The Gods of Gamblers

Check out this recent piece about a poker-playing priest:

The Rev. Andrew Trapp said he entered the PokerStars.net Million Dollar Challenge in hopes of putting St. Michael Catholic Church "super close" to its $5.5 million fundraising goal to build a new facility. He also wanted to strike a public relations blow for priests.

"At the very least, even if I didn't win any prize money, I was hoping it would help people to see that priests can have fun and be normal people and hopefully get a little bit of a fun twist on the image of the priesthood," the assistant pastor said Tuesday.

So the guy won $100,000 for the church building fund. Just ask comedian Steve Harvey to parse what a building fund is.

Why do I love this? The God and gambling nexus is totally gripping. If you ask me, Einstein was out of his gourd when he said that God does not play dice.

Personal bias - in my family's genetic tangle of the sublime and the ridiculous, both god and games play a huge role. My mother's two uncles helped build Las Vegas and were once, respectively, a pit boss at the Golden Nugget and a craps dealer at Binion's Horseshoe. My father was raised in a monastery by his uncle, a holy man named Parthenios (The Virgin). My mother's grandpa came to California to run an offshore gambling boat. My father's aunt was a prioress in a convent.

I could never choose sides. For about a year, I was simultaneously the (ghost) editor of America's oldest Christian magazine, and also one of the country's largest gambling magazines. Tough? Not as much as you'd think. The first month saw the crowning of Jerry Yang - the unlikeliest poker genius to ever win a WSOP bracelet and baffle Christians and gamblers alike.

Yang is a Hmong Laotian who started to teach himself poker near my hometown in California. He's a devoted Christian, prays before matches, and in two years, went from an online dabbler to the king of the green felt. When he sat at the World Series of Poker Final Table, he clearly had God on his side: In the final round, he pushed his chips all in on a pair of 8's, was quickly outmatched, then won by drawing an inside straight on the river, to win a pot worth $8.25 million. A feat of Biblical proportions. What did he do with it? He tithed to kids organizations.

Strangely, neither the Christians or the gamblers made him their poster boy. Go figure.

Kind of a shame. Gambling and prayer aren't as different as you might think. Lord knows, no one prays like a gambler with everything riding. Or as Dostoyevsky (a gambler, penitent and writer in that order) more delicately put it, "Can one even as much as touch a gambling table without immediately becoming infected with superstition?"

There is a good reason for these two activities are so closely tied, I like to think. There's a neat theory put forth by an old Oxford don and Hellenist, Gilbert Murray: Religion is how we think about what we don't know. When we find ourselves on the brink of the unknown - whether through joy, a personal crisis or any other mystical experience - we cast about for some way to understand what can't be understood. That language becomes religion.

Our drive to play games is willfully putting ourselves in that same brink: standing over the abyss, and, like Jerry Yang, letting it all ride. Mystics and gamblers share an adrenaline rush of looking out over the unknown, letting one foot hover over. It's the same rush.

And maybe Yang brought a closer synthesis from his homeland. There seems to be a much nearer nexus between the two in Asia. China, for instance, boasts Buddhism, Taoism and a baroque system of influencing luck at its spiritual center. Go to a Cantonese wedding, and the vows are barely finished before the gaming tables are brought out. Sic Bo and Bacarrat are national passtimes. A precursor of Keno helped build the wall of China.

And - to clarify the lead image above - there's a hugely popular Chinese movie genre which can be summed up as kung fu gambling. Spiritual adepts take their mastery to the gaming tables, and influence the fall of dice and the lay of cards through their spiritual perfection. A cool background here.

More and more American casinos, catering to the enormous Asian market, will hire Feng Shui experts. Entrances face east, walls are built with the soil layering practice of han-chiku and I Ching symbols abound. There's a buddhist shrine at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. A shrine. In a casino. No problem.

Which brings it back to us, I guess - Americans, and what we find holy. I've always been a fan of Vegas, ever since I moved there at 21 and worked the Strip while trying to find my own soul. Chuck Palahnuik wrote, "Las Vegas looks the way you'd imagine heaven must look at night." I agree. Built in 1946 by a nation wracked by Depression and Another Great War, the place remains, for better or worse, an American temple of the first order. Where there was a desert, we created a spring. Where there was scarcity, we created the groaning table of the casino buffet, presided over by the opulent fertility of the showgirl.

So what if these were vegas, or mirages. America has embraced this mirage as its own: that anyone can win, that anyone can be treated like royalty, that the next big hit has your name on it. It's our religion - the faith we hold when we look out into the unknown.