thanks for the HU! I just requested his first collection from the library and will report back when I get to it. A lot of reading ahead for me this month which is exciting. Speaking of, Dario Diefebi's novel Paradise, Nevada is coming out this month and has received some solid blurbs, although this NYT review is anything but praiseworthy

Poker Faces in the Crowd: Erving Goffman


In this month's 2p2 Mag I wrote about how America's GOAT sociologist Erving Goffman can help us better understand why we take voluntary risks.

Lol'ed at the part of eventually reaching status of having other regs know your routine better than yourself. Most regs in my room know I leave at 9:30pm, and some will even get me a rack unrequested around that time or look at their watch and give me a "aren't you late?" look. I keep telling myself that is a comment on my game play and not my personality.

I also wonder how much our pool will change once our casino eventually reopens. I don't hang out with anyone outside the room so I don't who the casualties have been, but there has no doubt been some.

GmynameisGGithasbeen400dayssinceI'veplayedahandofp okerG

Another solid writeup Ben Am really looking forward for that novel of yours where you will spend an extensive amount of time describing the vide, atmosphere, personalities etc. of poker rooms to devour every word of it Any such book coming to completion?

I believe this falls into the "hate the game not the playa" category!
ditto. Word around here is that action has been popping off with lots of fresh faces. A big factor seems to be the shorthandedness of the games. Harrahdise started 5 handed, was at 6 for a while, and just went to 7. Apparently just bumping from 6 to 7-handed attracted a lot of regs back to the room.

Thanks for the good wishes Dubn. I'd say I'm about a year away from a full draft of the book (nonfiction, not a novel). In the meantime, you might wanna check out Mason Malmuth's upcoming book Cardrooms:Everything Bad. The book is targeted at managers who want to create a "better," ie more profitable/more enjoyable cardroom environment. There's definitely some overlap with my own interests, although I'm ultimately more concerned with people and stories than, say, juicy promos and optimal buy-in structures.

How's your own writing going?
I've been fully vaccinated for twoish weeks. To my knowledge never had covid, but who knows. Glad to hear you're fully recovered and pondering recreating options. I plan to hit the road for some road-tripping/camping in the near future. Like you, I have little interest in masked-up pokering, but I do feel ready to play just to see how it feels. Maybe as early as this weekend. We'll see. But yeah, the only indoor activities I'm keen to pursue is the gym and the classroom (whenever we're allowed back)
This is a really good point. Her strategy feel like a tradeoff to me: more immediate resonance but less timelessness.

Not yet. Thanks for the HU about Pokerlogist's review, I'll check it out after I watch. My Criterion sub runs out in two weeks (as a rule I subscribe to one streaming service at a time and hop around) and here's what I plan to watch before it runs out:

Ozu
Floating Weeds
Good Morning
Dragnet Girl
Kurosawa
Dersou Ouzoula
Stray dog
Ikiru
The Idiot

funny you mention this, I just rewatched Tokyo Story with a friend
and noticed the prominence of the watch theme (the trains seemed obvious to me even on the first watch). I can see how Ozu rewards rewatching.

Thanks for all the cool links! I'll report back in your thread after I get to them + the movies above.

Just read this and loved it. Can’t be coincidental that such an influential social theorist had “skin” in the gambling world. The relationship between action and community does seem to be the key to understanding poker culture and its characters. Is Nick the Greek the ultimate archetype of this world? Our poker Odysseus?

hey, at least we have 2p2!

Glad it resonated for you, Dr. Pretty cool about Goffman eh? His love of gambling appears to be well-known among specialists (Goffmanians? Goffmanites? Goffers?) but that's about it. Reading his theory of "action" felt like an AHA moment to me. It's especially relevant these days imo as more and more Americans are engaging in voluntary risk-taking during a pandemic—seems counterintuitive, but somehow it isn't. As for Nick the Greek, I don't know much about him beyond a few myth-drenched anecdotes. If you or anyone else has some tidbits about his life, I'd love to hear them. I also want to watch the ESPN 30 for 30 on Jimmy the Greek.

Hope things are good in Kangarooland

Lost in Thought: The psychological risks of meditation

Wanted a poast on this long essay in Harper's because I know some of yall are into meditation/silent retreats. (FWIW I've been a meditation fish for a few months now and am really enjoying it)

I don't know enough about this subject to have an informed opinion. But I always appreciate stuff that prompts us to consider hidden or unexplored gaps in knowledge, and hopefully pieces like this Kortava's will spark a conversation.

I've been interested in this topic. There's a conversation on the Waking Up app, The Dark Side of Meditation, that I'll probably listen to soon that I'm pretty sure touches on all of this stuff.

