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Douglas Tirola: I just like poker. But maybe more importantly, I like the idea of poker. Or what poker represents in terms of someone living on the outside of society, like a more working-class guy’s version of a punk. To me, poker in some odd way relates to all of that outsider status.
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I think for the older guys—the Doyle [Brunsons], the Amarillo Slims, even Chris Moneymaker—there’s a desire to live outside the structure of society. There’s a level of that with some of the younger online players, but they might not recognize it as much. I think a lot more of them—and this is probably just the way our society is today—are focused on the money part of it. Obviously everybody wanted to win money, everybody wants to make money, but I think the older group was more like, “I want to make enough money to just do this forever,” and they know there’s going to be ups and downs. They all talk about going broke. The young guys compare it to day trading, like, “I could have gone to Wall Street, but I’m doing this.” The old guys weren’t thinking that because they never could have adapted socially.Ira Glass:
One thing I learned from your movie is that Chris Moneymaker was this horrible, degenerate gambling addict, not a “regular guy.” Do you think a lot of these players are just addicts who have found a way to make it work?
I think you're exactly right. A lot of poker players are gamblers at heart. If it wasn't poker, it would be something else. We certainly have a lot of stories from the movie where people would win a tournament and go straight to the craps table or the roulette table and blow it. But a lot of them have curbed that instinct because they have seen themselves essentially become celebrities, and I think the lure of becoming a celebrity and becoming famous keeps them a little bit more in check.
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I think during the time we made the film, that belief was debunked, or maybe the casinos just changed their view. I think the casinos realized, “This online thing was just recruiting new people that will eventually come to our casinos.” The universal conspiracy theory that a lot of online players believe is that the casinos were more against just the specific leaders in the industries being PokerStars and Full Tilt Poker, and that they wanted those shut down, even if that meant shutting down online poker temporarily to get rid of them from the market, and that eventually poker would be legal online and the casinos would take over those businesses. So imagine if you wanted to start a new burger place and you’re like, “God, it’d be a lot easier if McDonald’s and Burger King went away.”That’s a conspiracy theory, but it’s not especially far-fetched when you’re talking about casino operators.
We have this whole metaphor between Wall Street and poker in the movie, and the Wall Street banks influence the government to do bailouts and all this other stuff, so the idea of business getting involved with government is much more at the forefront of people’s minds now. Years ago you’d go, “Wait, casinos don’t even want to talk to the government because government attention for them can only be bad.” But now you see them lobbying for things just like IBM would.Bert Sugar:
Want more poker? Read this:
A Eulogy for Online Poker@HCheadle
