Barack Obama's hidden talent

[FarLeftRage]

He's a top-notch poker player. Thank goodness—he’ll need it.

Among the countless blessings conferred by the election of Barack Obama is the energizing fact—until now little-known—that poker will be back in the White House for the first time in 35 years. Not since Richard Nixon has the United States had a dedicated player of its historic national game in the Oval Office.

Throughout the campaign, Obama’s media minders have been far from keen for you to know this. Asked early on by the Press Association to name a "hidden talent," Obama rashly revealed that he considers himself "a pretty good poker-player." Subsequent investigations were hampered by a blanket shutdown on the subject from said minders. But it was already on the record that, after a cool reception from fellow legislators in 1997, when he first took his seat in the Illinois state senate, Obama won over colleagues of all parties with his charm and expertise at the green baize.

Expertise at poker used to be an unwritten job requirement for all would-be U.S. presidents.

In a short New Yorker piece last February, Obama’s friend James McManus, Chicago-based author of the poker classic Positively Fifth Street and the forthcoming The Story of Poker, reported that the rookie senator had co-hosted a regular game for which there was soon a waiting-list including Republicans as well as fellow-Democrats. "When it turned out that I could sit down and have a beer and go out for a round of golf or get a poker game going," Obama once told the Chicago Tribune, "I probably confounded some of their expectations." Poker, concluded McManus, was the secret of Obama’s transformation among "the Chicago machine pols and downstate soybean farmers" from "overeducated bleeding-heart and greenhorn" to regular kinda guy.


More at: http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2008-11-06/card-shark-in-chief


It is a good thing, I think...

[annabanana]

1. I suspect that any really effective President

would be a good poker player, once he applied himself to the game.

[Captain Hilts]

2. This is great news!!!! FDR insisted on playing versions with tons of wildcards...

so everybody had a good hand. Kind of the 1940s version of Dr. Pepper Poker.

[Hawkeye-X]

3. Then Barack Obama is invited to play poker anytime at my club

And he'd enjoy communicating or trying to learn how to communicate with the deaf :)

Hawkeye-X

[Historic NY]

4. I had an SS friend that played with Nixon in the later yrs.....he used

to sponge game refreshments. He told me he like to sit around in his boxers and wife beater.

[eshfemme]

5. LOL, I remember reading a story where his poker buddies decided to help him "celebrate" his 2004 win

to the Senate by taking him down. So they helped him celebrate by making him lose about $100 or $200 that day. It sounds like an asshole kind of thing to do but it's also something friends would do and it makes me LOL. Apparently, he plays poker the way he usually is-- very calmly and steadily so that when he bluffs, it's hard to tell. But that day since their goal wasn't to win the pot but to take Obama down, he lost all his money that day. He apparently wasn't such a happy camper afterward.

Evil bastards, aren't they? :evilgrin: