Poker's Back

My earliest memory of addiction was 2003. I was 14 and home on summer break. The World Series of Poker was airing on ESPN and ESPN 2. I couldn’t get enough.

I spent hours binge-watching Chris Moneymaker best 838 other players in the $10,000 Main Event. His story was legend: Moneymaker was an amateur player who booked his ticket to the Main Event by winning a $40 satellite tournament. He was the American dream, working hard with what he had, using a combination of skill and good fortune to make his way to the top.

By this time, I was pretty aware that I wasn’t going to make it as a professional athlete, and I needed another dream to latch onto. Poker was competitive, could be just as lucrative, and didn’t have a time limit. Playing cards seemed like an ideal way to make a living. When I was in high school, Moneymaker, Greg Raymer, and Joe Hachem became household names: they were all amateurs who turned low-limit hobbies into multi-million-dollar ventures and became as recognizable as some of the athletes I grew up watching.

As far as I remember, the programming seemed tailored to high school kids who weren’t legally allowed to enter a casino. The tournament aired during the summer, and reruns were on tv for hours at a time after school and before bed. In theory, there was time for adults to watch, but the only people I remember tuning in with any interest were me and my friends (teenagers). Collectively, our generation watched and helped create the poker boom.

Poker became a go-to activity in a town where there wasn’t much to do. We’d play on weekends, after games and practices, during school breaks, and snow days. Games included kids from different social groups and grades. We played on felt, ping pong, and dining room tables. A few of us had our own chips and worked after hours on shuffling checks. We were experts at looking like we knew what we were doing, and those games account for some of my fondest memories.

My parents were wary of me playing poker. They called it gambling, which was accurate. But I was only able to see it as a game I enjoyed, that happened to require money to play. In my head--big difference. Before I learned the value of money, I was focused on making more of it by taking chances. Fortunately, the games never got too out of hand and my lifetime winnings are probably as much as I’ve lost. Poker has mostly amounted to nothing more than good times with friends with a few pennies involved.

Thanks to the pandemic, poker’s recently reentered my life in the form of home games hosted on a third party site. A handful of the players are friends I grew up playing cards with, plus their friends and colleagues. For the most part, we’re products of the WSOP poker boom. For people who don’t play that often anymore, we still know far too much than we should and the contests are grinds. The programming seems to have stuck.