I’ve got a pretty long review of Des Wilson’s Ghosts at the Table in the current issue of The American Interest. In the review, I go from talking about the book to discussing the place of poker in global culture. Here’s a sample:
Poker is the quintessential American game. As with jazz or capitalism It’s no accident all three were either invented or perfected under the American aegis, improvisation intersects with formal rules, such as how to deal and the rank of hands. Risk-taking, cunning, nerve, bluffing, inspiration, luck and even skill at cheating, it must be said, all matter as much or more. A gutsy player doesn’t need a winning hand to collect any given pot, or the best cards over an entire evening to walk away with more money than he came with. As players leave a game, they may talk about who had cards and who didn’t, but deep down they know that personalities and gaming skills defined the results.
…
It could be that American poker lovers worry about what they’ll find in the past, as Des Wilson discovers in Ghosts at the Table. For him and his fellow players, the past is a bad neighborhood where maps are unreliable and the natives unfriendly.Wilson begins his tale by checking into the Bullock Hotel in Deadwood, South Dakota, where the ghost of Seth Bullock, the original proprietor, apparently shows his disgust over the current staff’s lassitude by shaking the odd plate or turning on a random blender in the kitchen. It’s not a chance reference: Touring the remains of the Old West in modern America, Wilson continually hears of poltergeists and specters haunting the old sites. And he believes them: The legends of the past really are ghosts, and hostile ones, too. The evil they’ve done lives on, and it still might undermine the progress poker has made towards legitimacy.
Poker Ghosts – David G. Schwartz – The American Interest Magazine
I never thought I’d be published in the same magazine as Lawrence Eagleburger, so this just shows you how unpredictable life can be. It’s a thought-provoking publication that I urge you to read.
It’s a different kind of writing for a readership that probably doesn’t care too much about gambling as such. I really liked Wilson’s book, and it gave me a chance to ramble on about cheating and the American psyche.
Just to let you know, I’m not going to try to pass myself off as some kind of policy wonk or Beltway intellectual now. Yes, there’s some high-powered political stuff in TAI, but my review comes right before a review of two books about the history of hamburgers, so I don’t have any illusions–this was clearly a “lighter side” deal.