I hate the “… For Dummies Books”

They have become so ubiquitous that I must confess to having one on my bookshelf (It was given to me. Just so we’re clear!). It infuriates me to no end that people spend money on books that say in the very title that they are completely dumbed down. Why would one buy a poker book on that level? There are tons of great books out there written by incredible poker players that give their personal insights.

Even for a person that doesn’t read much, they are still better off going straight to the primary sources. I mean Phil Helmuth and Doyle Brunson might be amazing poker players, but neither they nor their ghost writers are T.S. Eliot. The language is pretty easy to understand.

So please don’t patronize these asinine books that only add to the dumbing down of our culture. Read something with at least some semblance of intelligence. If you’re going to do something, like play poker, you owe it to yourself to do it right.

This article (The “Ladies” Event at the World Series of Poker) is a bit old (last month) but it raises some questions that transcend poker that are no less relevant.

Basically, the author highlights the fact that men cannot be excluded from the women’s championship at the world series of poker. Casinos are no more able to keep men from plating than they would be from barring women from the main event. And indeed men do play.

This brings up a whole host of notions about gender and equality. Is it even worthwhile to have a women’s main event if it is not really exclusively for women? It seems that there are not many men who play, I suppose out of some notion of decorum, but a few go right ahead and disregard the spirit of the tournament and try to pick up an extra bracelet. But is this whole notion of needing a women’s division fro something like poker obsolete? Does its continued existence merely highlight an attitude of victim hood that is detrimental to the status of women in society? I can’t say I have a clear cut opinion on the matter at this point. But obviously this tournament shows just one example of how society does seem to be moving in a direction of equality is becoming more prominent than singling out individual groups for assistance. Which, in the end, is the aim of movements that instantiated them in the first place.

In this post I will relate the card table demeanor of the shat man himself. I think this picture is a pretty good encapsulation of it…

(more…)