Endnotes and digressions from the latest show:
* I love Sonny’s description of Bill Paxton’s late-career persona as “America’s dad, but with some problems.” My favorite Paxton moment comes from True Lies, where he brags to Arnold Schwarzenegger that Jamie Lee Curtis “has an ass like a 10-year-old boy.” It’s weird and off-kilter and he sells it perfectly.
* We talked a lot about the Matt Damon poker classic, Rounders. The movie’s villain is the iconic Teddy KGB, which might be my favorite John Malkovich performance, ever. Just have a look at this scene and watch all of the little things Malkovich does: He never makes eye contact with Damon, or the camera. He puffs his cheeks out. He gives oddball line-reads (“Eye . . . veal . . so un-sye-tisvied.”)
And yet it’s not a study in ham and cheese—everything Malkovich does here blends together into an organic stew that gives you a real sense of the character. I’ve always imagined that in his previous life, Teddy KGB was a mid-level analyst at Lubyanka. He was brilliant—especially with sig-int—and specialized in decryption. But he was also unpopular. Clearly he’s on the spectrum. His peers hated him. His supervisors looked down on him, but tolerated his quirks because he was so good at his job.
But then the Wall fell and the KGB was scattered to the wind. Those with high-level connections became oligarchs. The mid-level officers found work with their former bosses. Everyone got rich as they looted the newly democratic Russia. Except for Teddy KGB. When the music stopped, he was left standing in Dzerzhinsky Square, the only guy without a chair.
So Teddy KGB came to New York and learned poker. Learned it with frightening rapidity. And then finally decided to be his own boss, running a club. Which is where we first meet him.
He’s still an oddball misfit. Even when he tries to threaten people, it’s awkward. At the end of that great scene, he taunts Damon, trying to keep him from walking away from the table. “I am steel up tventy grand vrom dis last time I . . . stick it in you?”
At which point Malkovich is standing next to a TV and starts thrusting his hips wildly. I defy you to watch that scene and not wind up rooting for Teddy KGB.
* We also mentioned Ricky Jay and His 52 Assistants. Ricky Jay is regarded as one of the greatest sleight-of-hand men to have ever lived. If you know who he is, then you probably already love the guy. And if not, his stage show, directed by David Mamet, will blow your mind. It’s an hour. Don’t watch it at work. Wait until you’re home and then hunker down and treat yourself to it. Seriously. You have never seen anything like this.
There’s a reason he’s not allowed on any casino floor anywhere in the world.
* In corrections this week, I got an email from friend of the show Chris Anderson about Jurassic Park. Here it is:
* That real-life Contra video I mentioned? Holy crap. If you ever again doubt the full, terrible extent of Western decadence, go watch it.
* Finally, the big payoff this week is a collection of amazing longform pieces on gambling. You’ll want to print these things out and savor them at length. They’re my gift to you.
First up is a 2000 Harper’s article by James McManus called “Fortune’s Smile: Betting Big at the World Series of Poker.” It’s the only essay on the list that you have to pay for and if you’re at all interested in poker, it’s worth the $5.
I’ve long suspected that this McManus piece is patient zero in America’s poker craze. Maybe it didn’t start the trend, but it saw the wave way out on the horizon. McManus is an amateur poker player who won his way into the World Series of Poker and then, improbably, found himself sitting at the final table.
Before the WSOP was a televised event, before anyone knew who Chris “Jesus” Ferguson was, there was this great essay.
* Marc Andreessen once claimed that “software is eating the world.” I often look around and am struck by the extent to which it’s actually math that’s eating the world. Case in point: The rest of my favorite gambling pieces are all really about math junkies invading the world of gambling and having it for their own.
There’s this amazing 2011 essay by Jonah Lehrer(!) in Wired about how people have hacked scratch-off lottery games. As I said on the podcast, nature is the only true source of randomness and any man-made attempt at generating random-seeming results is vulnerable to hacking. In the Lehrer piece, a geological statistician from MIT and Stanford became the first person to publicly break open a scratch-off lottery game: He figured out a way to predict whether or not a ticket was a winner with 95 percent confidence.
It turns out that there’s a tiny subculture of lottery hackers out there. In Massachusetts, between 2002 and 2004, a single person cashed 1,588 winning scratch-off tickets for a combined haul of $2.84 million. There’s a woman in Texas who has won lottery prizes over $1 million on four separate occasions. I don’t know. Maybe she’s just “lucky,” right? Oh, except that he has a Ph.D. in statistics from Stanford. You do the math.
There’s lots more. The New York Times magazine had a long piece on “advantage players”—rogue math nerds who find weaknesses in table games and then hit the house and run. They’re not cheating. They’re just smarter than the casino.
One of the (many) reasons to dislike casinos is that they market their games as being tied to both luck and skill, but when someone with superior skills takes their money, they get super pissy. Advantage players get chased out of casinos all the time, and if they come back after getting made, they get arrested for trespassing.
* In 2012, poker pro Phil Ivey went around playing baccarat with a partner who had mastered “edge-sorting”—she had memorized the patterns on the back of casino playing cards—and took the house for $9.6 million. The casinos turned around and sued Ivey for fraud. The courts made him give back his winnings.
* I’m not sure what category I’d put the Russian slot-machine hackers into. I mentioned this piece on the show and you’ll love it. Is it cheating because you happen to own a slot machine and have figured out how to exploit its weaknesses?
As I said, every one of these pieces is solid gold. Print them out and enjoy at your leisure.
* And as always, you can download the episode
here and subscribe to the Substandard on iTunes or on Google Play.
If you give us a five-star rating, Vic and Sonny will be able to afford the $25 table next week. And they’ll bet it all on the hard eight.