So, what's the first Ozu I should watch?

thanks again for your recs on the app. I listened to David Whyte's Identity and Conversation yesterday and really enjoyed it.
paging Shuffle

My own newb opinion would be to go straight for Tokyo Story. Alternatively, you could "warm up" with Late Spring and then watch TS...that way you'd meet Chishū Ryū and Setsuko Hara (who appear in both films) and get a sense of the metaconvos that begin to develop across Ozu's oeuvre. A lighter film that I loved is Late Autumn (Hara is in that one too, and it can be seen as a reimagining of Late Spring).

Cliffs: you can't go wrong!

Thank you for sharing this essay, which I quite enjoyed. I've read Goffman, but I never knew about this side of him.

However, as someone who crossed from the US to Canada at 26, I can’t resist pointing out that although you (quite reasonably) call Erving Goffman "the most influential American sociologist of the 20th century,” Goffman was born in Alberta, grew up in Manitoba and attended U of Manitoba, then worked for a while in Ottawa, and finished his BA at UToronto before beginning his career in the US.

There's an interesting parallel with McLuhan, who was also born in Alberta (11 years earlier), and also raised in Manitoba. Before going abroad, to Cambridge, McLuhan also studied at the University of Manitoba and he taught for a while in the US before winding up at Toronto. McLuhan thought that crossing borders between cultures added to one's perspective and ability to see the larger patterns that the permanent resident missed, and he particularly thought that growing up in Canada--with its sense of always being on the periphery, with the real "action" taking place elsewhere (most particularly to the South)--gave one an ironic detachment that was an aid to insight.

Hi Russell, thanks for reading and for pointing out an important part of Goffman's identity that I didn't acknowledge in the piece. To clear up future ambiguity, I'd like offer the following proposal: we Americans trade Goffman back to Canada in exchange for Neil Young and Steve Nash (and you get to keep Deenegs, free of charge!). So the new starting lineup would be:

Merica
bob_124
Neil Young
Steve Nash

Canada
RussellinToronto
Erving Goffman
Deenegs

Deal?

I had to google McLuhan. If my entire output had to be boiled down to a pithy catchprase, "the medium is the message" isn't half bad. I can't help but think of Shreve, the perennial Canadian outsider in The Sound and the Fury, always offering his ironic detached observations to poor Quentin.

The masks aren't that big of a deal, though we should be able to show our vaccine cards and get a stamp to be exempt. The killer is the big plexiglass penalty boxes. Pretty impossible to talk to players not directly next to you or see anyone across the table at all.

I'm not sure what game we're playing with those lineups, but I would want to be sure to retain Leonard Cohen for the Canadian side. For balance, you can keep Dylan as well as have Young ...

And then sweeping up the jokers that he left behind
You find he did not leave you very much, not even laughter
Like any dealer he was watching for the card
That is so high and wild
He'll never need to deal another (The Stranger Song)

If you are the dealer. Let me out of the game.
If you are the healer. I'm broken and lame. (You Want It Darker)

The ponies run, the girls are young
The odds are there to beat
You win a while and then it's done
Your little winning streak
And summoned now to deal
With your invincible defeat
You live your life as if it's real
A thousand kisses deep (A Thousand Kisses Deep)

That you had to google McLuhan says a lot about the transient nature of fame ...

Here's a passage of interest from from the chapter on games in his most successful book, Understanding Media)

You'd have to pry Neil Young out of our cold dead hands, imo.

GcluelessfantasyGMnoobG

Agree. He can have Celine Dion and Justin Bieber though

Cohen's lyrics, like Dylan's, are stellar, but I'll take Neil over both.
don't make me drive up to Manitoba!
sez more about my ignorance, but yes, lol @ fame.
I didn't have to google Cervantes but I haven't read anything by him. Something about a donkey? a don? quixoticism?
you telling me you don't want this?

Return to LOLive Poker

On Monday afternoon, as a week of crappy weather finally disappeared into the cloudless blue sky, I drove east on I-10. You can get from Nola to Biloxi in 1.5 hours, but I like to take the scenic route—Highway Route 90, along the coast. There are stilted houses, bridges slicing through bayous, hazy structures on the water that look like those 4-legged imperial walkers from Star Wars, and one of my favorite tiny towns, Bay St. Louis, where I stopped to run along the beach and read outside at Mockingbird Cafe. I was 100 pages into a novel about a hip jaded NYC-based millennial who’s poised to dump her hip jaded boyfriend (who’s also, she learns after snooping through his phone, a conspiracy theorist) but then he dies. The narrator offers witty depressing jags about politics and dating and social media and all the rest, so that when I read paragraphs like this
I was tempted to opt out from contemporary reality. Maybe I’d relocate to a shack in Maine and grow a beard and a garden, a beard-garden. But no, at least not yet. For now I preferred to, among other things, skip town on a Monday afternoon without telling anyone and hopscotch across the Gulf Coast and play LOLive poker for the first time in fourteen months.

