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Poker
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★ Poker

Party Poker online: In 2005 Party Poker went public on the London Stock Exchange with an $8.5 billion IPO.  They were worth more than British Airways.  ibid. 

 

In 2010 the WPT began a nationwide talent search for a brand new segment called ‘The Raw Deal’.  It would be the first format change in eight seasons.  ibid.

 

Full Tilt Poker was founded in 2004 by an elite group of poker celebrities.  ibid.  

 

In 2009 PokerStars set a world record with 307,000 players playing online simultaneously.  By 2011 they dominated the industry with a 42% market share.  ibid. 

 

Full Tilt Poker: ‘That money’s gone.’  ibid.  creditor

 

Between 2007 and 2011, Full Tilt Poker paid its owners $443,860,530.  The $390 million owed to players was never returned to the company.  ibid.  caption

 

PokerStars relaunched Full Tilt Poker in November 2012 and returned $150 million to international players.  The US Department of Justice assumed responsibility for the return of the US player funds.  As of June 2013 no money has been returned.  ibid.

 

 

‘A tectonic shift in the poker landscape and unfortunately this had pretty severe economic consequences for a lot of the industry and a lot of the community.’  All In: The Poker Movie, expert, 2009  

 

‘Why are you cracking down on poker?’  ibid.  Matt Damon

 

In 1961 almost every home in America had a card table.  By 1991 almost ever major casino had closed its poker room.  In 2011 a reported 60 million people played poker every week in America.  ibid.  captions

 

‘Amarillo Slim: He was the embodiment of what everybody thought a poker player was.’  ibid.  expert

 

1980 & 1981 Stu Unger WSP: ‘The only time he ever played the game.  He was a genius.’  ibid.

 

As of 2011 there are nine poker shows on eight major networks.  ibid.  caption

 

Online poker revenues grew from $82.7 million in 2001 to $2.4 billion in 2005.  On October 13 2006 president George W Bush signed into law the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (known as UIGEA).  This threatened to end the online poker boom.  ibid.

 

After his victory, Chris Moneymaker appeared as a guest on The Late Show with David Letterman.  ibid.

 

On December 23 2011 the Department of Justice ruled that the Wire Act of 1961 does not apply to online poker.  As of February 2012 Nevada, California, New York, New Jersey and Iowa are among the states considering legalizing online poker.  ibid.

 

 

On any given night millions of dollars change hands in high stakes poker games all over New York City.  These games are secret.  The people who run them can take a piece of every pot.  This is No Limit Hold-Em.  Players can lose everything in a single hand.  Inside Underground Poker, National Geographic 2012

 

 

‘In his craft nobody was quicker, nobody was smarter, and nobody was better.’  One of a Kind: The Rise and Fall of Stu Ungar, Mike Sexton, 2006  

 

‘Generous to a fault.’  ibid.  Doyle Brunson

  

‘He said, I like what drugs do to me.’  ibid.

 

A simple stone marks the final resting place of the man most consider the best poker player who ever lived.  ibid.

 

Only 45 when a cleaning lady found him dead in a cheap motel not far from the Vegas strip.  ibid.

 

Ungar is the only person to win the World Series of Poker and the Superbowl of Poker three times each.  ibid.

 

There was another side to this success story – cocaine.  ibid.  

 

‘He bet everything all the time.’  ibid.  friend

 

Millions of dollars passed through his talented hands.  ibid.

 

‘Stu didn’t want to be helped.’  ibid.  Doyle Brunson

 

 

High stakes at the table: a British poker ace is taking on the world’s best … The Rio hotel is putting on a very special event: each year, Vegas hosts the richest playing card tournament on the planet: the World Series of Poker with over $200m in total prize money.  Secret World of Las Vegas 24/7 III, Channel 5 2019

 

 

They [strategists] turned to a new idea called Game Theory.  Game Theory had been developed as a way of mathematically analysing poker games.  Adam Curtis, The Trap: What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom: Fuck You Buddy, BBC 2007

 

A military think-tank called the Rand Corporation: and the strategists at Rand used Game Theory to create mathematical models that predicted how the Soviets would behave in response to what they saw the Americans doing.  ibid.

