the black deck

I opened a deck of cards today.

…

Not just any deck of cards. I bought this deck of cards roughly a year ago. At that time in my life, I had taken an obsessive interest in playing poker, and I had set out to buy a new deck of Bicycle cards. Bicycle is a famous card company, they have paper cards that feel great, and have this neat air-pocket technology that lets them slide across the surface you’re dealing on. Great production value for the $5 or so you spend on a deck. I remember the event of buying this deck, it came in a promotional three pack, with identical designs on the back, save for the varying colours of the ink used on the design. There’s the blue and red decks, which are standard Bicycle colours, but this set came with a black deck, which, I had never seen before.

Let me first say that, in that moment, I was awe-struck. I had always played with Bicycle cards, and I had always thought, “Gee, wouldn’t it be fuckin sexy if they had a black deck, since I love black, and blah blah blah…”

I brought my 3-pack home, opened it up, and opened the red deck first. It served me well. I played poker with that deck until the cards were so scummy they stuck together, and the edges of the cards were black with debris and dirt. (No, I was not playing cards in a swamp. I just played a LOT of cards.)

I opened the blue deck maybe 4 months ago, and it was a lackluster event. I opened it up and worked it in within hours, since when I play online poker, I like to shuffle chips or cards to keep me focused and keep my hands busy. I didn’t even notice that deck’s coronation, and I almost felt like I didn’t do it justice. As if to make up the poor reception to the deck, I brought it with me on a plane trip to vegas, and I think the gesture healed my relationship with the blue deck. Today, it’s still my go-to deck of cards.

But this story is not about the blue deck. This story is about the snapshot in time, about half an hour ago, when I opened the black deck.

My baby; my prize. I cracked that dusty plastic wrapper off, and held it under a soft yellow light. The ink on the cardboard deck box was gorgeous. I normally cut the sticker seal with a knife, but for the black deck, I peeled it off, gently, leaving no residue behind. The sticker took 5 minutes.

I pulled out that deck, so pristine and orderly. A-K diamonds, A-K clubs, K-A hearts, K-A Spades. I thumbed through the cards one by one, till I found that Jack of Spades, my favourite card. I talked myself out of framing that Jack on my wall and throwing the whole deck out. I still might do it; in fact, I probably will.

This probably sounds weird, so I’m gonna jump tracks for a second here. Poker, in my estimation, is a perfect game. Before I had decided Poker was the best game in existence, I had previously crowned Chess as the champion. Games like checkers are too limited in your options. Sports tend to be great to watch and fun to play, but they are too unbalanced. If a 9′5″, 270lb. basketball player existed, he’d be playing in the NBA and he’d break the game. Or a 750lb, 5′ wide hockey goaltender. It’s too heavily dependent on a specific selection of innate abilities.

Most games are games like Go Fish, or Sorry! It’s mostly pure luck, with very shallow strategy, and I can’t even handle those games. In those games, you are irrelevant to the outcome, it doesn’t matter who is rolling the dice or drawing the card - unless you’re cheating, you’re a spectator.

I used to like chess for two reasons. One, at the highest levels of the game, analysis and mathematics lose to creative and artistic play. The analog defeats the digital. And two, I liked the idea that although mathematical structure is found in every tactic or strategy, the tactics and strategies apply directly to our perception of life, our philosophy. If you don’t see the correlation, check out Bobby Fischer’s essays on chess; he is an eloquent and insightful individual, and there is no doubt in my mind that the reason that he (and I too, although to a much lesser degree) see the game as poetry in motion, or as a lesson of life, than we do as a competition.

Poker, to my eyes, crushes chess on every level. For starters, the very best computer simulations fail miserably at keeping pace with any professional poker player. The creative mind destroys the computer, even when playing again an inanimate computer is the very worst sort of poker. Seriously, on the computer’s turf, the human absolutely crushes the computer.

Next, look at what we’ve done, in creating this game. We took a finite universe (52 cards, 5 card hand, mathematical and physical properties of the odds and permutations of the deal, and systematically more valuable hand rankings based directly off the rarity of the hands), and relegated the entire game to a plane of communication, strategy, thinking, EXISTING that is totally separate to it!

This is why you never play the cards, you play the man. Because everything he says to you is a lie, everything is designed to confuse and deceive you - at face value, on a physical plane, in a finite universe, that makes things rough. If you sit in the physical world, while playing poker, the game seems TOTALLY absurd. You get dealt random cards, you cannot change what you have, you cannot get a straight answer out of anyone, and you are asked to stake money on decisions made while in this insane situation.

And yet, we get all the information we need to make rational, creative decisions and strategy!

And yet, in the realm of the emotional, the psychological… if you play there, you’re not playing anymore, you’re living. You’re functioning on the highest form of communication we’ve discovered - empathy. Rational and assisted recreation of emotion, on a subconscious level, to instill in the receiver of a communication a tangible and well-charted understanding of the degree and impact of the emotional experience had by the sender of a communication.

I sit down at a poker table, and every part of my soul comes alive. My own personality shuts right off - I have no room for it. I am asking, in a deep and spiritual way, for everyone at that table to please, let me in, let me meet them, know them, connect with them. I’m asking them personal questions, questions they don’t ask themselves: “Do you believe in yourself? What threatens and scares you? Are you in over your head? Are you *always* in over your head?” And I’m open, listening, ready to receive anything they might send my way.

Anyone who’s every been in love and had the presence of mind to realize it probably recognizes this sensory awareness I’m talking about. Poker is perceived as a masculine, balls to the walls kind of game, but I play the game in the feminine. There is no ego, only understanding. There is no competition for me - I only want to cooperate with your needs, your beliefs. I’m not trying to win: I’m trying to live in that poker game with taoist freedom, impartial as nature, accepting and yielding wherever there is force, and tightening when I feel slack.

Learning to play poker is the same thing as learning martial arts, which is the same thing as learning how to live, feel, think, and explore our lives. I think we’re all capable of that, which is why we see the diversity of people that we do enjoying poker all over the world. I doubt they’d all agree that they experience the game like I do, but I’d suggest that at the soul of the game, the attraction to the game is bright and breathtaking for all the reasons I explore here.

I opened the black deck and I saw only opportunity. I saw the shimmering, sexy dress of a beautiful woman, the packaging and pathway to my most adored style of living. I saw a hand-carved, lovingly constructed wood and glass frame for the only painting I ever bought, and I saw my face in the crowd, my Jack, my choice - standing out in the sea of reds and blacks.

It’s gorgeous, and after a year of anticipation, it was and is everything I hoped.

~ Driz

~ by drizitche on January 22, 2008.