I wasn’t ready to go back to Harrahdise yet. I knew too many of the regulars, and what I wanted wasn’t so much poker socializing than poker-playing. I wanted to lose myself in the cards. Here at the Beau, my poker home away from home, I’d be one masked-up MAWG among many, anonymous and irrelevant.

My fantasy of incognito pokering lasted about five seconds. Standing in front of me at the registration podium was a jittery redhead I recognized from Nola. She looked, as usual, fashionable-sporty in a short skirt and black Converse sneaks that accentuated her pale legs. A big designer purse was slung over her arm, and she clutched a plastic cup of red wine as she chatted exuberantly with the gray-haired lady beside her. The floorman, a friendly guy who looked like a slender Russell Westbrook, sent her to the Big O game that was running in the lower section; three hold 'em games were running in the top section, and the other ten or so tables were empty. I took a seat on a comfy couch and wondered how long I would have to wait.


Ten minutes, it turned out. Not bad. I joined one of the $1/3 NL tables, Seat 3, and quickly realized that not much had changed. I could still chip-shuffle. I more or less remembered the hand rankings. The only major differences were the plexiglass penalty boxes and the masks.
Our table was fairly social despite the penalty boxes. I did have trouble distinguishing between two players' stacks, after one guy positioned his along his right wall, beside another guy's stack on his left wall. The masks weren't bad for me either, although mine made me thirstier than I otherwise would have been.

After snapping a few photos at the sesh’s beginning, I turned off my phone and implemented OffGridMode for what would be the next 18 hours. This was a way to focus on the game, to insulate myself completely from the incessantly jabbering online world—no texts, no emails, no social media—except, of course, for the 10 flatscreens silently blaring NBA and MLB and NFL around the clock.

I’ll spare you hand histories and player profiles. Suffice to say there was an OMC who frowned whenever someone raised and another OMC who complained whenever an empty seat wasn’t immediately filled—the games were 7-max, match the big stack, straddle from anywhere—and a degen multitabling PokerBROS on his phone and a gray-haired woman who couldn’t fathom how she could get so unlucky (statistically speaking) over such a long span of time (two hours). My opponents were universally terrible at poker whereas I was merely bad, and so I liked my chances to win.

After an hour or two the redhead left the Big O game and joined ours in Seat 7, beside the dealer. I wasn’t sure what to expect from her, strategy-wise. She was a Limitland reg, and my default assumption of limit hold ‘em players was that they were passive calling stations. For this reason plus my probably sexist assumption that she was a woman (more passivity), I decided to fold red KJ after she donked into three of us on a KT6 flop and jammed the 2 turn for a PSB. A few hands later I raised Q8 into her big blind and binked a AT2 flop. She checked, I bet, and she turbo-checkraised a small pile of greens and reds. Ah, so that's how it is: one of us was getting coolered or she was a spazzy gamb(o)ler. I decided to gii on the flop and she eagerly called off the rest, showing Kc4h for a bare flush draw, and I had my answer.

I held, of course, because I’m a sunrunner.

Without the protection of a limited betting structure, the redhead proved to be one of those ramming-jamming shortstackers who tries to turn a toothpick into a lumberyard. Over the course of the night she rebought for a hundo about 10-15 times; at some point I stopped counting. The same routine happened over and over. After busting a bullet or two she’d tell the dealer to hold the seat, scurry off to the ATM, and right at the 15-minute cutoff when they were about to lock up a seat she’d roll in at the last minute, her pale legs jouncing in those Converse sneakers, cheerily sipping red wine and sliding another hundo onto the baize. After her second reload she table-changed to my direct left, and in addition to having stacked her there was the possible awkwardness of deciding whether to acknowledge our long-term relationship as almost-acquaintances. But there was no decision to be made, because right away she smiled tipsily and asked about my book—how it was going, when I’d be done. “I know some people you know,” she said by way of explanation, and I nodded guiltily. Even after a fourteen-month sabbatical, I couldn’t escape my reputation as Harrahdise’s resident scribbler. I’d had plenty of these kinds of conversations in the past with other almost-acquaintances (“when are you gonna interview so-and-so?”) but what really threw me for a loop, what proved that our gossip mill was disconcertingly vast, was when she asked about my bike accident. I thought of essays I’d written, stories I’d told, and wondered how she had come into this little scrap of info and which accident she was referring to (the one when I was rear-ended by a truck on St. Charles Avenue? or when I tumbled head-first over the handlebars in middle-of-nowhere Georgia? or when I was sideswiped by a black Benz on Decatur Street?)

