Poker fans may enjoy collecting Poker Art, and there is a large enough industry churning out anything from Super Mario chip art to stylish monochrome photographs with titles such as Gunslinger and No Chance. Most of it, however, is primarily commercial products, with little or no nuance to entice the eye of a connoisseur.

What the serious poker player – with an eye for the game’s complex aesthetics – may have a general interest in whenever he is not busy challenging a worthy rival is poker in art: but does good art exist which is significantly related to poker?

Despite its immense popularity, worthwhile references to the game in art are rare and some admirers cherish them with the elite pride of the devotees of some wonderful esoteric practice. Poker in music, to my knowledge, features mainly in modern compositions, but there does not seem to be much possibility for its expression in sound. The more successful efforts are usually accompanied by video, and these are restricted to MTV clips. There are many songs which reference poker, but these offer mostly a half-hearted solace, composed by well meaning fans or even by poker pros that are not necessarily great with words or music.

The Card Party: Ballet in Three Deals, is the most significant poker-inspired artwork in music in which I am familiar. Music and visuals are ideally fused by its nature and was first danced by Balanchine’s American Ballet Ensemble. It is one of the rarer curiosities poker admirers might want to see, with music by Stravinsky, who enjoyed poker as a pastime. It is more fanciful than accurate in representing the process of playing cards.

The most obvious example in painting form is Cassius Coolidge’s series of Dogs Playing Poker. Nineteen commercially oriented paintings using anthropomorphized dogs was the order in which these were a part of. It is not even the paintings which are iconic so much, these days, as the general concept of canines around a table in a dimly lit club smoking cigars.

Many works of art, in fact, tend to stylize poker and card games in general, blending them with fantastic themes. Alice in Wonderland would be the most obvious example. Alexander Pushkin’s The Queen of Spades is one of his most famous stories. It depicts a player who heard about a card trick from a friend and is desperate to learn it. The story begins as realism and culminates as a sort of card-game horror. An old woman guarding the secret is threatened by the man who desperate to learn the secret, threatens her with an unloaded pistol which unintentionally causes the woman to die from fear. Her corpse glares at him after opening its eyes at the funeral, then at home he is visited by her ghost which tells the secret. In the first game the man’s possessions are double. While playing another game the man knowingly holds an ace but appears to have played a queen causing him to lose everything. After being committed to an asylum in room seventeen he raves, “Three, seven, ace! Three, seven, queen. There is a BAFTA-nominated 1949 fantasy horror adaptation of the story by Thorold Dickinson for the film buffs.

In film, poker tends to be criminally realistic (though not necessarily more accurate), from Cincinnati Kid to Rounders, with Edward Norton and Matt Damon. The last did moderately in the box office but has become a cult film precisely because of its decent depiction of the playing process. Three years earlier Martin Scorsese gave us a memorable sequence in Casino where a pair of con poker players are expertly detected and deprived of the ability to cheat in any near future by means of a hammer and De Niro’s efficient poker-face threats.

The author is a successful limit cash game player. He plays poker online and receives Absolute Rakeback as well as Fat Bet Rakeback.

categories: poker,poker art,gambling,games,entertainment,recreation