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Popular Culture Review
machismo of players—whether they be male or female—and they indicate that
the game puts the player in the hands of a commanding force of fate.
One song, “Deal,” written and sung by Tom T. Hall, plays on the
metaphor that poker is life. “Life is a gamble and the days are just so many
decks. . . . It’s a hard cut to take when you raise every hand but you lose. .. [but]
it won’t do to cheat, cause you have to cash in when you die.” The premier song
about poker is “The Gambler,” written by Don Schlitz and sung by Kenny
Rogers. It shares the metaphor, and offers that skill is an important element of
poker: “You gotta know when to hold them, [and] know when to fold
them. . . [because] every hand’s a winner, every hand’s a loser. . . [still] the best
that you can hope for is to die in your sleep.”
Kenny Rogers’ song was so popular that it generated a series of movies
in which he played the starring role, including The Gambler, and sequels such as
The Gambler Returns.
Other films have plots that take players to the “big game.” In Big Hand
for a Little Lady, Henry Fonda and Joanne Woodward star in with a story line of
an elaborate bluff. The Cincinnati Kid finds a young Steve McQueen in a
confrontation with the game’s most respected player, mobster Edward G.
Robinson. The “big game” is in New Orleans and McQueen gets a “bad beat”
losing to Robinson at seven card stud.
The most intense poker film has been Rounders, starring Matt Damon
as a law student and superb poker player. The game is Texas hold’em, and
Damon travels about the New York area usually trying to win games in order to
bail out Ed Norton, his degenerate childhood friend. In the finale he squares off
against a Russian gangster. Damon goes “all in” and wins enough to pay off his
friend’s debts and heads for the airport with ten thousand dollars in his pockets.
He is on his way to Las Vegas to buy in to the World Series of Poker at the
Horseshoe.
The world of painted art didn’t wait for the contemporary rush to the
poker tables. It discovered the game and its many themes which offer inspiration
for paintings of poker action. An excellent collection with narratives is found in
Arthur Flowers and Anthony Curtis’ The Art of Gambling (2000). The following
pieces are in that collection.
Democracy is the theme of Rufus Wright’s 1882 The Card Players,
which displays a Chinese coolie worker “cleaning ouf’ three Caucasians in a
western cabin, his four aces beating four kings. Charles Russell also shows two
miners playing with a Chinese worker in The Poker Game from 1893. Violence
in the West is captured by Frederick Remington’s 1897 Misdeal, as three
cowboys are dead on the floor next to a poker table. A. C. Radwood’s A Call,
from 1895, is a suggestion that violence is about to begin as two ace of hearts
are on the table and one cowboy is drawing his pistol out of his holster. The
flavor of the game portrayed brings to mind the murder of “Wild Bill” Hickok in