Those who sacrifice liberty for security deserve neither. -Benjamin Franklin
The Pentagon's "Doctrine of Achieving Rapid Dominance" postulates that the use of overwhelming decisive force and spectacular displays of firepower will paralyze an adversary's perception of the battlefield and destroy its will to fight. "The Doctrine of Achieving Rapid Dominance" is commonly known as "Shock and Awe."
The shock and awe that followed in the wake of the suicide bombing of the Las Vegas Crystal's Poker Room-149 dead, 516 injured-left the few surviving members of The Poker Alliance, the best players and top executives of poker, dazed and confused. While they were still suffering a collective case of post-traumatic stress syndrome, overwhelmed and paralyzed by the spectacular loss of life, The Poker Foes were already gathering to plot their next move.
The distance between Munich, Germany and Reno, Nevada is about 5,700 miles. The time difference in between 1938's Munich Agreement and 2012's Reno Agreement is 74 years. Yet appeasement-surrendering to the unreasonable demands of an aggressor by sacrificing strongly held principles in return for avoiding conflict-is not bound by either distance or time.
At their meeting in Munich on September 30, 1938, Neville Chamberlain sacrificed Czechoslovakia-A far away country of whom we know nothing-in return for Adolph Hitler's promise of Peace in our time. The empty promise of The Munich Agreement was proof that totalitarians view the slightest willingness on the part of their opponents to compromise or negotiate as a fatal weakness. This was a lesson all but forgotten by those who, on poker's behalf, signed The Reno Agreement.
It takes two sides to enter into an agreement. On one side was not The Poker Alliance (the legitimately elected representatives of poker's interests) but instead The Poker Czar, ultra-conservative Federal Judge Roy Bean (appointed by The Committee To Save Poker, whose one-and-only function was to save the profits of one corporation's brick-and-mortar poker rooms). "We don't care how much of poker profits you surrender," the Poker Czar had been told by the frightened corporate casino executives, "as long as you don't surrender our share."
On the other side were The Poker Foes-Senator Phil Fist, known as "The Man Who Killed Poker," and The Reverend Biggs Brother, known as "The Man Who Cursed Poker." These two disliked each other intensely. Each suspected, correctly, that the other was drumming up anti-poker support for his own political advantage. Fist believed Biggs longed to be a theocratic tyrant. Biggs believed Fist was a wannabe dictator. They were, as it turned out, both right, but that is a story for another day. The man who brought them together, Ed Gein, known as The Anti-Poker Prophet, had no totalitarian or authoritarian ax to grind-he just wanted to send hold 'em to Hell. The two sides met in Gein's home outside of Reno, Nevada, The Biggest Little City in The World.
The Poker Czar, purporting to represent "all poker players everywhere," and The Poker Foes, representing "all good and decent non-gambling Americans," worked out the now-famous Reno Agreement: "We, the undersigned, representing the will of the American People, resolve that nothing less than a Constitutional Amendment will solve, once and for all, the poker problem. Therefore we demand that an online poker prohibition amendment be immediately enacted and enforced. There will be no peace until online poker is unplugged."
[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)
