To Any Happy Mutant Poker Aficianados:
Did anyone else laugh at this interaction:
Interviewer: Here’s another thing I find unexpected about you: that you play poker. Do not take this the wrong way, but you strike me as the kind of person who would be a horrible poker player.
Scalia: Shame on you! I’m a damn good poker player.
Interviewer: But aren’t you the kind of guy who always puts all of his cards on the table? I feel like you would be the worst bluffer ever.
Scalia: You can talk to the people in my poker set.
Interviewer: Do you have a tell?
Scalia: What?
Interviewer: A tell.
Scalia: What’s a tell?
Interviewer: What’s a tell? Are you joking?
Scalia: No.
Interviewer: A tic or behavior that betrays you’re bluffing.
Scalia: Oh! That’s called a tell? No. I never … do you play poker?
As a player, it’s not so much his having a tell when he’s bluffing that will defeat him. It’s that someone like Scalia will probably never fold a good hand that has been run down by a better drawing hand. He’ll hold onto his AA all the way, even when someone with a stronger hand (re)raises him.
In the same way Scalia doesn’t acknowledge the rest of Earth when he talks about the “universally accepted” existence of Satan (which is anything but), he insists that he is a “damn good poker player” yet he doesn’t know what a tell is. (And my 78 year-old, non-poker-playing grandmother knows what a tell is.)
