I have many questions about poker and so I have written some more letters:

Hi there, my name is Thomas Gullen and I write letters to various companies and people. My favorite animals are cats (meow) and plankton (fffffttt fffffft).

Recently I started writing to some poker players and companies with some ideas and questions, as well as some letters about problems I have been experiencing that I would like resolved.

This is the first in a series of letters I have written, come back next week for more, and maybe I would have received some replies by then as well!

This week I became slightly obsessed with a man who seemed to have been photographed in a compromising position at a Cannes pool party held by a Cake poker skin:

The party looks like it was attended by poker players, affiliates, models, a dwarf and two cyberpunk dancers. Carl Cox was the DJ. Most people there had been paid to attend. The man in this photo looked like an old rake in a blandly handsome crowd. I downloaded the zip of photos and found him twice more:

I cut out the outline of his head, and started making quick, unsophisticated pictures with MSPaint:

I made them out of boredom, resisting the impulse to do something better with my time. But I later realized what I was reacting against. I’d felt a familiar mixture of envy and revulsion as I’d looked through the party pictures. Why did the poker site put up 700 megs of pictures from the party, if not to make us feel the desperate lust of exclusion? Are we to applaud the youth, beauty of the partygoers, wish we were there; wish we had what they had? Yes, you might say, the guys at this poker party look like tossers. But they are rich, young tossers, and their women have the immaculate beauty of a new textbook. That’s what money looks like. And we’re not invited.

I posted my pictures to 2+2. where RiverFenix, De_Neuro and No Fortune made these GIFs:

But I was the only one obsessed by this man. His expression is as impenetrable as the Mona Lisa. Is he surprised? startled? complacent? contented? mildly irritated? The whole of human emotion is in that face.

I’ve only once been to a pool party, but it was in an location to rival Cannes. On Capri, five years ago, I went to an “Angels of Love” house music party. There were dancers on a floating platform in the middle of the pool, and the crowd danced around the side. Everyone seemed beautiful and immaculately dressed, though later I saw there was a neatness to it that was too precise, too concerned with image, and perhaps a little dull. The crowd was not entirely exclusive, either, since some rough types had taken the boat from Naples, though in my keenness to feel excluded from some impossibly rich beautiful world I didn’t much notice them. I danced, didn’t drink, and didn’t speak to anyone other than my fellow language students I’d arrived with. As the bus drove us back to Capri town, it stopped to drop off Italians at their holiday villas where they were spending the summer, and I naturally chose to feel a Gatsbyesque exclusion as I watched them kiss goodbye.

I made more pictures. I wondered what the unknown partygoer was doing whilst I inserted his head into a range of inappropriate situations. Maybe by now he was on a yacht on the French Riviera, a private club in Manhattan, or in a Moroccan bordello? I felt a mild guilt – he’s done nothing to me. I realized that I actually liked him, for looking slightly raffish and seedy; and out of place, as I would be out of place. It was the young men I really disliked, with their clean complexions and T-Shirts over six-packs.

The PhotoShop assault is the tool of the powerless, of the basement dweller, of the loser, at home in their bedroom in their parent’s house. They can be used for humour, or for political purposes, as we saw with the recent election posters. But perhaps ultimately all they do is contribute to an endless stream of images; just more noise.

I didn’t want to go to that pool party anyway.

Poker players often don’t know how to manage money away from the table. Legend has it that back in 1983 Chip Reese paid a $2000 monthly water bill without complaint. Some time later someone pointed out his pipes had burst.

This week a poster on 2+2 asked whether it’s possible to live in New York on $65,000 a year. He spends a remarkable $800 a month on groceries, including $20 on olive oil and $35 on aftershave. And it transpired that on top of his $500 monthly credit card repayment and $1600 rent, he’s wholly supporting his girlfriend. The 600+ posts that followed debated whether it’s better to live like a king in distant exile (somewhere like Iowa), or like a mouse in the skirting boards of the big city. Some posters like jmakinmecrazy were bemused by how much money most poker players need to live. Maybe New York is a more expensive city than London because, as Katherine Hibbert showed, you can live in London for almost nothing. Or maybe you just get used to drinking aftershave.

In other news, a Finnish poster in BBV4L describes his job pretending to be a woman for an SMS dating service. Lonely divorced men in their 40s or 50s spend up to 2000 Euros a month to receive his texts, and speak longingly of their desire for a shared future. At the point they announce plans to sell their houses and move across the world to be with him, he senses it’s time to delicately bring their budding love affair to a close, and then wait for the next lonely man to text in.

When imaginary women won’t do, you can always try picking up women in the quietly erotic environment of your college library. The girls glanced across the room seem so beautiful precisely because you can’t easily talk. On summer days in the British Library I’ve fallen in love more times than Casanova. You might think it easier to approach them if you have the presumed advantage of an English accent in America. But, sadly, Gullanian reports this doesn’t always work. JaprielP’s sober advice reminds us that most people visit libraries to study, not be harassed by bookish inadequates. Finally, OMGMileyCyrus explains how to get the phone number of the studious girl of your dreams.

In BBV, we read of a classic PLO spin-up, where one player, disregarding the delicate science of bankroll management, managed to turn $10 to $1000 in six hours. I applaud his lack of bankroll management – but from the look of the graphs and stats he posted, he seems to have some kind of software installed, and is clearly taking the game way too seriously to be a true spin-up degen. PLO spin-ups are great fun – why not set up an account on Gutshot Poker and have a go yourself?

