#211: “Re-Hachem Old News”

History is written by the victors and in poker, the losers don’t always go down quietly. Especially if they used to be the winners.

I haven’t given my 2 cents on ‘that’ 5 minute and 36 second interview until now. I’ve been busy and what time I have for poker this year will mostly be spent playing. Blogs will be few and far between but I would like to  offer a few words on what was a most self-serving attempt to ruffle feathers, a cynical ploy by a so-called poker ambassador to drag the last bit of spotlight onto the ‘characters’ in the game because, quite frankly, that’s all the caché he has left.

Let’s be honest. These guys never emphasised their ‘personalities’ when they were winners. They made sure you knew about how well they played then. Now they don’t play well so it’s all ‘the new generation of pros are drones and cardboard cutouts’ as if they were all assembled from the contents of the same Beats By Dre ‘build your own poker player’ Kinder Egg. Bullshit. The new generation of players are more diverse and, in my opinion, a far more interesting group than their predecessors.

The goals of professional players and recreational players has always been different. The pro wants the recreational player’s money and back in the day, some pros boorishly bullied and harassed their table-mates to actualise what was perceived as (and likely was) an additional edge. The pros would then balance their conversational ranges with some politically incorrect jokes, pithy one liners and anecdotes about prior boorish behaviour when somebody else was the victim. It’s nice that the former pros turned characters of the game remember their schtick through rose-tinted glasses (there were few worse than Hachem for berating opponents, dealer-abuse and bemoaning his ill-fortune despite, at one time, running higher above EV than anyone on the planet) but, with a few exceptions, they were never that funny, that charming or that ambassadorial. They were pros out to make a living. And so are today’s pros.

History is written by the victors and I think that history will ultimately remember Joe Hachem’s interview for what it was: a desperate Dodo bird raucously squawking about all the things it used to see when it could fly.