Shuffle Up and Study

Poker News / Short-Stacked Shamus / 19 August 2011 / Leave a Comment

The summer is nearly over, which means it is time for many to head back to campus and fill those empty classrooms. I'll be going back, too, to teach my "Poker in American Film and Culture" class to a new group of college students. The course is in American Studies, and takes as its focus an examination of the history of poker (particularly in the U.S.) as well as cultural productions (films, stories, "Dogs Playing Poker," etc.) in which poker is of special importance. The main purpose of the class, then, is to use poker's story (and stories) to learn more about American history and culture.

Chronologically speaking, the history of poker roughly parallels the history of the U.S., with first references to the game coming in the early 19th century not long after the country declared its independence. In his Cowboys Full: The Story of Poker, James McManus fancifully offers July 4, 1803 -- the day the U.S. finalized the Louisiana Purchase with Napoleon, effectively doubling the country's size -- as a "symbolic birthdate" for poker.

Indeed, it was soon after that date that a card game resembling poker -- with 52 cards, drawing, betting, and bluffing -- was being played in New Orleans and soon thereafter spread across the newly-expanded nation. (Click here for a review of Cowboys Full and here for an interview with McManus.)

My course is divided into a number of different units. As I'll explain to the group next week when we meet for the first time, we'll begin as a history course, spending several weeks becoming acquainted with the story of poker as it evolves from the early 1800s to today. Then for a while the class will become more of a sociology or "cultural studies" course as we read and learn about the "culture of poker," particularly how poker changed from a game full of cheaters played in saloons and on riverboats into a (relatively) fairer game spread in licensed card rooms.

From there the class becomes a literature course, and during those weeks we'll read several stories as well as Jesse May's 1998 novel, Shut Up and Deal. (Click here for an interview with May where we talked specifically about his novel.) Then we'll watch some poker-themed movies, including The Cincinnati Kid (1965), California Split (1974), and Rounders (1998), during which stretch the class turns into an introductory film course.

The last part of the syllabus I reserve for "miscellaneous" topics. When I taught the course in the spring, this final unit happened to occupy the last two weeks of April. I had planned classes focusing on moral debates over gambling and poker, legal issues, and online poker.

We all remember how "Black Friday" (April 15) came along, suddenly and profoundly affecting online poker in the U.S. The events of that day also affected my class, with the three biggest online sites suddenly facing indictments and having to leave the U.S. obviously changing the way we discussed our scheduled topics. This time around I have a similar plan in mind for those last couple of weeks, although I have added a couple of extra "Black Friday"-related readings filling in details regarding the U.S. Department of Justice's indictments and its widespread consequences.

Putting together and teaching a class focusing on the history of poker has taught me a few interesting things about poker's present place in contemporary culture -- in America, especially, but elsewhere as well.

For one, the class has given me a different perspective on how a lot of people view poker. It's easy when covering tournaments, writing about poker all of the time, and playing whenever a game is available to forget that for a lot of people poker is not nearly as big a part of their lives as it is for some of us.

In fact, some of my students last spring were only casually interested in poker before taking the class. Sure, there were a number in the class who played online every day and were heavily into the game as players, but many were not. (Of course, with most sites no longer available to U.S. players, that will likely change this time around.) I like the fact that not everyone taking my class is going to be as immersed in poker as I am, since those students will be able to share a different, perhaps less narrow view regarding the game and its significance.

There is another way teaching the course has given me a broader perspective on poker and its place in contemporary culture.

So much has happened in poker over the last decade, particularly since the "boom" of 2003 caused by Chris Moneymaker's WSOP win, the rise of televised poker, and the (not coincidental) huge increase in popularity of online poker. Most of the major tournament series -- including some that seem to have always been around -- are only a few years old at most. Nearly all of the online sites are less than a decade old. And, of course, the "landscape" of poker has changed incredibly during that brief span as well.

That said, the game has been around a long time, with a couple of hundred years' worth of history preceding this last, wild decade. And in fact, while the growth in popularity of the game over recent years is certainly unprecedented, most everything else -- e.g., legal battles over poker, cheating scandals, poker's shifting back and forth from being accepted or even celebrated to being spurned or denounced -- is not.

In other words, the class has taught me that just like when your aces get cracked by kings, it's all happened before. Many times over.