Poker Ben
Brad ‘Otis’ Willis
Ben Affleck surprised everyone, and perhaps
even himself, by winning the California State
Poker Championship in July. Love him or hate him, he just may be the real deal.
In the middle of my hometown there's an Irish pub with a stage near the door. If you get there early enough, there’s time to chat up the prettiest bartender in town, order a drink and get a good seat. If you’re lucky,you might hear some good music coming from the stage. At a recent open-mic night, a guest artist was playing while the regular musicians were on break. The bar patrons seemed to like the guy on stage, so it didn’t take long for the regular musicians to come up and say, in effect, "Okay, that's enough." The implication was clear:This is our game. If you want to play for real, find your own stage. Here’s the thing. I want to hate Ben Affleck. I really do. He has more money than I do. He’s much more famous than I am. He maintains his tan under the light of popping paparazzi flashbulbs. His dinner reservations are assumed, not requested. Hordes of nymphets want his autograph, or better yet, a small lock of his designer ’do. I watch all of this through the lens of entertainment television, while eating take-out and trying to get over the fact that 21-year-old women have started calling me “sir.” The fringe benefits of financial stability and fame are reason enough to hate him. If we can’t loathe those who have what we don’t, who can we truly loathe? At press time,Affleck is probably thinking about poker. Or, at least, he should be, since he’s going to be playing in the $25,000 World Poker Tour championship next spring. There’s a part of me that wants to scream from the top of my chip stacks: “Friends, countrymen, this Affleck fellow is a fraud! Look, he has a Screen Actors Guild card! He’s not allowed to be a poker player!”But that would just be jumping on the bandwagon.
And there aren’t enough exclamation points out there for all the Internet
yahoos who want to derail and deride Affleck’s success. Affleck won
the California State Poker Championship in June—simultaneously
vaulting him to a new level of stardom and a new level of ridicule. Along
with the $356,400 prize and entry into the 2005 WPT Championship at
Bellagio,Affleck also got to add one more bull’s eye to his back.
To wit: As fast as the news of Affleck’s win could travel through the
slick ether of the Internet, the virtual columnists, poker blogs and
message boards were up in arms. A professional columnist nearly ten
years Affleck’s junior suggested Ben’s presence on the poker scene
was a harbinger of Hold’em “jumping the shark.”The Internet poker
pundit Mean Gene offered, “If folks who appear on ‘Celebrity Poker Showdown’ start winning big poker events, that's when we know that the end is nigh.” Another poker blog posted Affleck’s picture accompanied by the headline, “When good things happen to complete donkeys.” The vituperative chorus screamed with synchronized terror: How, in the name of all things good and holy, could the poker fates allow the goateed boy-toy to win—horror of horrors—a poker championship? How can the man who brought us “Gigli”truly be an emissary for the game we love? Simply put, folks, as much as many people might hate to admit it, Ben won. Why? Because he won. Simple as that. It doesn't signal the end of the game. It doesn't signal the end of the game being cool. And if one more person uses the phrase “jumping the shark,”I’m just going to lose it. In fact,it could be good for the game. The day after Affleck won (and the day after that) “Ben Affleck Wins Poker Championship” was the most e-mailed news story on all of Yahoo!. Now, not only were members of America’s biggest card clique talking about Ben, but also new masses of folks who don’t know a flop from a river were tittering about poker. Despite being wont to attack celebrities for the sake of attacking celebrities,I find myself (an amateur somebody and professional nobody) wanting to defend Ben. Let's think about where Ben has been. He suffered a relationship with an insufferable girl. The tabloids (falsely or otherwise) outed him as a strip-club junkie.
