THE BIG BOOK OF POKER SLANG

by John
Vorhaus

INTRODUCTION: AN EXPLANATION

With tongue planted firmly in cheek I call this book The Big Book of Poker Slang because you can tell by the heft and feel of it (in your humid hands even as we speak) that it's not all that big a book, not like The Big Book of Dinosaurs or The Big Book of Big Books or The Big Book of Words that Rhyme with Orange.

I'm not ashamed of having written a small big book. For one thing, it keeps the price down, and believe me a book resting on so slender a premise as this needs all the price protection it can get. For another thing, this makes the title a logical contradiction, a self-conflicting notion or oxymoron, like "specific generalities" or "random order" or "audible silence." I like logical contradictions. They tickle my mind. More than that, they challenge the sorting system in my brain. 

Suppose, for example, I'd subtitled this book, "The Book Without A Subtitle." What kind of sense could you make of that? Not a ton, that's for sure. And that, for my money, is the whole darn point of the exercise. Zen thinkers tell us (when they deign to talk at all) that confusion is the soul of understanding. You have to be perplexed by things before you can figure them out. At this instant, for example, you may be perplexed at having ponied up good bucks for this small big book. I hope, before all the pages have been turned, to make it worth your while.

For this isn't just a book of slang. 

It is ever so slightly more than that. 

In linguistic philosophy we learn that language informs belief; manipulate language and you manipulate belief. By inventing hundreds of new slang expressions for the persons, places and things of the poker world, I manipulate language; I change the way I think about things. I think this is a good thing.

Poker, as we know, is about concentration. The better you concentrate, the better you play. What seems to be a wildly self-indulgent exercise in naming things (this book) is really a means of focusing concentration, both yours and mine. By naming things, and by referring to these things by name, we quickly move to a deeper level of understanding; we "know" these things better than we otherwise would.

Example: The slang expression for a bunch of tight players at a card table is "rock garden." Fun phrase, sure. But look: If this phrase is in your head, it gives you new strength. You go into a card club, watch a game for a while, recognize it as a rock garden, call it by that name, and suddenly you have a higher awareness of that game, its strengths, weaknesses, pitfalls and possibilities. It's a shorthand, yes, and not a foolproof one, but it gives you a point of reference. By titling the elements of the game, you know them better than you otherwise would.

Take Adam and Eve. God gave them the job of naming all the plants and animals and the worms in the dirt and the fishies in the sea. Then God gave them dominion over these things. 

Ownership. Name a thing and you own it too.

How is this useful in poker? Hey, how is it not? You're sitting in a mid-stakes hold 'em game, and you notice that one of the players tends to get out ahead of his hand. You assign that player a name, call him a rabbit, because that's what they call a marathon runner who jumps out to an early lead and gives the other runners a pace to match. Generally the rabbit burns out and finishes well back in the pack. Once you've named this poker rabbit, he's yours. You know that his bets mean ever so slightly less than they should, and this gives you an edge you can exploit.

So that's big idea of this little book: Inventing and using new poker slang will actually make you a better player. If you make it your business to name things in your game, you can't help but focus on the game you're in. Focus equals concentration, and concentration equals profit in poker.

Which is not, God knows, to say that each and every term in The Big Book of Poker Slang will put actual physical dollars in your pocket. (There are only two people on the planet for whom that happy happenstance is true: myself and my good publisher, Ms. Dana Smith, whose big heart and generous spirit have earned her own special entry in this frivolous flexicon.) Fact is, some of these terms (fact is, a lot of these terms) are just for fun, little bonmotty names for things that I've accumulated over time. That's okay, I reckon; not everything has to have a deeper reason, and recreation, like self-indulgence, is its own reward.

Speaking of reward, I wish I could personally reward and thank everyone who contributed their slang to this book. I can't, because a) they're too numerous to mention, and b) my record-keeping is scandalously bad. In the end, I humbly confess, much of this slang is just mine: words or phrases that I cooked up and jotted down as I engaged in play in Southern California, Las Vegas, Colorado, and other points known and unknown throughout the poker universe.