 

Underlying Game Theory was a dark vision of human beings who were driven only by self-interest constantly distrusting of those around them.  ibid. 

 

The mathematical genius John Nash … In reality Nash was difficult and spiky; he was notorious at Rand for inventing a series of cruel games.  The most famous he called Fuck You, Buddy.  ibid.  

 

A system driven by selfishness did not have to lead to chaos.  He proved that there could always be a point of equilibrium in which everyone’s self-interest was perfectly balanced against each other … Selfishness always led to a safer outcome: it was called the Prisoners’ dilemma.  ibid.  

 

In the early 60s R D Laing set up a psychiatric practice in Harley Street in London.  He offered radical new treatments for schizophrenia and quickly became a media celebrity.  But his research into the causes of schizophrenia convinced him that a much wider range of human problems were caused by the pressure-cooker of family life.  Laing decided to investigate how power and control were exercised within the world of normal families.  And to do this he would use the techniques of Game Theory.  ibid.

 

Laing produced matrices which showed how just as in the Cold War couples use their everyday actions as strategies to control and manipulate each other.  His conclusion was stark.  That what was normally seen as acts of kindness and love were in reality weapons used selfishly to exert power and control.  From this research, Laing argued that the modern family, far from being a nurturing caring institution, was in reality a dark arena where people played continuous selfish games with each other.  ibid.

 

Laing was radicalised by his findings.  He believed that the struggle for power and control that he had uncovered in the family was inextricably linked to the struggle for power and control in the world.  In a violent and corrupt society the family had become a machine for controlling people.  Laing believed that this was an objective reality revealed by his scientific methods, above all by Game Theory.  But these very methods contained within them bleak, paranoid assumptions about what human beings were really like, assumptions borne out of the hostilities of the Cold War.  ibid.  

 

The system that was trying to control your mind and destroy your freedom … What Laing and the counter-culture were doing was tearing down Britain’s institutions in the name of freedom.  ibid.  

 

A group of right-wing economists in America now put forward a theory why this was happening.  At the heart of their idea was Game Theory.  They said that the fundamental reality of life in society was one of millions of people continually watching and strategising against each other, all seeking only their own advantage.  An assumption had become a truth.  The self-interested model of human behaviour that had been developed in the Cold War to make the mathematical equations work had now been adopted by these economists as a fundamental truth about the reality of all human social interaction.  ibid.  

 

Public Choice theory … James Buchanan: ‘no meaningful concept that could be called the public interest.’  ibid.  

 

Psychiatry, said Laing, was a fake science used as a system of political control to shore up a violent collapsing society.  Its categories of madness and sanity had no reality.  Madness was simply a convenient label used to lock away those who wanted to break free.  ibid.

 

All human judgment would be removed and replaced instead by a system based on the power of numbers; they gave up on the idea they could understand the human mind and cure it; instead, American psychiatry created a new set of measurable categories that were only based on the surface behaviour of human beings.  ibid. 

 

More than 50% of Americans suffered from some type of mental disorder.  ibid. 

 

This new system of psychological disorders had been created by a an attack on the arrogance and power of the psychiatric elite in the name of freedom.  But what was beginning to emerge from this was a new form of control: the disorders and checklists were becoming a powerful and objective guide to what were the correct and appropriate feelings in an age of individualism and emotion.  ibid. 

 

In November 1989 the Berlin Wall collapsed and the Cold War was finally over.  A new era of freedom had begun.  The shape that freedom was going to take would be defined by the victors – the West, and as this programme has shown, the idea of freedom that had now become dominant in the West was deeply rooted in the suspicion and paranoia of the Cold War.  ibid.

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