Men Playing Poker
A manifesto
Before I get to the business of the day, I want to give you a preview of some posts I have in the works. Coming in the next few weeks:
• anonymous rabbi interviews
• why I don’t go to Costco
• obituaries and Jewishness (following up on this great piece here)
But okay, to today’s post:
That headline above—“Men Playing Poker: A Manifesto”—is the title of a book I have for a long time wanted to write, and don’t think I ever will.
The book would be a cultural history of, and contemporary journalistic account of, men’s poker games, the recreational, fairly low-stakes kind, the kind that happen in rec rooms in residential basements, not in fancy clubs with doors that have sliding, Prohibition-era slots in them to keep the fuzz out—not, in other words, the poker game you see in Rounders, possibly my favorite movie of all time, and you should stop reading me now and have a glimpse:
Okay, so now that you have done that (you’re welcome), back to my idea for a book. It would look at those ubiquitous poker games, which seem to have persisted even as other kinds of (mostly masculine) associational life, like fraternal orders (Elks, Lions, Moose, Mongoose, etc.), other lodges (like Masons), Rotary, men’s clubs at synagogues (worth its own edition of this newsletter—I’ll get back to you on that…), assorted other brotherhoods, and of course beefsteaks, have fallen on hard times.
I am talking about the kind of game in which you can win or lose twenty bucks, maybe fifty, at most a hundred, but definitely not a thousand. Those $1,000 games are played by the kind of people I don’t know, and don’t care to.
I know a lot of men who play in the friendly, low-stakes kind of game I am talking about.
(Poker is very male. I know that there are excellent female poker players on the pro circuit; I know of mostly male “friendly” (non-pro, low-stakes) games that have on occasion, or for periods of time, had female participants. But I don’t know of any all-female, or mostly female, regular low-stakes friendly poker games. I would love to write about one, perhaps in this newsletter, so if you know of one, drop me a line.)
In my neighborhood, I know of several “friendly” games. I started one of them, about seventeen years ago. Since getting married the prior year, I had joked with my wife about how, now that I was a home-owning, married man, I needed to have a regular poker game. She called my bluff (so to speak) by buying me a set of poker chips for Hanukkah. I invited five guys to start playing. The game has grown; of the original group, five are still in the game; another, who joined within the year, still plays; and there are three others in the regular rotation, the most recent of whom joined about three years ago. We kept it up during COVID, in fact playing more often, moving to every two weeks, using Zoom and a poker app.
In short, it’s a very stable game, and the game has been a major source of stability in my life. At times when I have felt low—because of a health crisis, or parenting struggles, or difficulties at work—the game has been a source of support (there’s a feeling these gents have my back, whatever that might mean; that they are my posse; that if I were a Hollywood star, these are the people I’d put on the payroll and turn into my entourage, Vinnie Chase–style), but also a source of escapism. During the game, I forget my troubles.
During the game, I forget my troubles.
The other things I do with friends for fun, which include regular tennis matches with one of my friends (who is in the poker game) and regular long swims with another (who also is in the game) sustain me in other ways, neither better nor worse. The game is unique, in part because I laugh so much during the game. Also, I think, because the guys in the game feel like the clique that, in junior high and high school, I never felt I had.
I got curious what had been written about friendly poker games, and I found an old scholarly article, “The ‘Friendly’ Poker Game: A Study of an Ephemeral Role,” written by psychologist Louis A. Zurcher Jr. and published in Social Forces in December 1970. It’s a charming and insightful article about a regular game in a Midwestern town, in which the author had participated for a year (without telling the other players he was going to write about them). Some excerpts:
The seven "core" players who attended almost every game during the period of observation were all college educated, married, professional men: a lawyer, a college coach, a high school coach, an engineer, a sociologist, a social psychologist (the author), and an insurance broker. Four had been playing poker together for over ten years, and two others for over five years. They ranged in ages from early thirties to late forties, and all were in the middle, salaried, socioeconomic bracket.
Four had been reared and educated in the midwestern city (population 125,000) where the game took place, and where all of the players presently resided. When the friendly game first formed, the players had been associated with a small local college. Three of the current players still were employed by the college, each in a separate department. A second common characteristic of the founding members and four of the current members was experience in coaching scholastic athletic teams.
There were no radios or television sets playing, no wives serving beverages, no children looking over shoulders. The atmosphere was quite relaxed and the dress casual (although on occasion a member arrived in suit and tie following a business meeting). There was no apparent seating preference around the table except that if there was an empty chair, it generally would be next to a new man.
… all but one of the players smoked either pipes or cigars during the game …
All of the members were in approximately the same income bracket, and thus winning or losing $30.00 had a similar impact upon them …
The core members perceived themselves to be in a "different world" when they were playing. The friendly game, with its idiosyncratic roles, norms, rituals and rules of irrelevance, maintained clearly established boundaries. New men were selected carefully, and anyone or anything that disrupted the group dynamics or reduced the satisfactions experienced was eliminated or avoided. The players testified to their awareness that the poker group was “separate” from their other, broader, day-to-day social relationships:
[They said things like, “]I look forward every other Monday to getting away from it all. I can do that when I'm playing poker with the guys. I forget about my job, and other problems that I have, and I can just sort of get lost in the game.”
Sounds a lot like my game, fifty years later, minus the cigars—we always have several kinds of M&Ms, and a lot of different kinds of beer (which I am not partial to—give me a wine cooler, a hard cider, or a Zima any day).
Actually, the game in the article sounds even more like my dad’s game, which I had the honor of being a guest participant in last week. His game started in 1972 (he joined about five years later), started by a group of guys who were young professors at a small college in Massachusetts. I sat to the right of Bill, one of the original members. He spotted my tell right away—apparently my eyes lit up when a certain face card was thrown.
I’ll watch for that when I play in my regular game tonight.
What’s your poker game or other ritual? Send me an email at markoppenheimer@substack.com.