Grantland Poker Article by Rounders co-writer

By:

ChipFerguson 

Dated:

17 Jun, 2011

5 Comments

Last week, ESPN and Bill Simmons launched a website called Grantland, which has so far been very entertaining, with interesting articles written by quality writers. For someone like me who watches many hours of sports per week, the free content at Grantland has been a nice addition to my daily activities, as they've been putting out a few articles everyday while they launch their site.

Today they featured an article by a man who many professional poker players owe their livelihood to, the writer of Rounders Brian Koppelman, called "The Beauty of Black Friday." (http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/6665292/the-beauty-black-friday) Like many others, Rounders sparked my interest in poker when I was in college. It was by far the most mainstream, in-depth poker movie ever created, and still is today. Koppelman's article on Grantland yesterday however shows that he is out of touch with the poker community, and does not have poker's best interests in mind.

In the article, he contends that poker is better when it is in the shadows, compared to the mainstream turns it has taken in the past decade. "But in this dark moment, I have found one, small bright spot: Poker is, like Slick, finally back in the shadows, where, mythically at least, it belongs." I'll give you a moment to consider the hypocrisy of someone who wrote a studio movie with Matt Damon, Ed Norton, and fashion model Famke Janssen portraying poker players, saying that poker was better before it went "mainstream." He also contends that poker should be more like the Doc Holliday and Stu Ungar days. This is less than comforting because stories about poker in the Western days were often very violent, including the legendary Bill Hickock famously being killed during a poker game, while Stu Ungar was essentially destroyed by the Las Vegas lifestyle, neither of which sound like attractive outcomes to me. He says "later I was hipped to legends like Stu Ungar scraping himself off of the streets to show up for one last WSOP" while ignoring that the tragic part of Ungar's WSOP win was that he was found dead and broke less than a year later in a Las Vegas hotel room. Poker being in the shadows certainly did not help him.

It's clear that Koppelman has little invested in the future success of poker. He does not play for a living, and probably didn't even play online very often if at all. For someone like me, who does play online for a living and as my sole source of income, it's incredibly annoying to hear someone like Koppelman suggest that the advancements of online poker over the past decade have been a bad thing, when that is unequivocally false. Poker games are safer now, both from a physical and integrity standpoint, than they ever have been, and there is no downside to that. Someone who doesn't really care about poker's well being doesn't see it that way, because crooked live games don't affect them, and scandalous activities are always more fun for bystanders. 

The most egregious part of the article was undoubtedly a quote towards the end of the article "so even as I hate what the Federal prosecutors did, a small part of me likes that poker players, are, once again, in disrepute." Being in disrepute is not a good thing. By definition, it means being held in low esteem by the public. While I agree that Black Friday has definitely lowered poker's esteem in the public eye, how can that possibly be a good thing? Professional poker players are desperate for credibility, not disrepute. No professional poker players want to watch Kathy Griffin on Celebrity Poker Showdown, but I'm glad the show exists because it puts poker in a positive light. Seeing an Oscar winning actor like Ben Affleck playing poker makes the public realize that not all poker players were degenerates, which is a solely positive outcome.

Poker has a major image problem, which is evident when I tell people I play poker for a living, often resulting in the question "is that legal?" Think about that for a second, these people think that I make a living from an illegal activity. I can't think of any illegal profession that is even remotely reputable. Being on the same level as other illegal professions like organized crime and drug dealing is not a good thing. Poker becoming more mainstream would undoubtedly help legitimize poker in the coming decades, but unfortunately Black Friday has reversed much of the progress over the past few years. With the DOJ cracking down on Stars/FTP/Cereus and others, many of the public's inaccurate views on poker have been confirmed: that poker is a sketchy, illegitimate activity. Hopefully poker's image in the public eye will improve in the coming years, via legislation and promotion, and this will be a good thing for professional poker players worldwide.