\nC. Thompson, Bloomberg<\/p>\n
\tJames McManus is a big deal in the poker world. He wrote \u201cPositively Fifth Street,\u201d a book about the murder of a casino executive and the 2000 World Series of Poker, and \u201cCowboys Full: The Full Story of Poker,\u201d and he has covered the game for the New York Times, the New Yorker, Harper\u2019s and Card Player magazine. And now he writes for Bloomberg View.<\/p>\n
\tA 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\u2019t encountered this kind of an argot in what is otherwise English.<\/p>\n
\tHe described Greenlight Capital\u2019s David Einhorn turn last week at the table as \u201csitting in the small blind with pocket jacks,\u201d and throws around terms like \u201cthe flop,\u201d \u201cthe turn\u201d and \u201cthe river.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
\tThey give rise to sentences like this one:<\/p>\n
\t\u201cA 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
\tWe tracked him down in Las Vegas and asked what happens when he comes across a term he doesn\u2019t know. Does he just pretend to know and figure out later, or stop and ask?<\/p>\n
\t\u201cI will often ask,\u201d McManus said while covering the Big One for One Drop charity tournament. \u201cI consider it part of my job to know what the current lingo is.\u201d New vocabulary arrives \u201call the time.\u201d He adds that both \u201cFifth Street\u201d and \u201cCowboys Full\u201d have extensive glossaries of the terms.<\/p>\n
\tThe vocabulary isn\u2019t the only thing that has changed. The flossers have taken over.<\/p>\n
\t\u201cThe 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,\u201d he says. \u201cThe people who dominate the poker world today are young college-educated quants who are not scared of tough guys and they don\u2019t try to bully you out of the pot with their persona.\u201d But with their familiarity with game theory, \u201cthey do things that are similar to what the old badasses do, but they do it for mathematical reasons.\u201d<\/p>\n
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C. Thompson, Bloomberg James McManus is a big deal in the poker world. He wrote \u201cPositively Fifth Street,\u201d a book about the murder of a casino executive and the 2000 World Series of Poker, and \u201cCowboys Full: The Full Story…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":36,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7626","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-latest-casino-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/forumarchives.tmsites.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7626","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/forumarchives.tmsites.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/forumarchives.tmsites.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forumarchives.tmsites.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/36"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forumarchives.tmsites.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7626"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/forumarchives.tmsites.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7626\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/forumarchives.tmsites.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7626"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forumarchives.tmsites.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7626"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forumarchives.tmsites.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7626"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}