Poker News 
/ Short-Stacked Shamus / 25 March 2011 / Leave a Comment 
"To play poker with a joker is a lower-class game."
Such was the lesson taught to young John Lukacs by his mother in Hungary in the 1930s. Lukacs tells of his early poker-playing days in a 1963 essay titled "Poker and American Character."
The family played what Lukacs calls "classic draw poker" with no wild cards, although occasionally they would discard the lower cards (playing with less than a standard 52-card deck), thereby increasing the likelihood of making higher hands. In any event, the rejection of wild cards, coupled with his mother's "superciliously" objecting to their inclusion, revealed to Lukacs "a slight but appreciable class difference between the several varieties of the game."
In the essay Lukacs goes on to relate the experience of his first coming to America in his early 20s (in 1946) where he'd become a professor of history and embark upon a lengthy academic career which would see him author dozens of books on a variety of subjects.
"I had many illusions about the United States," Lukacs says of his earlier self, adding how "these illusions included poker." Like many, Lukacs saw poker as somehow emblematic of American culture. He recalls hearing a radio broadcast during the second world war profiling General Dwight Eisenhower (later to become president) that reported how he liked to play poker.
"This piece of precious intelligence about the new Supreme Allied Commander filled us with great joy and hope," writes Lukacs. "A poker-playing general, we agreed, would be a general with nonchalance and dash and that loose-limbed, easygoing, natural elegance of action characteristic of Americans." In other words, knowing that Eisenhower played poker seemed to endorse further his capability to lead.
Hearing that also further reinforced for Lukacs that strong connection between the game and America, "the fatherland of poker... the classic country of poker, where everybody plays poker." Whatever life in the U.S. would be like, thought Lukacs, one thing was certain. There would be poker.
Cut to 1963. Lukacs, writing his essay about "Poker and American Character," is forced to admit that poker as he imagined it being played was, in fact, one of those "illusions about the United States" that proved less than accurate. People were playing a card game that involved betting and calling it poker, all right. But to Lukacs the game wasn't really poker at all, "its relationship to poker [being] about as distant as that of General Lee's horse, Traveller, to Eisenhower's bubble-top limousine -- no; to his electric golf cart."
What was the problem? Wild cards. Jokers, gleefully grinning from the cards' surface as though mocking the "classic" game Lukacs once played.
According to Lukacs, every time he joined a game he was almost always forced to endure these non-traditional, wild card variants. "In seventeen years," he complains, "I have been able to organize a classic, or draw, poker game but once. At best, I have been able to compromise, on a one-sixth or one-seventh basis, meaning that when we play dealer's choice, I choose five-card draw on my turn."
Lukacs goes on to explain his predilection, his argument implicitly reprising his mother's earlier statement about "lower-class" forms of poker. By introducing wild cards, he points out, "the human factor is weakened and the factor of chance is correspondingly increased." In other words, skill becomes less important, and luck more so. "It becomes a gambling game," says Lukacs.
But there's more going on here than just a degrading of the game, argues the historian. "In this development I see reflected the erosion of the American national character," says Lukacs, connecting the rise of wild card games with a "gross inflation of values," "a form of immaturity," and a "strange kind of grown-up disorderliness covering up what is fundamentally an adolescent attitude."
It's a provocative argument which certainly seems to ring true in some respects. By increasing the importance of luck in poker and decreasing the skill component -- making it more of a "gambling game" -- Lukacs believes it becomes a much less worthy or defensible pursuit, perhaps less "adult" and more "adolescent" or childish. And since for him poker is so intimately connected with America, such a development doesn't speak well for the national character.
Here Lukacs sounds a great deal like the character of Mr. Brush in James Thurber's hilarious poker-themed short story "Everything Is Wild." First published in 1932 in The New Yorker, the story presents an irritable Brush being dragged by his wife to a dinner party that eventually evolves into a poker game involving three couples.
Like Lukacs, Brush is a strict proponent of "classic draw poker," and thus couldn't be more miserable when the others propose "adolescent," wild-card games like Duck-in-the-Pond, Poison Ivy, and seven-card stud with twos and threes wild. When Mrs. Spear announces the latter game, "the women all gave little excited screams," adding considerably to Brush's despair.
Brush gets his revenge, however. After calling straight draw poker on his first turn, he has an inspiration the next time around. "We'll play Soap-in-Your-Eye this time," he says, adding that "Out West they call it Kick-in-the-Pants." What follows is a side-splittingly funny -- and utterly incoherent -- hand of poker in which "red queens, the fours, fives, sixes, and eights are wild" and other murky instructions about betting rules cause utter confusion for everyone but Brush.
In the end, the three players remaining in the hand all make royal flushes, "but mine is spades, and is high" explains Brush to poor Mrs. Spear, since by her calling his bet he was awarded the right to name his suit. The story ends with Mrs. Brush telling her husband he is a "terrible person," her reprimand having little effect on his good mood.
Like Lukacs, Brush saw the degradation of the game with wild cards as representing "a form of immaturity," an unseemly (perhaps "lower-class") activity he couldn't bear to endure. You can almost imagine the conservative-minded Brush, faced with the prospect of having to sit with adults and play such childish games, crying out the story's title -- "Everything Is Wild" -- as not just a reference to the games the others are calling but a complaint about the culture as a whole deteriorating in much the way Lukacs is describing.
It would be interesting to know what Lukacs thinks of games that have become popular since he wrote his essay -- games like no-limit Texas hold'em, pot-limit Omaha, or the various poker tournaments with structures that perhaps tip the balance toward luck and away from skill. And how those games might reflect upon the character of those who play them.
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