POKER has a celebrity face. Says American actor and game show host Drew Carey: “Maybe Dallas wouldn’t be ranked as the 34th most dangerous city in America if Dallas police weren’t devoting precious resources to raiding friendly poker games played by veterans.”
Carey is speaking in Reason magazine. “In his latest video for Reason.tv, Drew Carey examines a paramilitary-style raid on a poker game at the Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 1837 in Dallas, which has now been forced to close its doors.”
Says Carey: “Poker is about as American as baseball and apple pie. It was born here in America. Mark Twain loved it. He’s a great American. Until recently, Supreme Court justices had a monthly game. They’re great Americans. You’d think playing poker in a VFW hall would be about as American as anything you could do.”
The Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink notes: “As a favoured dish of the English, pies were baked in America as soon as the early settlers set up housekeeping on dry land.”
As for Baseball, that’s a British game of rounders, albeit with big gloves and spitting.
Which leaves poker, a card game adapted from French, Persian and British card games.
Cary makes a, er, good point. Poker is an American game, albeit one you cannot play online.
As one legendary American put it: “The British are coming.” And we’re bringing poker.
You would likely have been moved to tears if you saw a movie in which a long-practicing chiropractor is forced to give up his cherished job after being diagnosed with an unexpected rare disease. But you would also be relieved when the retiree finally overcomes the disease and reaches the top of the profession he has so eagerly pursued.
Well that movie doesn't exist, but Joe Hachem, champion of the 2005 World Series of Poker, could have been the subject for such a plot.
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