SEPTEMBER 18, 2014
Posted by Drawing Dead · Label: Terminology · Permalink
A hand is drawing dead when there is no card left in the deck that can win it. Not unlikely to win. Not a long shot. Dead. The cards are still to come, the chips are still in front of the player, the timer is still counting down, and the outcome has already been decided by a board that has not finished falling.
It is one of the few phrases in the game that carries no ambiguity. Most poker language is hedged, because most poker situations are. A player is ahead or behind by a margin, favoured by a percentage, priced in or priced out. Drawing dead is the one description that admits no percentage at all, and that is exactly why it stays in the mouth long after the hand is folded.
Why it names a film
The phrase earns its place on a film about online poker because it describes something the players in that world recognise long before it happens to their cards. There is a state, familiar to anyone who has sat through a long losing session, in which the decisions are still being made carefully and the result is no longer in question. The hand is played out anyway. The buttons are still clicked in order.
Continue reading Drawing Dead: The Term Behind The Title
AUGUST 7, 2014
Posted by Drawing Dead · Label: Structure · Permalink
The film is built around two perspectives on the same activity: a poker pro, and a gambling addict. Both sit in front of a screen. Both open the same client, click the same buttons, watch the same cards fall in the same animation. From a camera's position behind the shoulder, the two are indistinguishable.
That indistinguishability is the structural problem and also the reason the structure works. A documentary about, say, two runners can show the difference between them in the first ten seconds of footage. A documentary about two people playing online poker cannot show the difference at all, because the difference is not in the hands or the posture or the room. It is in what the session is for.
Continue reading Two Chairs, One Screen
JUNE 24, 2014
Posted by Drawing Dead · Label: The Game · Permalink
Variance is the reason a good decision and a bad result can be the same event. It is also the single hardest thing to convey to anyone who has not sat through a long stretch of it, because from inside a session there is no visible boundary between being unlucky and being wrong.
The mathematics of it is not the interesting part, and it is not the part that does damage. The damage is done by the experience of a signal that arrives late, in the wrong order, and mixed with noise that looks exactly like signal.
Continue reading Variance Without The Mathematics
MAY 12, 2014
Posted by Drawing Dead · Label: The Game · Permalink
A card room has hours. It has a drive to it, a door, a floor staff, and a moment where the chips have to be pushed across a counter and turned back into something else. None of those frictions survive the move to a screen, and the removal of every one of them changed the shape of the activity more than any rule ever did.
The frictions were never designed as protections. They were incidental: consequences of the game living in a building. But they functioned as a structure anyway. Getting to a table required a decision made in advance, in daylight, about the evening. Leaving one required standing up in front of other people. Both of those are small, and both of them interrupt.
Continue reading The Table That Never Closes
MARCH 27, 2014
Posted by Drawing Dead · Label: The Game · Permalink
Bankroll is one of the oldest ideas in the game and one of the most consistently misread. It is not a score. It is not a measure of how well someone is doing. It is a boundary drawn around a quantity of money so that the money can absorb a run of bad outcomes without the person having to absorb them.
The functional purpose is separation. Money inside the boundary is money that can lose without anything else changing: no bill goes unpaid, no plan is altered, no conversation has to happen. The moment that separation breaks down, the boundary stops existing regardless of what the number says, because every hand is now being played with something attached to it.
Continue reading Bankroll As A Boundary
FEBRUARY 11, 2014
Posted by Drawing Dead · Label: The Game · Permalink
The popular image of poker reading is a face: the flicker, the hesitation, the hand that goes to the chips too quickly. Remove the face and the room and the chips, and the entire apparatus of that image disappears. What is left is a name, a stack size, a set of numbers, and time.
Time is the one physical thing that survives the move to a screen. How long a decision takes is visible to everyone at the table, and it is not fully controllable, because the situations that require thought are not evenly distributed across the range of hands someone might hold.
Continue reading Tells Without Faces
DECEMBER 9, 2013
Posted by Drawing Dead · Label: Craft · Permalink
The sports documentary has a shape that works: a season, a build, a contest with a scheduled ending, and a result that arrives in front of a crowd. Poker offers almost none of that, and every attempt to force the shape onto it produces the same distortion.
There is no season. There is no scheduled ending. A player's year is a continuous stream of sessions that begin and end for reasons of tiredness and appetite, and the meaningful units of it are statistical rather than dramatic. A month that mattered enormously looks identical to a month that did not.
Continue reading Why Poker Resists The Sports Film
OCTOBER 22, 2013
Posted by Drawing Dead · Label: Language · Permalink
Players have a large and specific vocabulary for the state in which their play stops being governed by their judgement. Tilt is the best known of these words, but it is only the entry point into a set of terms that describe gradations most outsiders would flatten into a single idea.
What is notable about the vocabulary is that it is almost entirely about motion rather than condition. Players talk about spiralling, chasing, running it up, digging, being stuck. The words describe a trajectory and a slope. Very few of them describe a place someone has arrived at, which suggests the language was built by people who were still moving when they needed it.
Continue reading The Vocabulary Of Losing Control