The Game is Seven-Card Stud

My younger sister, Wendy Freedman, is a professional poker player.  I say this not to brag but as an introduction to my blog topic, but I mostly mention it as a way to boost my page views via Google searches, since she is the closest thing we have to a famous person in the family.  This is what she looks like:

She is one of the few female professional poker players, as far as I know. Poker has traditionally been a male-dominated game, even within amateur ranks, where it is typically viewed as a male-bonding activity, an alternative to the all-male Tuesday-night bowling league or barfly softball game. Compared to those games, it is a more sedentary game and tends to attract a slightly rougher crowd, those inclined to drink beer, smoke cigars, and tell dirty jokes in the dark. Poker also rewards slightly menacing, duplicitous, and mysterious behavior, as your goal (to put it crudely, since I'm not a poker player) is to fool your opponent and take his money, regardless of whether your hand is better or not.

My sister and I have had a few conversations about whether poker constitutes gambling or not, and I won't rehash those friendly debates here, but suffice it to say that while poker, like all card games, involves the luck of the draw, it is mostly about psychological domination and strategy, or how you play those cards. This is why poker is such a natural symbol for the aggressive nature of modern life and a specifically American view of individualist success.  You are dealt a certain hand, but what matters most is how you play those cards. Poker is a modern game, and it aptly represents the "winner-take-all" strategy for success in a cut-throat American capitalist society.  In that way, poker is a perfect symbol for a naturalistic view of life. This is one reason poker figures so prominently in a number of Jack London stories and novels, including Burning Daylight.

Poker also emerges as an important symbol in Tennessee Williams's masterpiece, Streetcar Named Desire.  During the play's famous poker night scene, to which the women are pointedly not invited, Stanley erupts in a display of violence and physically abuses his wife.  The poker game serves as a display of masculine male power, and this patriarchal power structure remains closed to women, although they receive the brunt of its ugliness.  The play ends on the line, "The game is seven-card stud," suggesting that, as Blanche is carted off to the asylum and Stella submits to Stanley's power, the structure remains firmly intact. The game continues and women remain oblivious to its rules, even as they are subject to its power. This is one reason my sister is cool, because she has infiltrated this game, questioned its traditional male power, and benefited from the outcome.