James McManus, Columnist

One of These Nine Men Will Be Poker's Champ

The nine finalists for the World Series of Poker are a diverse group in all ways but one.

July 16, 2014 at 6:41 PM UTC

James McManus is the author of "Positively Fifth Street" and "Cowboys Full: The Story of Poker." He has written about the game for the New York Times, Harper's, the New Yorker, Foreign Policy, Esquire and Grantland. He teaches writing and literature at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

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Baseball, which evolved in the U.S. Northeast around the same time poker was emerging along the lower Mississippi, is now played in dozens of countries, and most of its best players are from Latin America. Basketball, our other 19th-century sport, is even more popular globally.

Yet because of a noxious mix of puritanical and cynical politicians, it is illegal in 47 states to play the country's national card game online, while the on-land game is proscribed in thousands of local jurisdictions. This is despite abundant evidence that poker is a contest of skill played by the likes of Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, Bill Gates and countless other civic and business leaders.