Las Vegas gossip columnists have needled him for wild nights at the Hard Rock, playing for hundreds of thousands of dollars at the blackjack tables and tipping cocktail waitresses with a C-notes per drink. There, but for the grace of the poker gods, go we, right? Sure. The thing is, I think most 30-something guys out there would kill to have just that Bacchanalian portion of Affleck’s life. For one day. At age 31, Affleck has reached the critical stage in a man’s life where he must make some serious decisions about his future. If only as a matter of perception, crossing the barrier from youthful 20s to introspective 30s can wreak no small amount of havoc on a young man’s psyche. Affleck seems to have discovered one of America’s great freedoms: the permission, perhaps encouragement, for man to reinvent himself. As sure as one finds himself traveling down a road to ruin (or, at the very least, sheer boredom) every person has the permission to reinvent himself as something better. And if not better,at least happier. While there have been no reports of Affleck’s plans to give up acting, one news story did question his departure from an upcoming Jerry Bruckheimer flick,asking if Affleck might be prepping for the WPT instead of focusing on acting. Regardless of whether that speculation holds any water,it seems Affleck is trying to reinvent himself as a poker player. And boy, do some poker players hate that idea. After winning the 90-person, $10,000 buy-in event in California, Affleck deflected much of the same tripe that Chris Moneymaker endured after his 2003 World Series of Poker win. Pros and amateurs alike saddled Moneymaker with what has become the easiest way to insult a poker player: They called him an Internet Player. It’s a label most of us would face if we rose through the masses and came out on top of a big tourney. We're Internet Players. Even though we're not. Many of us have done our time and developed leather asses in casino chairs. Many play on the Internet because it's more convenient. We don't live in AC, Vegas, Mississippi, Calif., or the other states where legalized poker rooms are getting fired back up. We may have day jobs,but don’t think for a second most of us wouldn’t give them up tomorrow if we could figure a way to make a modest living playing poker. You figure Ben prefers poker to acting? Me, too. Still, despite our best efforts, in many cases, we're pariahs in the "real" poker community. We're all fond of poker because it is the great equalizer. A wellheeled woman can sit at a table with a gap-toothed mountain man. Once the smells and cultures clash over the felt, poker takes care of the rest.
Similarly,Affleck can sit at a table with former football pro T.J. Cloutier. They're both stars and they both play poker. Sure, T.J. has a lot more time on the tables under his belt, but he's beatable. And that's what we all want to do. We want to beat our heroes. Like Moneymaker brought the Everyman Internet Player into the game, Affleck brings a new element. What that is exactly is hard to say, but it is something. Consider this: There are plenty of other Hollywood celebs who frequent the tables. James Woods, Lou Diamond Phillips, Tobey Maguire ... Do we hate them as much? Apparently, not until they start winning. In fact, until then, we kind of love them. We love them, not only because they are playing with the same color money as us, but because by buying into a foreign environment,these Goliaths of the entertainment world begin to share a certain vulnerability with us. Their education may be more expensive than a $4/$8 online game,but they are learning all the same,and it’s nice to have classmates. Especially the ones who have groupies. If you’re still unconvinced that Ben deserves a place at the elite tables,ask yourself this question: With everything that Affleck has, why in the world would he be interested in playing poker with a bunch of stinky, ugly, ill-tempered malcontents for money and celebrity he doesn’t need? I believe it’s reinvention taking place. He may have grasped the idea that poker transcends celebrity. It’s something more pure than the manufactured relationships that get made in Hollywood. When he works his day job, he has agents and publicists looking out for him. On the weekends, the only thing between him and failure is a stack of chips that everybody wants and only he can protect. Perhaps his new education in the game of poker (he’s being tutored by some accomplished pros, including Annie Duke and Amir Vahedi) helps him understand he is not focusing on a card game, per se. As all of us learn more about the game and improve our understanding of it, our mental capacity to endure life’s little eccentricities grows as well. We have a better understanding of how people work, how relationships exist and how to make decisions based on experience. We are people who realize that poker is not just a means to play, or not just a means to a profitable end, but a means to some sort of greater understanding of ourselves. If we can understand why we make decisions in a game, we might better understand how or why we make certain decisions away from the table. Now, maybe that sounds a bit heady. I may be over-glamorizing the addiction that may well be replacing women as my greatest earthly pleasure. Maybe I've developed some romantic notion of an otherwise brutal pastime. But I suspect it’s a concept with which Ben Affleck is familiar. And I suspect it is serving him well. So, give Ben a break. Hate him for being famous. Hate him for getting to do the freaky monkey dance with J-Lo. Hate him for being able to buy in to the biggest poker events in the world with the interest from his checking account. Hate him for being everything you’re not. But don't hate him for loving poker. Brad “Otis”Willis is an amateur poker player, freelance writer, and broadcast journalist in Greenville,S.C.
