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elfsEd Brayton tells a story about a woman playing poker and her confrontation with a young, brash asshole at the same table with her.
To understand this tale, you have to grasp the concept of the "bad beat pot." The "bad beat pot," as I understand it, is a pot maintained at larger casinos that is divided at a poker table among the participants if a hand that unquestionably should have won (and casinos have differing ideas of what "should have won") is instead beaten by someone with an even better hand. Half the pot goes to the loser, a quarter to the winner, and the remaining quarter is divided up among the other participants, with one extra divvy being allocated to the house to seed the pot again.
As Ed tells it, this woman had been dealing with a foul-mouthed player at a table of five all afternoon. The game was "small," only a couple of thousand dollars on the table all told. Finally, after a particularly frustrating round, the young man turns over four jacks, undoubtedly the winning hand, and says loudly, "Beat that, bitch."
The woman calls the floor manager over and asks him what the house's bad beat pot is worth. He informs her that it's $350,000. She says, "Well then. I fold." And reveals that she had four queens-- surely a bad beat. In doing so, she denied him his winnings of the bad beat pot, which would have been $175,000.
Ed calls this "the best poker story I've ever heard."
I don't get this story. When you play poker in a casino, the people at the table aren't your only opponents. The house is just as much an opponent as the others, right? Your objective, when you go to play poker, is to leave with more money than when you entered. Everything else is secondary. This woman not only lost the money she'd put into the pot that round to the jerkwad, she voluntarily gave up $87,500. Not only that, but she denied the other three people at the table $21,875 each.
This woman leaves the poker table poorer and with four cases of bad blood against her. I can't begin to imagine the rationale for doing so.
I don't know if the story is true. I also don't see why other people admire this story. As near as I can tell, this is a case of what sociologists call "egalitarian dynamics in storytelling." By repeating this story with admiration, Ed is signalling to his readers (his tribe, in our environment of evolutionary adaptation, the thing his brain is still evolved to consider) that he admires this woman's willingness to sacrifice what is (for me at least) an immense amount of money in order to enforce a social norm: politeness.
This is a very common trope in fiction: whether or not there's anything to be gained by the protagonist's actions, token slaps to the face of the antagonist, even at real cost to the protagonist, are satisfying messages between author and reader that both of them support and celebrate an egalitarian norm.
Ed's story falls precisely in that vein, but it doesn't make sense. She didn't enforce it, only stuck her tongue out at it. She paid a price, and generated ill-will among the others. I can't help but think that this story only appeals to us because our instincts still assume a zero-sum game, and the idea that money is dirty, and in this case ill-gotten, and so the price she paid is worth more than is apparent.
But I'm not superstitious. And normally, neither is Ed.
To understand this tale, you have to grasp the concept of the "bad beat pot." The "bad beat pot," as I understand it, is a pot maintained at larger casinos that is divided at a poker table among the participants if a hand that unquestionably should have won (and casinos have differing ideas of what "should have won") is instead beaten by someone with an even better hand. Half the pot goes to the loser, a quarter to the winner, and the remaining quarter is divided up among the other participants, with one extra divvy being allocated to the house to seed the pot again.
As Ed tells it, this woman had been dealing with a foul-mouthed player at a table of five all afternoon. The game was "small," only a couple of thousand dollars on the table all told. Finally, after a particularly frustrating round, the young man turns over four jacks, undoubtedly the winning hand, and says loudly, "Beat that, bitch."
The woman calls the floor manager over and asks him what the house's bad beat pot is worth. He informs her that it's $350,000. She says, "Well then. I fold." And reveals that she had four queens-- surely a bad beat. In doing so, she denied him his winnings of the bad beat pot, which would have been $175,000.
Ed calls this "the best poker story I've ever heard."
I don't get this story. When you play poker in a casino, the people at the table aren't your only opponents. The house is just as much an opponent as the others, right? Your objective, when you go to play poker, is to leave with more money than when you entered. Everything else is secondary. This woman not only lost the money she'd put into the pot that round to the jerkwad, she voluntarily gave up $87,500. Not only that, but she denied the other three people at the table $21,875 each.
This woman leaves the poker table poorer and with four cases of bad blood against her. I can't begin to imagine the rationale for doing so.
I don't know if the story is true. I also don't see why other people admire this story. As near as I can tell, this is a case of what sociologists call "egalitarian dynamics in storytelling." By repeating this story with admiration, Ed is signalling to his readers (his tribe, in our environment of evolutionary adaptation, the thing his brain is still evolved to consider) that he admires this woman's willingness to sacrifice what is (for me at least) an immense amount of money in order to enforce a social norm: politeness.
This is a very common trope in fiction: whether or not there's anything to be gained by the protagonist's actions, token slaps to the face of the antagonist, even at real cost to the protagonist, are satisfying messages between author and reader that both of them support and celebrate an egalitarian norm.
Ed's story falls precisely in that vein, but it doesn't make sense. She didn't enforce it, only stuck her tongue out at it. She paid a price, and generated ill-will among the others. I can't help but think that this story only appeals to us because our instincts still assume a zero-sum game, and the idea that money is dirty, and in this case ill-gotten, and so the price she paid is worth more than is apparent.
But I'm not superstitious. And normally, neither is Ed.
