Once I was a King, now I am only a pawn. —Louis XVI, King Of France.
[This is a work of poker fiction set ten thousand hands in the future. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is coincidental.]
This is the story of two tables.
A poker table on display at Las Vegas’ Rabbit’s Foot Casino, signed by every winner of the World’s Most Serious Poker Tournament; and a chess table, on display in the New York Chess Club, and signed by every winner of the American Chess Championship.
Only one name appears on both—Cyrus Eisenberg—known to the poker and chess worlds alike as “Cyrus the Great.”
“Now,” said Eisenberg, “I’m ‘Cyrus the Forgotten.’”
“Cy,” said Delia Harris, UNLV’s Poker Professor, “for as long as people play chess they’ll remember your Poisoned Pawn Gambit against Bobby Fischer at the ’65 chess championship. And for as long as people play poker they’ll remember The Miracle Of Coogan’s Bluff at the ’70 World Serious. Now that we’ve established that you’re totally unforgettable, what brings you to my office?”
“I’ve gotten a subpoena from the Un-American Games Committee. Senator Phil Fist is investigating ‘the subversive nature of poker.’”
“A lot of famous poker players have been subpoenaed. I don’t think there’s anything to worry about.”
“No?” said Eisenberg. “What about the so-called PEACE Amendment?”
Harris, spokesperson for the Poker Players Federation, had fielded questions from subpoenaed poker players all week, and, to allay their fears, had come up with a stock answer, “We’ve checked with constitutional scholars. Not one thinks the Poker Elimination And Criminalization Enforcement amendment has any chance of actually becoming law. No one seriously thinks there is a chance of poker being made illegal.”
“Let me tell you a story,” said the old poker player. “No one, at first, takes an idea like that seriously. In fact, it seems ludicrous. A law to make a country’s most popular game illegal is absurd, and to make a violation of this kind of laughable law punishable by imprisonment, that’s preposterous! Or so the Parisian chess players thought until the mass arrests began.
“The French Revolution,” wrote Voltaire, “was planned over a chess board. And Rousseau went him one better saying, ‘The object of chess and revolution are the same, the toppling of the king.’
“Now, the king in question, Louis XVI, was so desperate to suppress the revolution being planned over Parisian chessboards that he issued a royal edict called Le fermeture une partie d’échecs—‘The prohibition of the game of chess,’ actually making playing chess illegal. People who ignored the chess prohibition were all rounded up and imprisoned in the Bastille. Soon angry protests broke out all over Paris, and do you know what Queen Marie Antoinette said when she was told the chess players were angry?”
“No, Cy, I don’t.”
“She said, ‘Then let them play pocquer.’”
“Is that a true story?” asked Harris.
“If it’s not, it should be,” replied Eisenberg.
“I still don’t think,” said Harris, “that we have all that much to worry about.”
“Delia, I’ve sat at tables for two playing life-and-death games against the ruthless likes of Bobby Fischer and Stu Unger. They never scared me. But anti-poker zealots like Senator Phil Fist scare me to death.”
Eisenberg opens the subpoena, “Fist wants to talk to me about The Miracle Of Coogan’s Bluff.”
Delia Harris is baffled. “Coogan’s Bluff? Why would the Un-American Games Committee want to question you about one hand of poker played a more than half your lifetime ago?”
»
