The Lord of Misrule

Some attend the World Series Of Poker for its carnival atmosphere. The Rio Hotel & Casino is a natural setting for it, since the WSOP has grown to resemble a Brazilian event. Not only is it huge, crowded, noisy, and highly decorated, the people are often well-decorated too.

In the tournament rooms you’ll see poker players wearing costumes; you’ll also see costumes on non-combatants, in the hallways.

Why are they dressing up?

Because the WSOP is part festival. Traditionally, big contests and shows of skill were always part of holiday celebrations, and in days of yore these contests included foot-races, wrestling, games, and more. Poker is a uniquely American contest. These days, it’s true, we don’t observe most of the holidays we did long ago, as these were largely religious holidays -- such as saint’s days -- or seasonal, such as the Winter or Summer Solstice. It may be we are losing our connection with the seasons, the turning of the year, and the natural world. But for poker players, the World Series of Poker is one long contest which anchors us in the year. We can feel the summer approaching along with it; and summer, conversely, brings the WSOP to us. It’s become tied to the changing of our seasons, and when that happens, we are inspired to celebrate.

Celebrations in Las Vegas are prone to run wild with abandon. The World Series sometimes does pick up the scent of badness, like something in your refrigerator sitting next to the garlic. Given that this year’s WSOP Gaming Expo featured a dunk tank for strippers among the exhibits, it’s not unreasonable to compare the WSOP to the festival of Saturnalia, in ancient Rome:

Saturnalia, a holiday in honor of the god Saturn, was celebrated in mid-December, around the Winter Solstice. Everything was turned on its head: slaves were free for the day, and could be made into mock owners; masters waited on their own servants; slaves ran about in the streets and the villages and everyone drank heavily. A lord of the Saturnalia, the Lord of Misrule, was named. Amidst this wildness, a sort of mock government held sway.

Now, zoom forward in time about fourteen hundred years. ... In villages of old England, the Lord of Misrule was still around; still bearing the same title, he was a person chosen to rule over the chaos of pre-Christmas. Christmas itself brought so much solemnity that the aim of this celebration was to mock the seriousness of the Xmas rituals. (We can’t seem to help it; it’s the devil in us.) And this Master of Lack-of-Ceremony, Misrule, whatever you wanted to call him, was accompanied in the streets by people wearing costumes such as the hobby-horse, dragon or monster costumes, madmen’s or jester’s clothes, with bells, pipes, drums, and so on. (A good illustration can be seen in the film The Wicker Man with Edward Woodward.)

Now: Come back to our time and look around at the World Series in Vegas. Costumes in the WSOP tournament hall are a common sight. Some of these costumes are of characters: No dragons or hobbyhorses to speak of, but Elvis appears yearly, and we’ve seen Elmo, and the Pink Bunny for Goldenpalace.com. And we certainly have jesters and madmen -- just look at the hats.

It is fitting too that the final tables of the WSOP are being held in tents. The favored few within the Bluff Sequestrium should think of it as a tent pitched over the king’s court -- when they watch a joust or something. The final winner? Our mock king.

The Power of the Hat

Speaking of hats, the last couple of years have been excellent ones for hats at the poker tables, especially during the WSOP Main Event. (Pictures) Some are trademark ones: those on the heads of Minneapolis Jim Meehan, Doyle Brunson, Chris Ferguson, Amy Calistri, for instance. Whether the hat is the person’s habitual style, or that a particular hat is necessary for branding or recognition, it remains largely the same. Daniel Negreanu will change only the letters on his cap; Dutch Boyd will wear an alternate do-rag. Others at the tables, however, choose hats that surprise. I believe it was at the 2005 World Series longtime player Patti Beadles wore a big scarlet -- or maybe it was fuschia -- hat, wide-brimmed, which coordinated with her fuschia hair. The sight of it made me hope that in successive tournaments her hats would become bigger, grander and more elaborate every year -- like Bartholomew Cubbins’-- but at the 2006 WSOP she wore merely a pink fedora. Sadly, the fedora was not bigger than her hair.

There may be some power in a hat, even if it’s not what the wearer claims. Maybe it’s a little like a rack of antlers on a deer -- manifest power, if you can wield it. And when a player can concentrate well on his game without constantly readjusting -- his hat -- then I’m impressed. Take Randy Kaas, for example.

From Phoenix, AZ, Randy represented Bodog as a member of Team Bodog for WSOPs 2005 and 2006; he qualified online. Finished 262nd place in the ME in 2005. He is a chef and proud of it. He created a line of cooking utensils called the "Pourfect" system which he’d just gotten onto the market in 2005. (It’s sold on www.chefscatalog.com, and he's working on inventing more cooking and baking items.) I never saw him without his hat -- his toque, as he’ll correct you -- and never saw it wobble.

He talks playfully, fancifully, about himself and the Toque and the power it lent him. In 2005, he said, "The table {he started Day 2 of Main Event} told me my presence was intimidating... that my hat -- my toque -- was overpowering to the table and they were unable to play against me... I was able to do a lot of stealing, and be the bully of the table." ... "Even though they loved me, I felt, I was able to take advantage of the table."

Yes, there’s something to a hat.

The Power of Other Stuff

What other things do players take with them to the poker table? The sunglasses have been discussed to death, and the combo of hat/dark glasses or hood/dark glasses is also well explained elsewhere. These serve to hide a player’s reactions. Hiding, with a side of cool.

