A Player’s Web of Significance: A Narrative of a Finnish Online Poker Semi-Professional

A Poker Man's TaleOne night in western Finland in November 2006, Mark (pseudonym), a civil servant and a family man in his mid 30s, was drifting aimlessly through cyberspace when he remembered a conversation he had had with a fellow chessplayer earlier that fall.He paused for a minute and then typed a search phrase in Google: "poker room."He clicked on one of the top results and got into a site.He would soon play his first online poker game.Mark would first bet with play-money and after a few days switch to playing with a few real euros [1].After learning the game he would invest more and win more -and lose some.His game would improve and his self-control strengthen.Finally, after three and a half years he would count his net winnings for the last year and see that he had won an amount equal to half his salary (ca. 20 000 or $ 27 000).Mark would look back and see how, depending on the day, the game had been a thrilling intellectual challenge, a battle, an irritation or an abomination.He would have visions of going pro and being his own master -or quitting the stupid game once and for all.He would see how the game had brought significant new elements into his life: excitement, money, a new hobby, but also questions of ethics, addiction, time-use, family and reputation.He would deny it, but he had become a poker man.At this point it should be noted that this is not a typical academic horror story about gambling and addiction.This is different.This is what often happens.To put it in the language of anthropology, this text presents a narrative of an agent in a web of significance or, in other words, a person in a culture.As Clifford Geertz continues the idea of Max Weber, humans are suspended in "webs of significance" they themselves have spun.Culture is those webs and to analyze culture is not, as Geertz says, "an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning."(Geertz 1993, 5.) In this article, the culture in question is online poker and the person spinning a web is my key informant, a semi-professional poker player from western Finland whom I have observed playing and whose interviews have revealed valuable details about the cultural context of the game (See also Jouhki 2010).I will attempt to reconstruct the way an online poker player negotiates his actions in the online and offline worlds and how he places himself in the hegemonic discourses about poker culture.In other words, this is a story about a poker player as he and I see it.Together we will construct an example of how poker manifests itself in a person's life.In addition to the narrative of the main informant, I will also draw on interviews with members of the informant's family, which, I believe, is an approach too rarely taken in gambling studies.The research question of this article could be formulated concisely as: What is The Web of Significance of an Online Poker Player?To address my question I have combined interviews and observation in a sociocultural environment limited to one household.Thus my research could be called small-scale ethnography, life history or perhaps more accurately