Rice Grad asks: Is poker a sport?

Professor Bainbridge's readers are correct; clearly not.

It was fashionable in my class on Sport, Society, and Science for professors to entertain questions like this seriously. Indeed, I made the embarrassing mistake of entertaining questions like this seriously last February. [Updated answer for the record: No, of course chess is not a sport. Don't be silly.]

Anyway, I have come to discard my previous hesitation and error thanks to listening to Ted Cohen discuss Wittgenstein. We make an error, he convinces me, when we try to figure out the one thing all games or sports have in common. This is to assume that all things that fit into the class of "games" or "sports" have something incommon. But it is quite possible that we must rely on some degree of hand-waving film-flam or disjunctive definition. So be it. Shooting, archery, steeplechase, bowling are sports. Chess, poker are not. They are "mere" games.

But this is not really the critical question about poker that I promised in the title. The critical question is: What on earth possesses somebody who gets dealt 2-6 off-suit to pay the small blind (five cents) to see a flop? Upon seeing 10, 4, 7, what inspires him to bet? Upon finding a caller, what inspires him to bet twice as much on the turn? Upon keeping his rather unshakable and intrigued caller, what inspires him to push all-in when he is playing the board's 10-high? And what allows him to finish the night, despite losing that hand, without losing his shirt?

When I understand the answers to these questions, I will understand my own tight-confused style of play much better.

One last post on Czeslaw Milosz-- I have always had a strong preference for autobiography over biography, not because people's stories about themselves can necessarily be trusted, but because what they say is still so revealing.

At any rate, Czeslaw Milosz, on himself, from Milosz's ABCs (2001):

Hatred: ...it required a great deal of stupidity to act differently from my colleagues in literary circles and to flee to the West, which was convinced of its own decadence. The dangers of such a flight are described very well in these lines from Hamlet, applied to the Cold War:

'Tis dangerous when the baser nature comes
Between the pass and fell incensed points
Of mighty opposites.

To be despised and triumphant in the course of a single life, to wait for the time when it would become aparent that my enemies who made up disgusting things about me had made terrible things of themselves. What interests me most in all of this is the difference between our image of ourselves and our image in others' eyes. Obviously, we improve upon ourselves, while our opponents seek to strike even imaginary weak spots. I muse over my portrait that emerges from songs of hatred, in verse and prose. A lucky guy. The sort for whom everything goes smoothly. Incredibly crafty. Self-indulgent. Loves money. Not an iota of patriotic feeling. Indifferent to the fatherland, which he has traded in for a suticase. Effete. An aesthete, who cares about art, not people. Venal. Impolitic (he wrote The Captive Mind). Immoral in his personal life (he exploits women). Contemptuous. Arrogant. And so forth.

...What is most striking is that it is the image of a strong, shrewd man, whereas I know my own weakness and I am inclined to consider myself, rather, as a tangle of reflexes, a drunken child in the fog.

The U.S. won a gold medal in women's saber. (The first U.S. fencing medal since Peter Westbrook's 1984 saber bronze; the first U.S. women's fencing medal ever.)

And hats, the New York Times tells us, "are making a comeback".

As a saber-fencing hat-lover, you would think I would have something substantive to say about these developments other than, "'bout time."

[Nor do I have much to say to the Slithery D's anti-fencing blasphemy; at a very high level, parrying is fairly rare because footwork and distance-keeping are so dominantly important. But at the large intermediate level (where I flatter myself that I belong), parrying is generally underused, and a good way to make short work with minimal effort.]

Some time ago I blogged about the ESPN-LEZ-Scrabble-championship fiasco, at the behest of Slithery D.

Nick Tam, who was at the tournament, and whose post I linked to at the time, has returned and posted more.

As he makes clear and I did not, the serious controversy had to do with the fact that A: The offensive words, unlike normally non-playable words, were unplayable even if unchallenged (for obvious reasons), and B: Wright had already selected his new tiles when LEZ was deemed unplayable (as a partial consequence of A).

The issue that made this a controversy of note to the players was not the ESPN censorship rule, but rather its enforcement. (Of course, the censorship is part of what made the story so interesting to the press and the bloggers who covered it.)

[UPDATE below!]

Lithwick (mentioned below) also wrote:

Re-activists like another Bush nominee, Janice Rogers Brown, have called the Supreme Court's shift toward defending New Deal legislation in 1937 the start of "the triumph of our socialist revolution."

You describe the year 1937, the year in which President Roosevelt's new deal legislation started taking effect, as quote, "The triumph of our socialist revolution."

I'd ask a follow up question on your comparison of the post-Lochner era to a socialist revolution.

(T)he Revolutions of 1917 and 1937. The latter date marks the triumph of our own socialist revolution. ... Protection of property was a major casualty of the Revolution of 1937. The paradigmatic case, written by that premiere constitutional operative, William O. Douglas, is Williamson v. Lee Optical.23 The court drew a line between personal rights and property rights or economic interests, and applied two different constitutional tests. Rights were reordered and property acquired a second class status.24 If the right asserted was economic, the court held the Legislature could do anything it pleased. Judicial review for alleged constitutional infirmities under the due process clause was virtually nonexistent.

In Sunday's Conservative-judges-are-activisits-too NYT column, Dahlia Lithwick wrote:

Re-activist judges are able to present themselves as "strict constructionists" or "originalists" by arguing, as does Justice Clarence Thomas, that any case decided wrongly (i.e., not in accordance with the framers of the Constitution) should simply be erased, as though erasure is somehow a passive act.

From Alex Kozinski's What's So Fair About Fair Use?:

[I]f the district court had thought it necessary, it was even authorized under section 503 to have all copies of the O.J. book impounded and destroyed.

Think about this for a moment. Congress has given courts the power to order books burned. In a legal regime as jealously protective of freedoms of speech and press as ours, this ought to give us some pause. What’s that you say? Classified documents about our Vietnam war effort have been stolen from the Pentagon and given to the newspapers? You want an injunction to avoid risking the death of soldiers, the destruction of alliances, the prolongation of war? No way, Jose; this is the land of the brave and the home of the free. But wait a minute--did you say someone drew a picture of O.J. Simpson wearing a goofy stovepipe hat? Light the bonfires, it’s Nuremberg time!