Lucky items include favorite card protectors, such as Greg Raymer’s fossil. Yeah, it’s really lucky if your cards aren’t swept up by the dealer by mistake. Then there are lucky shirts, lucky clothes; Freddy Deeb jokingly credited his “magic shirt” with his $50,000 H.O.R.S.E. tournament win. Lucky shirts it seems are generally loud, and sometimes unlaundered.

Monkey Business

Wil Wheaton (of Team PokerStars, but best known as the actor who played Wesley Crusher on StarTrek TNG) carries one of the more unusual talismans to the poker table -- a stuffed toy monkey. This item is highly appropriate, given Wheaton’s extensive internet life. The poker boom (or viral infection, as Dr. Pauly calls it), driven by the internet, has populated the big-money tournaments with online players, some of whom have never played a live game. The nature of internet poker has produced some remarkable players and brought altogether new names to fame. These newbies are often referred to as monkeys.

“A field of 3,000 monkeys” -- Minneapolis Jim Meehan.

There are some people who refer to themselves as monkeys -- the internet aficionado, the gamer, the internet geek, the writer, the blogger, the programmer. Wil is probably all of these, as well as a poker player. (In addition to his blog and books in print, he’s written features such as some very funny episode summaries of StarTrek The Next Generation. Occasionally, he appears in internet comics such as the amazing DieselSweeties.) These groups of people who call themselves monkeys are paying homage to the Infinite Monkey Theorem -- which says, generally, that an infinite number of monkeys typing randomly on an infinite number of typewriters eventually will produce the works of Shakespeare. To call yourself part of the monkey population is to befriend your own insignificance. You are one of the many millions of people on the web, typing away. Those millions, considered together, are not infinite but are powerful.

Why the monkey?

Writers and artists who have drawn inspiration from the Infinite Monkey Theorem include Jorges Luis Borges, whose story “Pierre Menard, Author of The Quixote,” describes an imaginary writer who has randomly produced a book which is the same as Cervantes’ Don Quixote, word for word.

Cartoonists are fond of the Theorem too. In the online comic Goats, the main characters visit a world which is written & edited by infinite monkeys. See: Goats Archive 050707 This panel is strangely reminiscent of “The Watchers in the Glade,” a 1964 science fiction story by Richard Wilson. The story goes: Marooned on another planet, a small group of earthlings -- former journalists -- are slowly going mad. They sit in an alien field, doing nothing but waiting until sundown (and death), while one of them feels compelled to keep a running journal of their empty days. He works on a typewriter in the grass. It’s the last days of Man -- and he would be blogging, if only he were online.

We took this segue from poker only to come right back: It was just last year that PokerShare.com sponsored Mikey, the poker-playing chimpanzee in the WSOP. Do we -- those of us who play on the internet, anyway -- see ourselves in him, in a stripped-down form?

Internet poker certainly pushes the point home about infinity. Online, players can see many more hands per hour than in live games, and this fact provokes the litany, “It’s rigged...” Perhaps sitting at the computer confronted by questions of randomness, infinity, and software we can’t really fathom, we feel a little like the simians we used to be.

Maybe we need some serious help. Sooner or later, perhaps on Wil’s blog, you may run across the phrase monkey mojo. Mojo -- a word borrowed from voodoo and other magic -- originally refers to a small bag containing the ingredients used in a spell. It’s your bag of luck, your power. Austin Powers movies aside, a mojo is generally worn around the neck. Luck spells often use roots like the High John the Conqueror root or the mojo hand root, which looks like a tiny human hand.

An internet monkey might be considered to have mojo or power precisely because of his underdog, come-from-behind, less-is-more nature. There’s nothing more fearsome than strength coming from an unexpected faction.

In the world of voodoo and African magic, gamblers belong to an unlikely faction too. Because gambling games are associated with the devil, gamblers stand in the devil’s shoes, in a sense. What is considered lucky for the devil is also lucky for the gambler. The color black, usually considered unlucky, is for the gambler a lucky color. Black cats and black candles also become lucky.

According to the folklore, green is a lucky color for when you’re gambling or for money wishes in general. White is supposed to be unlucky for the gambler.

If you travel a lot in the East, especially Japan, you may have seen red silk fabric draped on statues of deities. The drapery isn’t there because John Ashcroft visited, it’s there because the color red is associated with those deities and with fighting illness -- smallpox in particular. In the novel Shipwrecks by Akira Yoshimura, a small village sees a large ship founder and wreck, so they drag the ship in to make use of the bounty. The villagers find that everyone on board is dead, the corpses all dressed in bright red silk clothes. The dead were smallpox victims, set to drift on the ocean to meet their fate. The red silk is a final plea to the gods to expel the demons who bring illness.

Now here's something weird. The Japanese word for monkey is the same word as one meaning "expel," as in expelling evil spirits. Monkey images often serve as charms to ward off demons and illness.

And finally we can’t forget The Simpsons and Mojo, a personal helper monkey which Homer adopted from a lab. This monkey was however NOT lucky; he adopted Homer’s habits and ate so many doughnuts he couldn’t move. Sent back to the lab, Mojo types on a keyboard to communicate with lab assistants. “Pray for Mojo,” he says. There’s that typing monkey again.

So, if you want to enhance your poker performance this summer, you might: Wear a giant hat, light a black or green candle, wear black clothes, make friends with a black cat and get some of its hair on your clothing, wear a red shirt, carry a monkey charm -- especially a red monkey charm, wear a bag around your neck filled with lucky roots, use a dried High John the Conqueror root as your card protector... or you could, you know... work on your poker strategy.~~