She left to reload before I had the chance to ask. When she got back, we started chatting about people we knew. Life at Harrahdise was the same story, different day, she told me. She was sure that she’d gotten Covid from the cardroom. She told me about Moe Blue relentlessly asking for her number, living downtown, how a French Quarter eccentric I’d recently discovered—Jude Acers, the chess king of Decatur Street, had taught her how to play chess. Poking her head around the penalty box and lowering her flowery mask—I didn't mind, I was fully vaccinated and ****ing invincible—she asked if I’d heard about Any-Two Lou. I nodded sadly. And what about Old Ewald? I'd heard about him, too. And what about Little E, Old Ewald’s seventy-year-old son? I hadn’t heard about him. I thought of Mike G, Little E’s big brother who'd sent me a pamphlet filled with stories about his family. Losing your dad and your little brother in the span of a few months—that had to be tough.

“We’ve all known each other for such a long time!” the redhead said sadly. I guessed that the she was in her late thirties, although she could have been five years younger or older. That was one of the strange things about cardrooms—people don't seem to notice, or care, about age as much.

By the end of the night I’d been nitrolled and slowrolled but never intentionally insulted, and so I considered the sesh a win (despite booking a loss). Around two, after the redhead busted again (was she coming back? I didn't care) I racked up. It was late enough that only the main cage was open, and there was a short line of folks who were signing up for M Life cards and cashing in sports bets. A burly tourist wearing a Bane mask—one of the slowrollers—got in line behind me and gave me a soldierly nod. I’d gotten him pretty good in one hand, he said. I replied that he had gotten me pretty good in one hand.

“I did!” he admitted, and we shared a laugh.

Beard-garden ftw, methinks?

Damn, should have actually did the last-longer bet. Congrats on getting back into the game!

Ghello,mynameisGG,andithasbeen1year1month14dayssin ceI'velastplayedahandofpokerG

Trying to think of a hipster novel that has stood the test of time. Also trying to think of a poker-hipster novel hybrid. Would seem possible, no? Finally, what grade of poker celebrity are you these days, Ben? It appears that your status has matured upward

Ben, that socia-media quote/critic was GOAT (and I actually used it as a FB post ), thx.

Have you checked out The Ringer's Gamblers podcast mini-series??? Some solid stuff in there, especially the pool hustle stories.

thanks for the good wishes! over/under on 2 years before your Great Return?
The first novel that comes to mind is Infinite Jest. More of a bro bible than a hipster manifesto, but there's some overlap, yes?

on the spectrum of poker infamy, I'd estimate that I'm somewhere between "irrelevant" and "extremely irrelevant." I do have my kick-ass puppy-filled PGC going for me, though!

Glad you enjoyed, Dubn, the book is Lauren Oyler's Fake Accounts.

Yes, I've listened to all of Gamblers. Really enjoyed them. I think my favorite was the Michael Sall/gin rummy episode along with the pool hustler (can't remember his name) who faced Viffer in some extremely degen pool battles.

April Recap


Bob's Books [15/52]

First up this month was Mary Miller's Biloxi, a novel about a divorced retired white guy who gets a new dog. I had heard Miller read a few years ago in Oxford Missippi and was impressed with her ability to make the ordinariness of everyday life compelling. Her style might be an acquired taste but anyone who enjoys the Raymond Carver tradition of "dirty realism" would enjoy her stuff, I think.

Next up was Lydia Millet's The Children's Bible, a kind of environmental parable in which a pack of Gen Zers endure hurricanes and societal collapse following the the inability of their drunken apathetic parents to prevent, or even to attempt to prevent, impending climate catastrophe. Maybe this description suggests a novel that's overly preachy, but I thought that it was funny/clever/accessible without getting heavy-handed. Mainly this is because of Millet's ability to create a likeable teenage narrator who speaks for the younger generation.

I agree with this description from a review that I read somewhere about Fake Accounts: "The writing is brilliant, bringing to life a narrator with a penetrating gaze and a mordant, misanthropic voice." Like her author, Lauren Oyler, the narrator is a young, savvy, self-aware stylist who plays with form. A justification for one chapter's fashionable choppy structure, she says,

The novel might be worth reading for its sentences and its social commentary, but I was a little disappointed that nothing much happens. I realize that this is part of the point—one of the section headings is called Middle (Nothing Happens)—but a bit of action would have been nice; the somewhat predictable twist at the end of the book wasn't enough for me. Overall, still glad I read it.

