but Wallace also insists that there is something deeply sad about it. Advertising and entertainment—especially television—are at the center of the problem. Television pretends to create human contact but actually exacerbates our loneliness; like other malignant addictions, according to Wallace, “it offers itself as a relief from the very problems it causes.” The result, Wallace lamented , is an attitude of radical skepticism and hip ennui, producing a culture in which we require of our art an ironic distance from deep convictions, desperate questions, or a sincere attempt to bond with the reader.



It’s no surprise, then, that Wallace turned to “low” or pop culture to understand both himself and American culture. His forays into nonfiction—A Suddenly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, Consider the Lobster, and Both Flesh and Not—cover a ridiculously wide range of topics: a cruise ship “vacation” (notice the scare quotes), tennis, the Maine Lobster Festival, the yearly porn convention (held in Vegas), political talk radio, 9/11, and grammar. If only Wallace had entered a poker tournament!

In these and many other topics--those are just the ones that I remember, there are plenty of others--Wallace uses techniques that are common to literary journalism: “immersion reporting, accuracy, symbolic representation, complicated structures and voice." http://www.ialjs.org/?page_id=34. Wallace's nonfiction voice is utterly unique; I've never read anything like it, and I instantly recognize it when I see it.

For anyone interested in Wallace, here's a few good place to start: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/20/sp...pagewanted=all


***

I never got around to reviewing Positively Fifth Street, which offers a bridge of sorts between DFW, who never wrote about poker, and Whitehead's account of his 2011 stint at the WSOP Main. In the next post I'll point out how a few of the techniques mentioned above--immersion reporting, voice, complicated structures--play out in McManus's poker classic. Then on to Hustle.

I posted about Richardson Memoir in the book thread a while back. Here's what I wrote (slightly edited):

thanks, Russell. sounds like it's worth a read.

More Live Hands


Hand One

Villain (500+): 35ish white local, very splashy and limp/cally, raised in position, showed a few bluffs, won a huge pot with a set.

Hero (400): nitty. basically watching villain go at it with two loose donks

Hero raises KQo to 10, the two loose donks call (they cover), villain raises to 40 from BB, hero...

I think you can fold/call/raise here, but I don't like any option. Say you have AK here. Is 4bet/fold best?



Hand Two

hero (400) raises AKo to 15, same villain above limp/calls

flop K7J (30), villain leads 20, hero calls.
turn 3 (70) villain bets 50, hero calls.
river 3 (170), villain bets 100, hero...

Anyone raising this river or is a call best?

Seems like a fine call given double donk.

What are the blind sizes? - so I can work on stack depth pre re your spolier q.

Nice dfw+ review.

Hand 1 : I like a 4 bet with the KQo. We have 2 blockers and I believe it is time to take back some initiative (in this hand and for metagame) instead of losing some overall equity by letting villain freely go at the 2 other fishes. What is the minimum hand you 4 bet here? Do you have a 4 bet-bluff range? (I think KQo fits perfectly a potential 4bet-bluff range, especially given metagame).

Hand 2 : It really depends on villain's sizing/tendencies. How often does he call or find a fold on a river raise... In a vacuum, I like a raise, but only against certain foes and with the double intention of balancing out my double floats that raise-bluff river (like AQ or Q10).

This is a great run out for your hand as KJ and J7 just got counterfeited. I'm raising based on villain description as there are a lot of hands in his range that you beat and I think he calls with.

Was this in Lake Charles or are you playing in some of the Houston underground games?

J7 got counterfeited, but KJ only gets countered when holding AA, not AK.

Oops, good point. I still probably raise villain as described but I value own myself all the time

in hand two, villain covers. So on the flop we're at an SPR > 10


If I had a 4bet-bluff range, I agree that this hand would be a good candidate.
With stacks at 400$, I could raise/fold to...90-100? The problem is (a) I hadn't been playing many hands, so villain is less likely to squeeze, especially from the bb; (b) villain had iso-raised limpers in position but hadn't squeezed OOP; and (c) I hadn't played live in a long time--in months--and was actively trying to avoid sticky spots that a 4bet would create.

I rarely minraise, but this might be a good spot for it.

Nola. I played some Houston games back in the day but they've all been pretty meh--huge rake and lots of shadiness.

Do you find any states easier then others?

Yes, although easiest is prob different from most profitable. I prefer games with deep buyin allowances, which encourage creativity and allow you to really exploit villain mistakes. A lot of casinos on the gulf coast are great for this reason.

As for easiest, la is supposed to be pretty soft. Vegas is pretty tough.

More Live Hands

Hand One

Hero (300$): just sat down
Villain (250$): looks stationy, called two big bets with Q8 on AAQx board.

straddle, one limp, hero raises to 20 with KQ, five callers.

Flop: KJ4(120$), hero bets seventy, folds to villain who shoves pretty quickly, folds to hero who must call 150 more. Hero...



Hand Two


Hero (400$) raises to 7 with 89, nit (200$) calls in MP, two others calls in LP

Flop 65Q (28), hero bets 20, nit calls others fold

turn 4 (68), hero bets 20, villain calls

Questionable sizing on the turn, not sure what's best

river 7, hero checks, villain checks.

I think I prefer betting in hindsight, nits prefer stationing over bluffing.

Hand Three()

Hero (400): somewhat LAGGy, I had been opening a decent amount
Villain (325): tight, ABC.

limp, villain raises to 12, hero calls on the button with JJ, limper folds

Flop QJ4 (30$), checks through

Turn 9, villain bets 20, hero calls

River J, villain bets 45, hero shoves, villain calls and loses with QQ

the whole hand was obv a cooler for one of us, but villain's flop check was suspicious. His sizing and demeanor on the river suggested a big hand--most likely 99, possibly QQ, so I decided to go big

***

ran very well and played fine given that I hadn't played live poker in a long time.

book review of The Noble Hustle tomorrow.