Toxic Masculinity, Casino Capitalism, and America's Favorite Card Game

The Poker Mindset

Andrew Manno

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9783030402594
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030402600
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Economic Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

Poker is a centuries-old American game. Why has it become so popular in the twenty-first century? What does current interest in the game tell us about ourselves and some of our most pressing social issues? In this timely and thought-provoking book, Andrew Manno offers important insights into the intersection of gaming, gender, and capitalism that illuminate how the shift to a casino capitalist economy—combined with a culture of toxic masculinity—impacts workers and how it has led to the rise of populism in the United States that manifested in the 2016 election of Donald Trump.

© The Author(s) 2020

A. MannoToxic Masculinity, Casino Capitalism, and America's Favorite Card Gamehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40260-0_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Andrew Manno¹

(1)

Department of English, Raritan Valley Community College, Branchburg, NJ, USA

Andrew Manno

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

Since the turn of the twenty-first century, it seems that poker is everywhere. New casinos now include large poker rooms and older casinos are expanding and updating older poker rooms, when as recently as the 1990s some casinos didn’t offer poker at all, or the game was relegated to small, uninviting spaces. In addition to being played at casinos, poker is played online, at fundraising tournaments, and at taverns around the country in free “no gambling” poker leagues. It’s impossible to know exactly how many people play poker, but the game has been compared to baseball, with estimates that “[b]etween sixty and eighty million Americans play poker, making baseball the second great American game: second to make its appearance, second in the number of participants” (McManus 2009, p. 27). While these numbers are admittedly inexact, there’s little dispute that poker is very popular and very profitable. Games tell us about ourselves, so much so that “we can learn far more about the conditions, and values, of a society by contemplating how it chooses to play, to use its free time, to take its leisure, than by examining how it goes about its work” (Giamatti 2011, p. 1). Since poker is so popular, it demands our analysis.

What Is Poker?

Poker is a card game played using a standard deck of fifty-two cards, where players attempt to make the best hand. There are many variations of poker, but what these variations generally have in common is that the best hand is made of five cards and that the player can win a poker hand either by having the highest value hand in a showdown between players or through other players folding their cards and dropping out of the hand. The value of a poker hand is based on the probability of the hand occurring, with highest value hands having the lowest chance of occurring. Poker is fundamentally a betting game, and bets occur at different intervals during a poker hand, so in addition to winning a poker hand by having the strongest holding at showdown, a player can also win by everyone else being unwilling to match a player’s bet and folding before a showdown. The winner of a poker hand gets the “pot,” the total of all bets made during the hand. The betting nature of poker sets it apart from other non-betting games like rummy or pinochle, and the ability to bluff (and in doing so misrepresent or partially misrepresent the strength on one’s poker hand) is a crucial part of the game as a result of the “complex interplay between the intrinsic strength of a hand according to the predefined hierarchy of card combinations and the representation of the hand through the betting action” (Bjerg 2011, p. 204). The importance of betting and bluffing is greatly increased in the popular variation of poker called No-Limit Texas Hold ‘Em.

No-Limit Texas Hold ‘Em

While there are many variations of poker, by far the most popular in the twenty-first century is No-Limit Texas Hold ‘Em. In this version of the game, each player is dealt two cards face down called “hole cards,” which that player alone can use. In addition, at intervals throughout the poker hand, five shared “community” cards are dealt face up (called “the board”). Players make the best five-card hand from amongst the hole cards and the community cards. Betting intervals occur after the hole cards are dealt, after the first three community cards (“the flop”) are dealt all at one time, after the fourth community card (“the turn”), and after the fifth community card (“the river”). The term “no limit” refers to the betting amounts at each interval. Unlike “limit” poker variations that cap the amount of money that can be bet at each interval, in no-limit games, players can bet any amount of their available money above the minimum required amount. This increases the pressure on other players and allows players with lesser strength poker hands to force other players to fold their greater strength hands. The power of betting in poker (and especially in No-Limit Texas Hold ‘Em) comes from the fact that the game is one of limited information. Players only know what cards they hold and the community cards, so they must speculate on the holdings of opponents. Texas Hold ‘Em is a relatively recent variation of poker, and poker itself is a relatively new—and decidedly American—game, although it has its roots in other European card games.

A Brief History of Poker

While the precise origins of poker are not known, historians and scholars of the game agree that poker has its roots in European “vying” games such as “English Brag, French Bouillotte, Italian Primera, Spanish Mus, and … the German game of Poch” (Bjerg 2011, p. 204). Bouillotte was also called “poque,” and McManus and others argue that poker was introduced to the United States in New Orleans after the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. Further, poker historians argue that “poque,” which is pronounced with two syllables, would sound like “pokuh” when using a Southern pronunciation. When the game eventually spread north, “the second syllable would pick up an ‘r’” (McManus 2009, p. 51).

