Poker Mac

Aaron Brown's Book

Check out this well written piece on poker at Harvard in Harvard Magazine. The author is an executive director at Morgan Stanley, who just published a book about poker and Wall Street. This article is basically an excerpt of one of his chapters. There’s a lot of name dropping (Bush, Scott Turow, Bill Gates), and its probably just a shill for his new book, but I found it an interesting read.

He calls the finals clubs “safe” — but having grown up in Boston, my experience with them was entirely violent. In high school I went to a friend’s birthday party at one and had my leather jacket stolen. The best part of that night was finding the guy with my jacket down the street and when I pulled it off him and said “that’s my jacket — it’s from Sharper Image, right?” Don’t laugh, I thought Sharper Image was the epitome of cool in 1985. So the guy drops the jacket and says “Sharper Image! That’s my Tag!” lol. My girlfriend and I chased the trail onto a subway train full of 50 or so of this guys pal and I got punched in the face.

The next time I was in a finals club was college – my friend Cro-Mag and I jumped the wall in search of beer (and found it in the basement). Then when we couldn’t get from the basement to the party, we ran into the front door crowd. The front door guy, slight and short looked a lot like our friend, Rat-Boy. No matter how many times we repeated, “you look like Rat-Boy dude!”, we could not impress him. He punched me in the face.

Maybe the poker games were less painful.