Visual Job

David Mamet is one of America’s most shrewd and calculating writers of plays and films. With works like American Buffalo and Glengarry Glen Ross, he reveals the often brutal way men deal with their friends and workmates. It is no surprise then that Mamet is a huge poker fan. He surrounds himself with poker-playing friends, including the master card trickster Ricky Jay. And, best of all, he writes about the game. He is not really your go to guy when you need to learn the odds of winning with a pair of pocket tens, but he was excellent in expressing the futility one can feel at the end of a bad night when he wrote, “The poker player learns that sometimes both science and common sense are wrong; that the bumblebee can fly; that, perhaps, one should never trust an expert.” And he probably does not have many fans at the Ladies International Poker Series, but he does have an elegant way of tearing apart a guy on the verge of folding when he writes that, “Playing poker is also a masculine ritual, and, most times, losers feel either sufficiently chagrined or sufficiently reflective to retire, if not with grace, at least with alacrity.”