Diversity--Unless It's Lowbrow

Poker's popular again, starting when ESPN televised the "World Series of Poker" beginning in 2001. Then poker's pull skyrocketed when the game was humanized. This ""new generation of players" started a stampede after the 2003 event, won by an amateur ironically named Chris Moneymaker, earning a $2.5 million prize. (The 2004 series winner Greg Raymer, also was a newcomer.)

Unsurprisingly, Moneymaker's published a memoir. Surprisingly, Esquire editor A. J. Jacobs reviewed it in Sunday's New York Times. Unsurprisingly, poker's nationwide popularity made the game gauche in Manhattan:

I have a feeling that the professional players threw the 2003 World Series of Poker. They held a meeting, took a vote and decided to let this accountant from Tennessee who'd never entered a live tournament walk away with the $2.5 million first prize. If so, it was a clever business move, a smart bet. Because now, every schlemiel with a pair of mirrored sunglasses and a rudimentary grasp of the rules of poker thinks he can play cards with the pros. And you can be sure 99.9 percent of them will leave with drained wallets and the sound of snickering in their ears.

Put it this way: after reading Moneymaker: How an Amateur Poker Player Turned $40 Into $2.5 Million at the World Series of Poker, I was half convinced that I could wangle my way to the final table of the World Series at Binion's Horseshoe Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas. And I play poker at a third-grade level. This book is 240 pages of false hope. It may cost $23.95, but I have a hunch it will cause more people to lose more money than any other book this year. . .

The sections on Moneymaker's childhood and early adulthood are fairly unremarkable. We learn he gambled on football, horses and pool. He bought a red Infiniti G20. He drank a bunch of beer. He gambled on blackjack. Although Moneymaker, now a professional poker player living in Tennessee, admits he was a compulsive gambler, this is perhaps the least introspective addiction memoir in history. . .

Being the Times, the review concludes by disparaging the very people liberal Democrats claim to protect:

In the end, "Moneymaker" is the flip side of the Protestant work ethic. Why suffer through all that tedious heavy lifting and perseverance when you can get instant fame and fortune with minimal energy expenditure? It's an alarmingly seductive narrative. And nowadays, Chris Moneymaker has plenty of company, from "American Idol" winners to hotel heiresses. Too bad that for every Cinderella there have to be 838 ugly stepsisters.

Such condescension is common. Yes, the reviewer was playing for laughs. But somehow the bigots are poker players and Protestants. In blue America, tolerance is strictly one way.

Personally, I like both poker and Broadway plays. But between, say, Idols and Opera, only Opera is taxpayer subsidized. The left loves choice--especially when they pick and we pay.