It’s worth noting that prior to the popularity of poker, one of the most-played card games from colonial times through the Civil War was whist, a forerunner of bridge. Whist is a cooperative and “cerebral trick-taking game encouraging honesty, partnership, sobriety, silence … and courteous manners” (McManus 2009, p. 71). Whist reflected the masculine ethos of the time, what historian Anthony Rotundo calls “communal manhood” with a focus on duty, honesty, and “public usefulness” (Rotundo 1994, p. 2). Benjamin Franklin maintained that whist was played “‘not for money but for honour’” (McManus 2009, p. 71). This is quite different from the focus on self-interest and dishonesty essential to poker, reflecting an evolving, more modern masculine ethos that mirrored the evolution of our market-based economy.

Poker had several moments of expansion. The game spread up and down the Mississippi during the 1820s, especially on riverboats. It spread further during the Civil War and further still throughout the American “wild” west of the 1870s and 1880s (Kelly 2006). Poker then spread worldwide during World War II, when the US military provided more than thirty million decks of playing cards to GIs overseas (Kelly 2006). No-Limit Texas Hold ‘Em likely originated in Texas in the 1920s and 1930s. The game spread in popularity due to a number of Texas road gamblers who eventually brought the game to Las Vegas, where the poker variation was used at the first World Series of Poker at Binion’s Horseshoe Casino in 1970 (Bjerg 2011, p. 216).

Online Poker

While the World Series of Poker (WSOP) popularized No-Limit Texas Hold ‘Em between the 1970s and the 1990s, the game exploded in popularity in the late 1990s and early 2000s in large part due to the availability of online poker. Free online poker has been available since the mid-1990s, but the first for-money online poker was available at PlanetPoker in 1998 (“Online Poker”, n.d.). While identifying the total number of online poker players is extremely difficult, some studies have attempted to gather this information. The numbers, however, are inconsistent. Data collected between 2009 and 2010 identified over six million different online poker players worldwide, with the United States having the largest number with about 1.5 million players (Fiedler and Wilcke 2011, pp. 12, 15). Skolnik, on the other hand, indicates that ten million Americans played online poker for money in 2009 (Skolnik 2011, p. 98).

For-money online poker has faced a number of legal challenges since its inception. In 2006, the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (UIGEA) was added to the Security and Accountability for Every Port Act of 2006. The purpose of the UIGEA was to prohibit financial transactions from within the United States to online gambling sites (O’Brien 2012, p. 295). The law was quickly circumvented by players and online poker sites through the use of offshore money processing companies that acted as go-betweens for the players and the poker sites (O’Brien 2012, p. 300). Further, in 2011 in United States v Scheinberg, three major online poker companies (PokerStars, Full Tilt Poker, and Absolute Poker) were indicted, and eleven defendants were charged with violating the UIGEA, as well as illegal gambling, money laundering, and conspiracies to commit bank fraud and wire fraud (O’Brien 2012, p. 295). These three poker websites were seized by the FBI and made unavailable to US online poker players.

However, in 2012, a federal judge from New Jersey ruled that poker was primarily a game of skill rather than a game of chance, and the door was opened for states to allow online gaming for state residents. Currently, Delaware, Nevada, and New Jersey allow online gaming for its residents (“Online Poker”, n.d.). Brick and mortar casinos initially opposed online poker, seeing it as an existential threat to the casino business in Las Vegas and Atlantic City (Vardi 2011). However, casinos are now struggling with this new reality, with some opposing online poker (Ruddock 2017) and others cautiously supporting it with the hope of exclusive casino rights to offer online gaming (Vardi 2013). Regardless of these legal challenges, interest in poker has been consistently strong in the twenty-first century.

The Growth of Poker

Let’s consider the growth of poker further. One indicator of such growth is the popularity of televised poker. The most important in-person poker tournament, the World Series of Poker ten thousand dollar buy-in No-Limit Texas Hold ‘Em “Main Event” championship, held each year in Las Vegas and televised in recent years on ESPN, has shown massive growth. The tournament had 194 entrants in 1990, 512 in 2000, 2576 in 2004, 7221 in 2017, and 8569 in 2019. The first-place finisher in the 2019 WSOP Main Event won ten million dollars (“World Series of Poker”, n.d.). ESPN commentator Norman Chad said of the popularity of the World Series of Poker, “This is still the last great American gold rush” (Chad 2019). Free, no-gambling poker leagues are also popular, with just one league in the United States—a league in which I regularly play—including one hundred thirty thousand players (“World Tavern Poker”, n.d.). The...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. “All In”: Poker as a Gendered Space
• 3. “On Tilt”: The Poker Mindset, Toxic Masculinity, and the Alt-Right
• 4. “A Stacked Deck”: Casino Capitalism and the Poker Mindset
• 5. “Deal Me In”: Neoliberal Workers and the Poker Mindset
• 6. “Fight, Don’t Fold”: The Poker Mindset and the Rise of Trumpism
• 7. Conclusion
• Back Matter