Justice and the American Way
Jul. 24th, 2006 01:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
peterbirksAmerica is full of contradictions. For example, there is the dichotomy of rewarding effort, but then restricting the power that people achieve through that effort. Because, if you put in a lot of effort to achieve a position of power, one of the rewards that you want is to keep it, which tends to entail other people not having their efforts appositely rewarded.
America also has an intrinsic dislike of big business. I know that this may seem a strange thing to say, but the concept of "the little man" and "individualism" is deeply ingrained in the American psyche. Many people fled to America because they didn't want feudalism, or were persecuted by those in power. They hardly want a society where there is a new set of "big powers", even if those big powers got there through a lot of hard work. So, effort is rewarded, but keep competition.
Most Americans have a similarly contradictory approach to gambling. There is the puritan work ethic that has filtered through the centuries. Work hard and get rewarded. Gambling is not hard work, so to be rewarded for it is wrong.
Gambling on sports affects another ethic. Corruption in sport, even though we know it has resurfaced time and time again, is something that Americans do not like to think about. But they do know that corruption in sport is usually caused by gambling. Therefore if you make the gambling illegal, the corruption will go away. Well, that's the theory.
Online poker in America will not die. The main coalition strength is not the puritan right or the namby-pamby left; it's the "where are our tax dollars" states and federal centre.
I am forever bemused by an attitude that I often find in poker players (often American, but qually often, not) that, because poker is a meritocratic game (the best win, the worst lose) it should be meritocratic on a microeconomic level. In other words, when someone makes a bad call on the turn and then wins through a lucky suck-out, that this is, somehow, morally wrong. It's a flagrant abuse of the way things should be. Now, you and I know that it is this very variability - that the bad play can (and often does) win — that keeps poker going. But the moral evangelist (invariably a tight player who doesn't enter that many pots) seems to think that this is simply, well, plain unfair. "I am a better player than he is. Therefore I should win when I get into the pot against him as favourite", they think.
However, it doesn't always happen that way. So, what can our "victim" do? He does what he feels obliged to do. He may have lost the money, but he's damned if he's going to lose respect as well. So, he tries to convince all the other players at the table that, although he might have lost this hand, in fact he is the better player than the actual winner of the hand.
And that final action, of course, makes him the biggest fish of all.
But you can sense their frustration. In poker, money is how you keep score. And for a lot of these people, insecurity is rife. Their fear is not that they are worse than another player, but that other people might think that they are worse.
It is this, I think, that ultimately defines any player who tries to convince other players at the table that he is a good player as someone who is not likely to be a long-term winner. Because the genuine long-term winners don't care what other players think about them (although some winners try to make other players think that they are worse than they really are). They just want to play right, to play well. And to avoid being results-oriented.
At poker, I don't like to project a false image, because, like when you slow-play Aces from early, it can cause problems later on. If I have just been myself, it's a lot easier to work out how your opponent sees you. This in turn lets you work out how he or she is likely to react to you, and this in turn makes your own choice of action easier to decide. But if you start off with "Does he think I am how I have been pretending to be, or has he seen through me?" then you have a problem.
America is built on the concept of "Everyone has a chance. Work hard and you will get your reward". Nowhere in the American constitution (which is where everything started to go wrong) is the line "Oh, and by the way, life isn't fair. Sometimes you will work hard, and the other guy who did fuck-all will get the reward". Perhaps if they're had been things would have been different.
America also has an intrinsic dislike of big business. I know that this may seem a strange thing to say, but the concept of "the little man" and "individualism" is deeply ingrained in the American psyche. Many people fled to America because they didn't want feudalism, or were persecuted by those in power. They hardly want a society where there is a new set of "big powers", even if those big powers got there through a lot of hard work. So, effort is rewarded, but keep competition.
Most Americans have a similarly contradictory approach to gambling. There is the puritan work ethic that has filtered through the centuries. Work hard and get rewarded. Gambling is not hard work, so to be rewarded for it is wrong.