Some people have challenged me on this. "Vorza," they've said, calling me by my own slang name for myself, "where the hell do you get off making up new words for things? What gives you the right to reinvent language to suit your whim?" Good question. One I contemplated for many long nano-instants before dismissing altogether.

Language, you see, is constantly being reinvented. Just think of the words and phrases we use daily which did not exist a scant ten or 20 or 30 years ago. Ebola virus. Computer virus. ATM. Virtual reality. Omaha/8. Microwave oven. Shareware. Outplacement. Cyberspace.

Thing is, none of these words came out of nowhere. Someone, somewhere, coined each of them, uttered every last one for the first time in human history. Language is an act of creation, an act of individual creation. Everything that follows is just adoption and convention and consensus.

Consensus is cool. Consensus is useful. If I decide on my own, for example, to change the word "truck" into the phrase "tax return," I can have an amusing little word party all on my own, talkin' 'bout "flatbed tax returns" and "quarter ton tax returns" and "garbage tax returns" and "18-wheel tax returns," and "keep on tax returnin' baby." But if I'm walking down the street and see a preoccupied priest recklessly entering a busy intersection, it does him not a whole heck of a lot of good for me to yell, "Watch out for that huge speeding tax return!" In that moment, he and I lack consensus in language, and thus is a pious (albeit preoccupied) cleric needlessly snuffed.

But consensus starts with creation, and that's what this book is about. My own personal act of poker slang creation. You can take it or leave it as you see fit. Chuckle over and dismiss each and every entry, or choose the ones you like and work them into conversation in your own happy poker realms. Either way is fine with me. Though it would float my boat in a big way to think that I'd significantly shaped the vocabulary of poker players everywhere, I'm not one to overestimate my impact in that world or in any world; each of us is the center of our own little universe and we're of astoundingly little interest to the universe next door.

I also invite you to invent your own slang. (You are cordially invited, and no RSVP is required.) After all, if I can invent the language, there's no reason why you can't too. If you take it into your head to call a full house a "bulging condo," for example, no force on earth can stop you. You might get some strange looks, but don't let that bother you. I get them all the time. 

By the way, if you bought this thing thinking it was a definitive compendium of "real" poker slang, stuff like "freeroll" and "bad beat" and "dead man's hand," sorry but you're barking up the wrong book. These are new words, the terra incognita, if you will, of poker slang. It's not a scholarly text. It's only barely a text at all. Of course if you're reading these words, the odds are excellent that you've already exchanged your precious pence for the pages you now hold. Drat. Geez, I wish I could help you, but we have a strict policy here at the John Vorhaus Entertainment Empire: Satisfaction guaranteed or your money banked.

Okay, I'm acting flip. I do apologize. This comes from the self-awarded freedom of making up new words. Having given myself license to invent language, I keep thinking I have pretty much license to do anything, or say anything, that enters my fevered brain.

Hey, it's an exciting freedom. And guess what? You can have it too. Even if this turns out not to be exactly precisely the book you expected it to be, why not let it be exactly precisely the book it is, and make it useful to yourself accordingly? Use these words. Abuse them too. Use new words of your own. See if command of the language doesn't give you new command of your game (or even -- dare I whisper it? -- your life at large). I'm betting it will.

One last thing: On the off-chance that I sell enough copies of this flightless bird to justify a follow-up, you'll make my job a hell of a lot easier if you contribute to that book. Send in your own poker slang. Anything at all. Words you've heard around the table, or muttered to yourself in dreams. Phrases you've invented to describe trick plays or painful beats. The poker realm as seen by you, using your marvelous powers of perception. Send them to me care of my fine publisher. Maybe I'll dig 'em. Maybe I'll find a place for them in The Bigger Book of Poker Slang. 

Then you can be the boss of language too.