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Maryann Guberman has been a writer and editor with many gaming publications, including Sports Form, Card Player, Poker World, Player's Panorama and Systems and Methods. She also has written and edited numerous books on gambling.

April 28, 2007

A Poker Apologia

The denunciation of the young is a necessary part of the hygiene of older people, and greatly assists in the circulation of their blood. -- Logan Pearsall Smith

Did you ever have one of those "aha" moments? If you are over the age of 30, you probably have. That phenomenon is known by the more sophisticated word, epiphany. It's that instant when you finally get something, when a reality flashes like the tail of meteor through all your senses to your brain and culminates in a realization. It's the light bulb over the cartoon head, which you might have read about in this space before since the further away from 30 I get, the more these moments come along.

By and large, people know the planet earth rotates on an axis but they don't understand the concept. (I don't) They know a flower, as beautiful as it is, pleases them but they generally don't analyze the concept of how it germinates underground then erupts from the soil in its own birth.

As it should be, we don't spend all our waking hours analyzing life. We can't think about every involuntary movement of it; we mostly just live it, hopefully to the fullest and with thanks for it. But parts of life does require us to understand how things work, why they work, and how they can benefit us.

Susie Isaacs talks about the concept in her book, Ms. Poker. She discusses how she suddenly came to understand the importance of position in poker. Now it's second nature to her but before her realization, she just knew the button rotated from left to right and that somehow that was supposed to mean something to her. But it wasn't until she had to make a critical decision based on all the information she could muster, that she got it!

That's kind of what happened last week.

One of the Discovery channels was airing a special on the Summer of Love, that 1960s era when the city of San Francisco was the center of the universe for everyone. Newcomers, older residents, and the remainder of the dwellers on the geography of the United States where folks focused on the city by the bay and everyone over 30 all had an opinion about this strange generation.

The newscaster asked some mature individuals for their opinion of the Hippies. Yikes, what a bubbling cauldron of negativity! They didn't like the hair, the clothing, the dope, the music, the filth, the lack of stability, the devil-may-care attitude, the free love, the wandering, the flowers - nothing. The generation, they agreed, was worthless and probably dangerous.

That's when it hit me, the poker aha.

I know the people in charge of ratings want to keep changing the face of televised poker to keep the broadcasts interesting; and to some extent are responsible for the ego antics players now display in front of the cameras. That's show business, we know, and Ed Sullivan or the Texaco Star Theatre type of consistency doesn't cut it any longer. Longevity isn't a word that's synonymous with entertainment productions.

But - and this is a big but -- people like me and others who have commented on the rowdiness of today's poker players need that "aha" moment. We are the older generation, and we should not be upset about admitting it. These brash youngsters with their rotated baseball caps, their high-fives and fist pumping celebrations are the younger generation, and we can't expect them to apologize to us because they aren't like us. They live that extreme sport life style and they don't think twice about expressing their feelings. They just don't hold back just to please someone else.

Decorum as we know its definition, the way the word has come to be interpreted in relation to society, is in the process of change. What we who have been here longer perceive as socially acceptable etiquette may not be what our children see it.

The Hippies did not destroy us with their unconventional behavior (at least I don't think they did) and the 20-somethings of today will not destroy poker because of their unconventional behavior. They are an expressive lot, these youngsters - not all of them, of course, but enough to make us notice.

Just think of it this way: If it weren't for the young people falling in love with poker, all of us would still be searching for a game instead of finding dozens of them at our fingertips and doorsteps!