Hunting Fish: A Cross-Country Search for America's Worst Poker Players by Jay Greenspan (St. Martin's Griffon, 2007)
Stumbled across this book a few weeks ago. After skimming the preface and Amazon reviews, I decided that it was a must-read. Guy drives around the country, plays poker, writes about it. Sound familiar?
Manufacturing a Plot: From Foxwoods to the Commerce
Greenspan, a poker-playing writer--or is he a poker player who writes?--sprinkles in (1) history and descriptions about his poker road trip, which takes him from the East Coast to the South, Texas, the Southwest, and eventually California; (2) ruminations on the poker lifestyle, including table etiquette, taxation, the language of poker, the difference between tourneys and cash, tilt, the loneliness of the road, and the ethics of "hunting fish"; and (3) a personal narrative that includes his desire to make it as a writer, family drama, and, most significantly, life with his new fiance, Marisa.
One of the difficulties of writing about poker—especially cash games—is that it lacks narrative arc. The game goes round and round, pots are won and lost, and you leave when you leave. No surprise that the best poker nonfiction tends to recount a major tournament, which offers a perfectly packaged plot in the form of a dramatic final table and hefty payouts. But Greenspan isn't buying into the Main Event; he's seeking out backwoods games with strangers. His three-month goal is to build his bankroll so that, when he arrives at the Commerce in LA, he can hop in the 10/20 games. “To find out if I could beat the guys who regularly played for high stakes, I'd need a deep bankroll—at least 35,000.” He needs to boost his current roll by 15K—and manufacture a plot in the process.
Crafting a Poker Persona
From his first session at Foxwoods, Greenspan paints himself as one of the "good" players at the table (4). He's a fish hunter. Once, at Foxwoods, Greenspan successfully bluffed Chris Moneymaker (he showed, of course). Once, in Vegas, “after a couple of memorable encounters against Erik Seidel, he asked me, 'Are you a pro?'” (41). Cool story bro.
The whole narrative is written from Greenspan's perspective, so we get a detailed sense of his thought process--which is to say of strategy, of how to play (or misplay) hands. Without getting into details, my sense is that, when it comes to poker prowess, Greenspan is like many of us: he thinks he's better than he is.
I don't care much care if Greenspan's "good" or not--whatever that means. I'm more concerned with the ways he crafts his persona, which, in almost every book of poker nonfiction, involves a tension or trade-off between the writer-as-player or the player-as-writer. Which is it?
Jim McManus, Colson Whitehead, and (if memory serves) Anthony Holdem adopt what I'd call the "aw-shucks" approach. They poke fun at themselves as poker players, acknowledging and even reveling in their amateur status (Holden's subtitle to
Big Deal, One Year as a Professional Poker Player, is at least partly tongue-in-cheek).
Al Alvarez more or less skirts the issue entirely, preferring to cast himself as a curious outsider whose poker skills are irrelevant to his task of portraying Vegas highrollers.
And then there are narratives written by established pros: Broke by Brandon comes to mind, as do a ton of autobiographical strategy books that I haven't read (take your pick: Gus Hansen, Negreanu, Helmuth, Matusow, Barry G).
Greenspan's attempt to talk intelligently about poker strategy, and his tendency to see himself as a excellent player, hammers home a key point about poker narrative: it's very hard to accurately assess your own talent, or to "see" yourself through the eyes of your opponents (or readers).
The Poker Lifestyle
Greenspan is clearly uneasy with the poker-playing profession. On the one hand, his concern is ethical. More than once he'd asked himself: "Is this a way for a decent persona to make a living? Or...Can someone who continually exploits the comparative ignorance and stupidity of those around him be considered a good person?" (182).
On the other hand, it's pragmatic. Can life as a poker pro, with all its instability, prevent a stable future with his fiance? Early in the book, Greenspan struggles to reconcile competing goals: padding his roll and buying Marisa a ring. “Before my cold stretch started,” he writes, “I could have peeled twenty to forty hundred-dollar bills off my roll and handed them to a Hasid on Forty-seventh Street, who would ensure that I was getting the best deal since the Louisiana Purchase, but that wasn't an option anymore. I needed that money for my bankroll” (7). The dilemma resembles a tamer version of Dostoevsky's disastrous gambling sprees, which forced him to repeatedly pawn his wife's clothing (and his own).
The best part of
Hunting Fish, imo, is Greenspan's honesty in writing about himself. I just wish the rest of the book, especially the poker content and the plot, was as admirable, but it just isn't. After two hundred pages of a fairly repetitive formula--drive somewhere, play poker, talk to people, drive somewhere--Greenspan arrives at the Commerce with enough money to hop into the $10/20. With more money and confidence than when he started, he's ready to answer the two questions that, in his opinion, any aspiring poker pro must ask:
1: Can I beat the games? (219). "Clearly the answer was yes," Greenspan writes. "I have the intelligence and spirit that will allow me to profit for years to come...I doubt I'd ever be a millionaire, but I'm confident that I could put together a tidy six-figure income for a long time" (221).
2: Do I really want to do this fifty hours a week for decades? "Here the answer was equally clear," Greenspan continues. "No. After only three months of intensive daily play I was tired and frustrated, my mood continually sour. I wanted to be home with Marisa...I wanted to be in New York. I wanted a family. I wanted a life that was a little closer to normal" (221). And so, with the second, tougher question answered so clearly, Greenspan leaves the poker life behind.
Notes and Questions
the poker world as an inverted pyramid--fish at the top, pros on the botton (201-2)
Dad's email about poker (194)
Cliffs
Jay Greenspan's
Hunting Fish is a clear step below other, more familiar poker narratives by Jim McManus and Al Alvarez. But it does offer a valuable glimpse into the poker lifestyle; think of it as a companion to David Hayano's ethnography
Poker Faces. Greenspan writes honestly--and, at times, eloquently--about the live grind.
Last edited by bob_124; 12-19-2014 at 04:15 PM.