Battle of the Cliches
2007-10-25 11:08:40
By:
Gene Bromberg
The Poker Players Alliance was on Capitol Hill the past few days lobbying Congress. Quite a few big-name players were in Washington making the case for legalized poker (including Chris Moneymaker, Howard Lederer, Annie Duke, among others) and the PPA managed to attract quite a bit of media attention. Now, I do enjoy hacking on mainstream reporters who write about poker. Which is, when you think about it, really unfair. General assignment reporters have to cover a wide range of subjects, and picking on them because they don't know the difference between an open-ended and gutshot straight draw is small and petty of me.
Thing is, I'm a small and petty person. And while this used to bother me, I now embrace my inner crank. I find that I sleep better at night and I no longer have trouble making eye contact with myself in the mirror. So as I read through the numerous pieces about the PPA's campaign, I noticed a disturbing trend--the heavy-handed use of poker lingo in their leads.
For example, this elegant opening to an article in the Los Angeles Times:
When trying to convince lawmakers that her career is more than just a card game, professional poker player Annie Duke refuses to fold.
Ecch. Actually, one of the arguments put forward by Annie's brother Howard was that, in poker, you CAN fold. That's one of the ways poker players exhibit their superior skill--they fold losing hands. But I see the reporter's point, I can easily imagine Annie being rather indefatigable as she made her point to various Congresspersons.
The headline of a audio story at Marketplace is almost nausea-inducing: "No Online Poker? Some Can't Deal". I mean, that's just awful. A piece in the Atlanta Journal Constitution goes from the OK to the ridiculous in two sentences:
You've got to know when to hold 'em and know when to fold 'em — and that means poker is a game of skill and not luck, a panel of lobbyists, academics and gamblers argued Wednesday on Capitol Hill.
The distinction involves a pot potentially worth tens of millions of dollars.
OK, quoting The Gambler is acceptable here because knowing when to hold 'em and fold 'em is an important point to raise when arguing poker is a game of skill. But to say that the fate of online poker is a "pot potentially worth tens of millions of dollars"...this I don't like. First of all, the money involved is certainly A LOT more than tens of millions. And calling it a "pot" diminishes the importance of the cause. Yes, there's a lot of money to be made if online poker is legalized. But this fight is also about personal liberty (and personal responsibility). Not everybody plays at nosebleed limits online. Lots of people enjoy poker enough that a nickel-dime game is enough to satisfy. And the government shouldn't trample the right of those (or any other) players.
The article
released by the Associated Press begins, "
Internet poker players are raising the stakes in Washington." Ehh. The stakes were raised when Bill Frist tacked the UIGEA onto an anti-terrorism bill--what the PPA is doing now is playing catch-up in the deep-stack game of politics.
It's heartening to see poker's lobbying effort
get so much ink over the last few days, though it's also discouraging to see the pathetic arguments made by some poker's opponents appear in print without close examination. To be fair, refuting those arguments would take hours and hours of research and analysis...well, it's a crummy day out, guess I'll get to work.
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