Over in the Las Vegas Life forum, a man who lives twenty minutes away from the Las Vegas strip asks for advice on the best spots to sleep in his car, because twenty minutes is a long time to spend away from the casino, and $30 is too much to spend on a motel. This being a gambling forum, he receives serious answers rather than disdainful recommendations to seek medical help. The best suggestion is this scheme to get a free hotel room if you can hoodwink the maid in the middle of cleaning it. Because, when all your money’s gambling money, why waste a cent on a room?

Imagine a bizarre alternative universe in which the next government will be made up of poker players, not politicians. Here’s how our next government might look:

Prime Minister: Ziigmund
Voters warmed to the 27 year old Finn when he proposed building an enormous waterslide in the centre of every town or village in the country. He is himself Finnish waterslide champion, and believes it can cure most of our nation’s ills. The estimated construction cost of this is £800 mega, but Ziigmund says he will raise this money by selling tequila shots in schools.

Chancellor of the Exchequer: Isildur1
Since our gold reserves were sold off to the lowest bidder, the Bank of England is in desperate need of a spin-up. Who better to take care of the finances of our nation – the future of our sick and infirm relations, our OAPs and soldiers overseas, – than the 19 year old Swede believed to be Isildur1?

In what political journalist Andrew Marrr has called a request unprecedented in the long history of parliamentary democracy, Isildur1 has agreed to become Chancellor only on condition he can wear a Kermit the Frog mask for all his government duties. The BBC have bought the broadcast rights to his games on Full Tilt. So the whole nation will be able to gather round their television sets to watch him try to spin up our money; just as, generations ago, they gathered round their wirelesses to listen to the wartime speeches of Winston Churchill. Viktor will fight them on the 200/400 tables, on the 300/600 tables, on the 500/1000 tables, and he will never surrender. His opponents will be a trio of Americans, believed to be backed by the Federal Reserve, under a scheme known as the Hastings Plan. Isildur1 will be given an initial £90,000,000,000 to try to spin up. The nation depends on his success!

Foreign Secretary: FullFlush
This is a position which requires the mastery of many languages, and great cultural understanding, tact and sensitivity. And yet the Foreign Secretary must also have a Machiavellian side, able to balance sometimes conflicting interests and to advance the cause of our nation in sometimes underhand ways. The Foreign Secretary represents us on the world stage and promotes British interests abroad, taking part in delicate negotiations with foreign leaders and dignitaries. It is hardly a position for an uncouth brute in an ill-fitting T-shirt with a potty mouth and the temperament of an uncommonly malicious baby.

And yet, somehow, this is the role FullFlush now finds himself in. He has already spoken at length of his interest in one particular privilege he will enjoy as Foreign Secretary. His official duties will see him attend ambassadorial receptions held at embassies all over the world. The drink flows freely at these events, and the sandwiches are there for the taking. Salmon, cucumber, cheese and tomato; there is no sandwich too exclusive to be eaten by the holder of Her Majesty’s high office. FullFlush, in this aspect of the job if in no other, will do his country proud.

Secretary of State for Transport: Tony G
It’s a politically sensitive issue to tell voters to end their reliance on the motorcar. And that the solution isn’t more roads; it’s for people to live, shop and socialize nearer to where they work; to end the culture of commuting. But Tony G ‘ who himself drives a hummer ‘ has certainly shown he has the political will to push forward a fundamental change in this country’s transport system. With subsidized bicycles available to all and a mandatory death sentence for anyone found guilty of stealing a bicycle, we will soon be a happy cycling nation like Holland, but with public executions. As Tony G put it during his election campaign, ‘On yer bike!!’

Secretary of State for Work and Pensions: Doyle Brunson
This nation faces an unprecedented pension crisis, with the deficit said to be running into hundreds of billions of pounds. Doyle Brunson is just the man to sort this out. He knows all about being a pensioner ‘ he’s been one since before most of us were born. And yet you never see him queuing up outside a Post Office in rural England anxiously waiting to receive his pension, having failed to make any other provision for himself. Why not? Because he lives in Texas, some of you might say. But that isn’t the real reason. Doyle is a rugged individualist, a frontier man, an old school road gambler who always knew how to hustle up a stake, how to find a game, and how to beat it. He doesn’t need the welfare state to help him. And, with his help, neither will this nation’s pensioners. He’s going to make toughened poker playing road gamblers of our nation’s grannies.

Doyle plans to spend the next four years travelling the country in his bright red Oldsmobile, visiting bingo halls, bowls clubs, village gardening clubs, matinee theatre performances, and other places where pensioners are known to congregate. He’ll teach them how to play the Cadillac of poker, and advice them to replace their knitted hats with stetsons, and pack a barking iron in their handbags next to their bus pass just in case of trouble. With Doyle’s help, our nation’s old folk will learn how look after themselves at the poker table. Their Post Office pension will in future be paid straight into their online poker accounts; and their Winter Fuel Allowance will be paid in the form of a bonus on an online blackjack site.

Our wise new leaders Ziigmund, Isildur1, FullFlush, Tony G and Doyle Brunson will make this country great again!