You Took Little Children Away from the Sun and the Dew . for a Little Handful of Pay on a Few Saturday Nights

Some of the hobbyists made use of the card room economy. For others, poker seemed mostly a social activity. The house seemed to value them, striving to make them comfortable and keep them from going to rival card rooms. Although they didn't lose much as a group, they kept games going consistently for tourists who might walk in, and they used the restaurant steadily, which kept overhead down. Also, the card rooms seemed anxious to preserve a friendly image, advertising good meals and companionship rather than excitement and sex, like Las Vegas did at the time. If the hobbyists went away, the card rooms might look more threatening to the city of Gardena.

Both subsistence players and hobbyists tended to be older-most were over 65. They had some kind of outside income, which they supplemented through poker (subsistence players) or from which they funded poker as an entertainment expense. My guess is that these groups combined gained much more than they spent at Gardena. For one thing, they could take advantage of the tax-free discount goods and services available from other players. For another, they could spend all day socializing in comfortable surroundings with moderately priced meals, without the expenditure for front (clean clothes, a decent apartment, etc.) required in other social situations.

In Las Vegas, the loser is king. Casinos fall all over themselves to offer airplane tickets, free rooms and food, fancy shows, and other inducements to losers. That's why it seems odd that Gardena treated the tourists badly. There was no effort to attract them or to turn them into regulars, and no concern if they disappeared or went to a rival card room. The clubs don't run beginner's classes or other things to make it more comfortable to play. Gardena is not a place to play poker for fun.

Perhaps the clubs have figured out that it's too expensive to compete for tourists. These players generate steady profits, but they seem to come without encouragement. The biggest reason casinos lose money (yes, casinos often lose money) is that they go crazy competing for the losers. A monopoly casino, or a small group that cooperates to restrain competition, is a much better investment.

To complete the contrast with Las Vegas, the card rooms cater to winners as if they were star athletes. Las Vegas sets the rules to prevent winning. If someone outsmarts them-for example, by card counting in blackjack-the casinos do everything they can to exclude them. In Gardena, winners are treated with extra consideration, they are lent money or given employment as house players if they fall on hard times, and they get the most favorable rulings from floormen. If a winner considers changing card rooms after a bad spell, the house will bend over backward to prevent it, including offering to forgive all debts. Las Vegas does that only for losers.

Winners help the club's reputation, of course, which does attract some long-distance players (like me). But their main function is to protect the community from tourists. Most tourists can be handled by the hobbyists. If they start to win, the subsistence pros can take over. But if that doesn't work, each card room needs to have some of the top players in the world to bring in. The house may not rearrange seating to accomplish this, but if a tourist keeps winning, he will come up against his match. If that weren't true, top poker players from all over the world would keep showing up in Gardena until the game had such negative expectation to the community that it would fall apart. The winners are the hired guns elected sheriff to keep other gunmen away.

The most influential theorists in poker today-David Sklansky, Mason Malmuth, and Mike Caro, for example-made their names in these card rooms. This explains the focus on beating individual opponents. That was their main job. They could accept high-variance, random-walk results because they were embedded in a secure credit system (not secure like a portfolio of AAA bonds and a vault filled with gold, but secure enough to mean that if their abilities kept up, they would always have a stake). They didn't have to worry about the larger economic infrastructure; the card room did that for them.

This kind of environment makes for superlatively refined one-on-one competitive skills, but not the kind of balanced outlook needed in other poker situations. This isn't to say that the theorists don't have that balanced outlook, just that Gardena did nothing to encourage developing it.

Winners are mainly younger men, almost always divorced or never married. They are the best-educated group within the community. Unlike most of the other regulars, who have arrived at their destinations in life and will likely go down rather than up in the future, winners are usually on their way to something. Some want to become more successful professionals; others want to write books, or finish school, or invent something. Another reason the house is nice to them is that they leave sooner than other regulars, so they must be constantly replaced.

The biggest demographic difference between the winners and the break-even players is that the latter group is mostly married and includes some women. They also tend to be a bit older, less well educated, and less ambitious. Some of them may move up to become winners (also true of a few subsistence players), but most will not. Some make substantial income in private poker games and use high-stakes Gardena games to hone their skills. Others seem to be keeping one foot in the Gardena community as an escape route if the other part of their life turns bad.

This overall picture may be pretty depressing. The tourists are fleeced, and the hobbyists are just passing time away in windowless smoke-filled rooms with a red light every half hour to mean money is due. The subsistence players are eking out a very marginal living, and the action players are keeping noncompetitive businesses afloat with cheating. The break-even players are devoting tremendous skill and energy, and losing money in the process. Only the winners seem to have a good deal, and they are mostly trying to get somewhere else. However, consider the alternatives for many of these people.

We're going to dig a bit deeper into the poker economy, to find less depressing niches that make it work at least as well as your local bank, for you and for the community at large.

CHAPTER 5

Pokernomics

Дата добавления: 2015-10-26