One of the highlights of my rather quotidian life is my weekly poker night with some friends and colleagues. The group was started by a fantastic couple who are new to town and wanted a forum to meet people while staying home so they didn't have to incur child-care costs whenever they wanted to socialize with others. Being new, they relied heavily on their one contact in town to propagate their invitation to join a fun, socially-oriented poker group. This contact on his own is a great guy, but fulfills the role of "pedantic poker player who is great for remembering who plays in position where the tournament goes heads-up, but takes $10 tournaments just a bit too seriously" quite nicely. However, this guy was the "median node" (okay, I just made up a term that might not make sense) in his own network, which then reached out to even more "serious" poker players who have now infiltrated and perhaps infested the group. While the network search started with a friendly couple new-to-town, their lack of ties resulted in low control/selectivity over the search, having to span numerous degrees of separation, and they ended up with a couple of Poker Dorks. Since the game is institutionalized (the same weeknight every week), and they're too kind and welcoming to do anything about it, now they're stuck with them. Live poker is a unique experience that you can't get online, and given the difficulty of getting invited to a game*, I don't think these guys are going anywhere. Perhaps the fact that they don't have a hyper-competive high-stakes game outside of the Indian casino hours away further underscores the co-ordination problem that exists with poker (and for that matter, friendships, forming bands, dating, etc.).
Perhaps you know the type. The guys who are hunched over incessantly doing chip-tricks (with the accompanying annoying "clicking sound") looking and acting miserable, only to have their personalities jolted by an opportunity to count outs, to inform you of their genius that extracted value in a won pot for them, or to concoct face-saving explanations for an unthinkable lost pot ("He was playing crazy! I had to make that call!" [where he turned out to be a 4-to-1 underdog]). As a "serious novice" myself, I don't mind their presence (especially because I enjoy having people I secretly find villainous to compete against), and think one of them is actually a nice guy, but I find it incredibly awkward that they intimidate and alienate the novices, women and those in the group who are just there to socialize. Correctly identifying the table as weak-tight, they raise with marginal hands and bet just about anything strong, as most of the people will fold unless they have the absolute nuts (and even then, I'm not sure some of them would recognize a straight flush if they made it). They also never show their hands if they don't have to, even to novices who are trying to learn the game and ask to see to try to make sense of what happened, as opposed to figuring out how Poker Dork #1 plays AJo UTG on a raggedy flop after CO and the BB called preflop**. I felt terribly that the wife of the original couple specifically asked to have a seat reserved away from the poker dorks because the constant clicking of chips bothered her, and she hated being raised out of every pot that she wanted to limp in. It's her house and she sacrifices sleep to stay up and play, yet I worry that she's not having fun anymore, which in turn impedes my ability to enjoy myself. I used to have a "weekly basketball group" as well, and while we played hard and competitively, we also made sure that everybody had fun (the only bad outing I ever remember having was when we played with some townies who passed less than Kobe Bryant), and certainly wouldn't go as far to debate the merits of the diamond-and-one to stop someone having a good shooting night. I suppose there's a continuum between "cut-throat high-stakes competition" and "competiton as a fun social activity" that some don't appreciate.
In their defense, I'm sure the Poker Dorks just think "we're playing poker" and are oblivious to the context they've walked into. Guys wearing "Yahoo! Student Programming Championship" t-shirts tend not to be the most socially adept people in the world. However, for hyper-competitive people enthralled with gambling, they are totally unaware of the concept of cooling the mark out. Further, the lucrative nature of self-promotion in the booming poker superstar market as proliferated by ESPN and others has resulted in a number of gregarious, entertaining, charming professionals (e.g., Negreanu, Matusow, Nguyen) that show that you can be fun to be around and watch even if you're playing for millions of dollars.
On the bright side, while I don't go out of my way to keep score, despite their focus, drive and virtuosity, I think both of the Poker Dorks are net donators to the prize pool. Given the impact of luck in poker, especially in the short-term, this may not mean a whole lot, but I'm going to be there next week and do my best to gut these Dorks of their chips, so I don't have to listen to that damn clicking all night. I still won't play my fiercest against the novices, but I guess the Dorks have managed to reshape the activity as they desire it, because now I'll think twice about showing my hands and giving out free information. I want everybody else to have fun, but it would be sweet to bust those fuckers and knock them out of the tournament, then chip-dump to the novices and play in a manner that makes devalues skill differentials just to irk them.
I guess the moral of the story is that if you're going to engage in a network search that spans multiple degrees of separation, you better have a damn good broker.
* As an example, http://poker.meetup.com/cities/us/ia/iowa_city/ suggests that this co-ordination/scarcity problem is widespread, and that it's difficult to rectify for many.
** This is poker jargon that I meant to look esoteric and complex. Like I do with most mathematical equations in many social science journal articles, you can just skip over it and understand the general idea behind it.
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