Without seeing the flop

As a decidedly amateur poker player, I've been buying up a rack of poker shirts and caps designed to make me look more formidable and fearsome than I really am.

They have things like “World Series of Poker 2008” and “The Sands Poker Room” emblazoned on them, as if I’d actually been to those places and cleaned out a roomful of dismayed and disgusted competitors. Of course, no one at my table takes that seriously; indeed, coming into a poker room dressed up as, say, Phil Hellmuth, with "PokerStars.com" or "Full Tilt Poker" written all over you, will almost certainly tag you as the eager amateur or "the fish" in a tank of grizzled, toothpick-nibbling sharks. But we amateurs, of course, like to advertise our availability for disaster, choosing to see it as a bold foray into the unknown. As any two-bit golfer or badminton player knows, that kind of boldness deserves appropriate livery: the right shirt, the right shoes, the right bag, the right studied smirk. It was like that when I became addicted to badminton three years ago: since it was easier to do, I paid a lot more attention to my shoes—Yonex SHB 99 Power Cushion shoes, if you must know — than to my footwork. Not surprisingly, my game never got beyond Class F, although my shoes were A+. Such sporting fashions came to mind recently, when I saw, advertised on eBay.ph, a T-shirt featuring none other than the familiar figure of Jose Rizal hunched over a poker table, fingering a stack of chips, as if wondering whether to call or raise Señor Cabron. I thought it was brilliant — or unique, in the least. Apparently, it wasn’t only me who saw the ad, because another member of the local poker players’ forum I frequent (www.pokermanila.com) took exception to the shirt, seeing it as a travesty of our national hero’s image. But was it? I happen to think that while there may be a theoretical limit to poor taste, heroes and luminaries — especially long-dead ones — actually benefit by being brought into the present, albeit through parody or caricature, as the thousands of (often uncivil) liberties taken over the centuries with the likes of William Shakespeare, George Washington, and Abraham Lincoln can attest to. Neither Will’s, George’s, nor Abe’s reputation has suffered by their unceremonious appearance on countless cartoons, coffee mugs, winking-eye stickers, TV commercials, and, yes, T-shirts. I choose to see these as signs of affection, of a presumed familiarity with someone who could just as easily have been forgotten. I mean, when was the last time you saw a Millard Fillmore T-shirt? (Who he? Google time.) But to get back to Pepe and poker. I don’t know if Rizal ever played poker, or if he was a gambling man — probably not. We do know that he played the lottery, and even won a considerable amount while in exile in Dapitan. As Philippine studies scholar Ari Ngaseo puts it, "Rizal was constantly railing against what he perceived to be the debauchery — drinking, gambling, and whoring — of his fellow Filipinos in Madrid. Rizal himself drank in moderation, bought lottery tickets, and according to Maximo Viola, once drank from ‘the cup of mundane pleasure’.” Whoops, that last remark is intriguing, but let’s not go there for now. In “The Indolence of the Filipino,” Rizal gives us some idea of how he sees gambling as a recourse for the desperate. He writes of the dispossessed Filipino that “without defense and without security he is reduced to inaction and abandons his field, his work, and takes to gambling as the best means of securing a livelihood.” Historians like Gregorio Zaide tell us that Rizal was appalled by reports of excessive gambling among his fellow ilustrados in Spain, and so he “wrote to M. H. Del Pilar on May 28, 1890 to remind the Filipinos in Madrid that they did not come to Europe to gamble, but to work for their fatherland’s freedom.” That didn’t sit very well with the Pinoy expats, who took to calling him “Papa” (or Pope) instead of Pepe for what they took to be his moralizing. Still, that didn’t mean that Rizal was immune to the charms of Lady Luck. In September 1892, while in exile in Dapitan, he won a share of second prize in the Manila lottery (think of it as today’s lotto) worth P6,200 — no mean amount in those days. His biographer Wenceslao Retana is quoted as saying that the lottery was Pepe’s “only vice.” And unlike many of us, Rizal didn’t throw his winnings back into the pit, reportedly giving P2,000 of the windfall to his father, sending P200 to a friend in Hong Kong, and investing the rest in agricultural land. I suppose that’s why heroes are heroes. Interestingly enough, the term “hero” also occurs in poker. It’s what you call the guy (usually you yourself) whose action you’re following in a hand. (His most relevant opponent — let’s say that hooded, sunglassed face across the table trying to look bored to disguise his pocket aces — is naturally called the “villain.”) And that in a sense is what poker (which its diehards will swear isn’t gambling but a sport) is about: a showdown across a green table between hero and villain, not over politics or morals or the fortunes of others, but over one’s ability (or otherwise) to read the other. As poker’s wise men put it, “You don’t play the cards, you play the player.” I wish I had that kind of gritty, steely-eyed ability to sum up another individual’s whole worth in a minute by muttering just one of two words: “call” or “raise.” (“Check” and “fold” are also options — which the sagest and bravest of players know when and how to take, but which often seem too wimpy for frisky beginners.) As one of those rank amateurs, I don’t; I have neither composure nor wisdom, only a compulsive excitement to get in there and literally pay whatever it takes to see the “flop” — the first three of five shared “community” cards laid out on the table (in Texas Hold’em, you hold two cards in your hand, and mix them up with the five cards on the board to make up the best possible combination of five.) Some of the most important betting in poker takes place pre-flop, to separate those with truly strong cards from the merely or pathologically curious, which I am. That’s why I’m fated to lose more than I’ll ever win, and why I’m wearing a PokerStars shirt instead of, well, being one. On the other hand, with all his coolness and his astute grasp of human character and behavior, Jose Rizal would have made a great poker player, aside from already being a great writer. “I die without seeing the dawn,” my hero and tocayo writes magnificently in the Noli. For this poker donkey, the most trivially tragic thing I’ll probably ever get to say is, “I die without seeing the flop!” Email me at penmanila@yahoo.com, and visit my blog at www.penmanila.net.