Every Tuesday night, as he has for the past year and a half, Stephen Elliott gets together with a group of friends and plays poker into the wee hours. Bets hover around $20, but money isn’t really the point, Elliott says. It’s what you can learn about people–including yourself–while pushing chips across a beer-stained table. Players come and go, but ten of the regulars and their wins, losses, and notable bursts of shit talking have been immortalized in the Poker Report, a semiregular poetic bulletin the Chicago-bred novelist E-mails to about 100 subscribers from San Francisco, where he lives now as a fellow at Stanford University’s creative writing program.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Like most literature on gambling, the Poker Report goes beyond dry recital of the stats or strategies for winning. Questions rattle around the table about how to lose gracefully, who likes whom (a romance has bloomed between two of the regulars), and how to escape into a deck of cards as Enron screws the pooch and kids in the Middle East blow themselves up. Elliott usually doesn’t have the answers to the questions he poses in the report–sometimes he’s too drunk to remember who won, much less pontificate at length on world peace.
His first experience with poker was just grisly enough to pique his interest. En route from Chicago to Seattle, where he was heading to live with a girlfriend after Northwestern, Elliott stopped at a “saloon” in West Yellowstone, Montana, joined a private game, and lost most of the $600 he had to his name. “I think I had about $20 left after that…just enough to get into Seattle on fumes. I showed up with nothing, and it was just terrible for our relationship.” Nevertheless the couple stayed together for another year and almost got married–a gamble Elliott chickened out on. “I wish I had gone through with it–because then I could’ve gotten a divorce,” he says with a laugh. “I’d have already gone through the whole marriage experience, gotten all that out of the way.”
