C. Thompson, Bloomberg

James McManus is a big deal in the poker world. He wrote “Positively Fifth Street,” a book about the murder of a casino executive and the 2000 World Series of Poker, and “Cowboys Full: The Full Story of Poker,” and he has covered the game for the New York Times, the New Yorker, Harper’s and Card Player magazine. And now he writes for Bloomberg View.

A lot of you folks have a natural affinity for poker for obvious reasons, and except for stories about cricket and, well, financial markets, we hadn’t encountered this kind of an argot in what is otherwise English.

He described Greenlight Capital’s David Einhorn turn last week at the table as “sitting in the small blind with pocket jacks,” and throws around terms like “the flop,” “the turn” and “the river.” Those expressions (for the rest of you who are as clueless as we are), in order, refer to the first three cards dealt, the fourth card, and the fifth card.

They give rise to sentences like this one:

“A few hands later, he pushed all in before the flop with an ace-4, tempting Colman to call him with a slightly inferior king-queen. After a flop of ace-4-jack, it looked like Negreanu would double through and have more than a fighting chance again. But a 10 on the turn gave Colman a Broadway straight.”

We tracked him down in Las Vegas and asked what happens when he comes across a term he doesn’t know. Does he just pretend to know and figure out later, or stop and ask?

“I will often ask,” McManus said while covering the Big One for One Drop charity tournament. “I consider it part of my job to know what the current lingo is.” New vocabulary arrives “all the time.” He adds that both “Fifth Street” and “Cowboys Full” have extensive glossaries of the terms.

The vocabulary isn’t the only thing that has changed. The flossers have taken over.

“The game used to be grizzled, Texas road gamblers who were tough guys. The force of their personality and ornery nature could force you out of the pot with a bet,” he says. “The people who dominate the poker world today are young college-educated quants who are not scared of tough guys and they don’t try to bully you out of the pot with their persona.” But with their familiarity with game theory, “they do things that are similar to what the old badasses do, but they do it for mathematical reasons.”

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