Finally, I read David Lawson's Paul Morphy: Pride and Sorrow of Chess, the definitive biography of one of chess's all-time greats. It's extremely thorough and I learned a lot. More on Morphy in my next poast. But first, take a look at this pampered pup!

Poker Faces in the Crowd: Paul Morphy

This month I wrote about Paul Morphy, one of the most compelling figures in the history of chess and a Louisianan to boot.

May Recap


GG Covid! Street music + effyou fireworks to celebrate the city's decision to abolish 1am last call.

For anyone interested in a good poker doc, I just watched To Be Determined and enjoyed it. Leaving aside the fact that it's more or less Solve4Why advertainment, the production value is stellar, the main character is a likeable everyman (longtime lowstakes Jerzee grinder), and a solid list of pros/industry vets provide macro context. I especially liked how the doc explains the evolution of poker from the Moneymaker Era to today.

I also read a Vegas-based novel that's recently gotten a lot of attention.

Bob's Books [21/52]

Dario Diofebi's Paradise, Nevada is an overwrought behemoth of a book, 500 pages of American greed and glitz. I had never heard of Diofebi, but according to his bio he was a poker pro who quit the game to pursue writing. The good news is that, unlike lots of other novels "about" poker, Diofebi understands the game. Two of the four main characters are grinders: Ray, a wannabe-GTObot who transitions from online to LOLive, and Tom, an Italian immigrant who binks a donkament and intentionally overstays his visa. There are some excellent descriptions of how the fragile Vegas ecosystem works, how it's threatened by savvy good-for-the-game pros who poach rec players. Much of the action is in the top section of the fictional Positano, an obvious stand-in for the Bellagio.
Unfortunately, the sections featuring Ray are often a jargony slog, and the book as a whole feels disunified; it easily could have been 100 or 200 pages shorter imo. Overall I'm glad I read this one, but I think it could have been better.

George Saunders's A Swim in A Pond in the Rain is one of the most unique books I've read in a while. Not exactly lit crit or an anthology, it weaves his commentary around a handful of stories by 19th century Russian greats Tolstoy, Chekhov, Turgenev, and Tolstoy. I guess you could say that Saunders focuses on craft or "how stories work." "A well-written bit of prose," he says, "is like a beautifully hand-painted kite, lying there on the grass. It’s nice. We admire it. Causality is the wind that then comes along and lifts it up. The kite is then a beautiful thing made even more beautiful by the fact that it’s doing what it was made to do." Not for everyone, but a must-read for fans of Russian lit or people who want to better understand how writers think about storytelling.

Klara and the Sun is the first Ishiguro I've read. It's narrated by an AF, or an Artificial Friend, who exists to provide companionship to privileged teens. Anyone who enjoys Black Mirror-type speculative fiction would enjoy this one, I think.

There were some similarities between Ishiguro and Ted Chiang's sci-fi short story collection Story of Your Life. I thought that some of the stories were a bit dry/overintellectual, but "Tower of Babylon" is one of the most incredible stories I've read in a while and worth the whole collection by itself.

Lower Ed, Tressie McMillan Cottom's exploration of for-profit colleges—think University of Phoenix—was eye-opening for me. I mean, I was aware that the college admissions game is rigged, but I hadn't given much thought to how the predation occurs within within what she calls Lower Ed. For-profit colleges, she argues, "are distinct from traditional not-for-profit colleges in that their long-term viability depends upon acute, sustained socioeconomic inequalities. All of higher education benefits from inequality in some way, but only for-profit colleges exclusively, by definition, rely on persistent inequalities as a business model." Cottom writes primarily as a sociologist, but she also weaves in her own experience as an employee of two for-profit schools as well as lots of interviews with students. Informative, well-written, and a good reminder to be born into wealth and privilege if you want to get ahead.

Finally, I'm not even going to bother summarizing Kevin Wilson's novel Nothing to See Here. I'll just say it's a perfect book and it was easily my favorite read of the month.
Towards the end of the month, I went on my first proper trip in over a year, to the FL panhandle. Spent about half the time camping and the other half on the beach. Was a great trip, and I even pokered a bit at my old stomping ground Ebro. Of course nothing has changed. Games still good.

On the way back, I stopped at Blackwater River State Park, an ez stop off I-10 if you're traveling between Pensacola and Tallahassee. Turns out Doordash delivers to tent sites!

Trees

Intrepid explorer

This weekend, I'm off to Pearl River Missippi for more pokering. Hope everyone's month is off to a good start!