It's the end of the world as we know it-and I feel fine. -REM
One day people are just named Charlie Brown or Homer Simpson, the next day-"Good Grief" and "D'oh!"-their names are suddenly famous. Or infamous. Take, for example, the poker player Edward Theodore Gein, who shares this name with the real life killer who was the basis for the Norman Bates character in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho.
This strange naming coincidence is stranger still. Both were real life psycho killers.
While dyslexia, the inability of the brain to correctly recognize letters, is well known, there is another, lesser known, but no less debilitating problem called dyscalculia-the inability to count.
Today it is recognized as a neurological disability. In the 1960s it was treated as a mental illness.
Young Edward Theodore Gein suffered from a severe form of dyscalculia. Diagnosed as mentally retarded, his parents attempted to beat the "devil of dyscalculia" out of him. One night young Eddie butchered them both. Committed to a State Mental Hospital, Eddie was introduced to the game of poker. While 2 + 2 was still and would always remain a mystery, Eddie discovered that two pair of funny-looking symbols beat one pair of any funny-looking symbols every time. Eddie spent many years in intensive "poker herapy." After his release, Eddie hitchhiked to Las Vegas and began to play psycho poker.
"Psycho Eddie" Gein became the anti-card playing religious zealot, the "Poker Prophet," only after losing The Crystal Casino's $1,000,000 Winner-Take-All Poker Tournament to his opponent's 666.
In a rational world, Ed Gein, the self-styled "Poker Prophet," would have (again) been committed to a psychiatric ward. Instead, soon after the suicide bombing of the Las Vegas Crystal Casino's poker room, he was a guest on Today's A Good Morning America. The host, Chatty Patty, began, "Sadly, the suicide bombing has taken the lives of 149 and injured 516. My guest this morning says it was their own fault. Welcome, ex-poker player and now poker opponent, Edward Gein. My first question to you is, how could the deaths of all these innocent poker players be their own fault?"
"For one thing," answered Gein, "there is no such thing as innocent poker players. In my first book, The Evils of Poker, I proved to a theological certainty that poker was the devil's game. Think about it! Don't poker players sit in a circle? Isn't Hell organized into circles? The proof of poker's guilt is there if you know where to look.
"Then, in my second book, All Poker Players Are Going Straight to Hell, I revealed, with mathematic certitude that, through his evil poker game, Satan was trying to bring on the Apocalypse. I showed there are exactly 2,580,697 ways of being dealt a five-card hand. 25.80697 is exactly the square root of 666. There are exactly 443,556 ways of being dealt three of a kind. 666 times 666 is 443,556. The proof of Satan's hand is there for all to see! Now, in the same smoke and fire that destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah, we see the proof, plain and evident, before our very eyes. It all adds up!"
"What all adds up?" asked Chatty Patty.
"Don't you see? 149 dead. 516 injured. Add them together and you get the number of The Poker Beast. 666! It is The End of Poker Times!"
Gein's math remained badly flawed. No one noticed.
[This is a work of poker fiction set ten thousand hands in the future. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is coincidental.]
(To be continued in the next issue of Poker Player)
