OK, this one, I admit, is small and probably doesn't matter. But these comments in a Christianity Today article just rub me...
It's like playing the World Series of Poker with poker chips. Interesting, but it no longer makes the heart race when you're trying to bluff your opponent.
Thus, every NASCAR race becomes a World Series of Poker, where the stakes are not a pile of money—though there is that—but survival at the fastest speed possible; that is, sport at its riskiest, deliberately racing right up to the abyss, looking into mysterious and dark depths while avoiding the bony hand that reaches up to grab you.
Really? I guess those millions of dollars the WSOP hand out yearly made it past the crack staff at CT. If the stakes at the WSOP are not money, what are they? (I know, I know, the winners bracelets are nice, but most people would take the money over a piece of jewelry any day).
If you are going to use pop culture to make your points, please get it right. Otherwise, you seem like what most people who are not Christians believe about us already. Clueless and out of touch...
Link: Cheating Death | Christianity Today | A Magazine of Evangelical Conviction.
I read part of the article. Seemed like a bunch of waffle written by an overly verbose idiot.
I am pretty sure that if you make the final table of the WSOP Main Event, your heart will be pounding when you are waiting for a call or fold of an all in bluff.
That one pivotal moment could make a real world winnings difference of several hundred thousand dollars or even millions. All players are acutely aware of that. Just ask Sammy Farha, about the time Chris Moneymaker bluffed him.
And to claim that replacing money with chips makes them less exciting to players is also nonsense. Ask a casino cashier which he or she gets more excited about handing. Cash or chips? The answer would be neither, because handling cash and chips is just a part of their job.
If the WSOP were played with actual cash (a gross impossibility and betraying the authors total ignorance of the game), it would mean no more or no less to a player than chips. The cash or chips are not 'real' until you are knocked out in the money or prevail and win it all.
Posted by: ZCT | August 13, 2008 at 08:31 PM