Gambling on sports affects another ethic. Corruption in sport, even though we know it has resurfaced time and time again, is something that Americans do not like to think about. But they do know that corruption in sport is usually caused by gambling. Therefore if you make the gambling illegal, the corruption will go away. Well, that's the theory.
Online poker in America will not die. The main coalition strength is not the puritan right or the namby-pamby left; it's the "where are our tax dollars" states and federal centre.
I am forever bemused by an attitude that I often find in poker players (often American, but qually often, not) that, because poker is a meritocratic game (the best win, the worst lose) it should be meritocratic on a microeconomic level. In other words, when someone makes a bad call on the turn and then wins through a lucky suck-out, that this is, somehow, morally wrong. It's a flagrant abuse of the way things should be. Now, you and I know that it is this very variability - that the bad play can (and often does) win — that keeps poker going. But the moral evangelist (invariably a tight player who doesn't enter that many pots) seems to think that this is simply, well, plain unfair. "I am a better player than he is. Therefore I should win when I get into the pot against him as favourite", they think.
However, it doesn't always happen that way. So, what can our "victim" do? He does what he feels obliged to do. He may have lost the money, but he's damned if he's going to lose respect as well. So, he tries to convince all the other players at the table that, although he might have lost this hand, in fact he is the better player than the actual winner of the hand.
And that final action, of course, makes him the biggest fish of all.
But you can sense their frustration. In poker, money is how you keep score. And for a lot of these people, insecurity is rife. Their fear is not that they are worse than another player, but that other people might think that they are worse.
It is this, I think, that ultimately defines any player who tries to convince other players at the table that he is a good player as someone who is not likely to be a long-term winner. Because the genuine long-term winners don't care what other players think about them (although some winners try to make other players think that they are worse than they really are). They just want to play right, to play well. And to avoid being results-oriented.
At poker, I don't like to project a false image, because, like when you slow-play Aces from early, it can cause problems later on. If I have just been myself, it's a lot easier to work out how your opponent sees you. This in turn lets you work out how he or she is likely to react to you, and this in turn makes your own choice of action easier to decide. But if you start off with "Does he think I am how I have been pretending to be, or has he seen through me?" then you have a problem.
America is built on the concept of "Everyone has a chance. Work hard and you will get your reward". Nowhere in the American constitution (which is where everything started to go wrong) is the line "Oh, and by the way, life isn't fair. Sometimes you will work hard, and the other guy who did fuck-all will get the reward". Perhaps if they're had been things would have been different.
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no subject
Date: 2006-07-24 04:01 pm (UTC)It is a form of karma because if you can't/won't see your own mistakes then that makes it very difficult to improve as a player.
Andy.
no subject
Date: 2006-07-24 05:01 pm (UTC)The other night I sucked out (rivered a 3-outer) after a total misread of the situation and was rather pleased to get a "fkn clown" from the unfortunate loser in the chat box. I rather feel that I just don't get enough of those.
American sport in the main seems (and I'm aware of the sweeping generalisation here) to be set up to ensure that upsets like Hereford v Newcastle in the FA Cup can't happen. Like the World Series not being in any sense (apart from Canada) open to teams from the rest of the world. They don't really seem to get the idea of knockout competitions - or maybe they just don't like them - perhaps because of the one-off nature.
Perhaps it's a long-run/short-run thing. After all, even in the FA Cup, the upsets are local events: the winners these days still tend to be drawn from the small population of "big" clubs.
The American Constitution
Date: 2006-07-24 06:59 pm (UTC)One could read that as giving the government the right stand in the way of personal satisfaction: 'We said we'd let you try'.
no subject
Date: 2006-07-24 10:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-07-25 07:44 am (UTC)Most players seem aware of what their opponent is going through and do not act so stupidly. And since the worst example of wankdom in this arena was a Scandinavian (2004), a man so stupid that at one point he didn't even realize what he should or should not be shouting for, and who eventually got blinded away to nothingness because he stopped getting hit in the face with cards, I didn't feel that I ought to make this an exclusively American matter.
PJ