Martha Frankel
Reads from Hats and Eyeglasses: A Family Love Affair with Gambling
Wednesday, February 27, 7 p.m.
Harvard Coop, 3rd floor

If you’ve mainly watched flashy Vegas poker on TV, you might think that the “hats and eyeglasses” in the title of Martha Frankel’s new memoir refer to the accessories of choice for poker players bent on getting good luck from their headgear or using tinted glasses to conceal any emotion in their eyes. But the “hats and eyeglasses” of the title are neither lucky charms nor self-protective measures. Rather, the phrase refers to hats and eyeglasses as the only accessories that rise to the surface after someone drowns. In poker terms, if you’ve got “hats and eyeglasses,” it means you’ve got a bad hand. You’re sunk. Things are hopeless. You might as well fold. Of course, nothing’s ever as it seems in poker—so if you say you’ve got hats and eyeglasses, you could easily be holding a full house.

To call Martha Frankel’s Hats and Eyeglasses a memoir of gambling addiction is kind of like calling a poker hand “hats and eyeglasses.” In other words, it’s pretty misleading. The book does cover the author’s torrid involvement with an online poker site called Paradise Poker, detailing the alluring palm tree icons, the virtual tables filled with asshole players, and the very real charges Frankel ran up on her credit card bill. But her description of this addiction takes up only a few of the book’s many chapters, leaving plenty of room for Frankel to provide detailed background on her family, her poker apprenticeship, and the aftermath of her addiction, creating a compelling picture of a family whose members love gambling almost as much as they love each other.

Though Frankel tells a fascinating tale, those seeking to end a gambling addiction should look beyond this book. Frankel frankly glamorizes poker here, and this Bostonist finished the book with a craving to play rather than a balanced perspective on the game. So please read with caution—or don’t read at all—if you’ve ever had a serious gambling problem.

Full review of Frankel's book after the jump.

It’s hard to reject gambling when it’s in your blood. Raised in a close-knit Jewish family, Frankel can remember few if any times when she felt distant from others—or from gambling. The book opens with food and family: the women play mah-jongg in the kitchen while the men play poker in the living room. Bagels, cream cheese, and egg and tuna salad are ready to nourish the gamblers; Frankel herself is in charge of distributing snacks upon request. Gambling is never seen as an addiction in Frankel’s family. Though many of her relatives grapple with other addictions—most notably drugs—games in general and poker in particular remain symbols of luck and accomplishment, not damnable addiction.

Confident in her ability to resist the allure of gambling, Frankel describes herself in opposite terms from much of her family: “They were always looking for an edge; I liked to smooth things over…. They became drug dealers; I was just a drug user.” For years Frankel was a part of her family but not quite on the same plane. But then she got into poker.

Assigned to learn about poker for a screenplay she's writing, Frankel begins to investigate poker in more depth than she’d explored it during her youth. She chooses her cousin Kevin, who’d been by her side throughout her childhood and adolescence, to serve as her poker mentor. Kevin’s wife Barbie is a poker dealer, and she invites Kevin and Frankel along on a poker cruise she’s working. This is Frankel’s first sustained exposure to playing poker on a regular basis, and she loves it. A natural flirt, she uses her outgoing nature and social skills to read and influence other players while learning to keep her own “tells” in check and avoid going “on tilt,” or letting frustration affect your play. She makes a point to “Watch, fold, ask what usually wins in teach game, wait until I feel like I understand before I dive in,” and reflects that “This sure beats exploring foreign lands.”

After the poker cruise, Frankel gets even more into the game, forgetting her screenplay—and most of her other work—altogether. She attends a writer’s conference and spends every night at a casino playing poker, writing little but winning big. She plays with nervous, angry men; with people wary of her "unlucky" all-black outfits; with people half or twice her age. She teaches friends’ children to play and goes over hands by herself at home. Through it all, Frankel keeps her husband distant from her hobby, making the person closest to her furthest from her favorite pastime.

Frankel has been playing weekly poker games and visiting casinos for years when she first forays into online poker. She’s turned on to the online game at a casino, of all places. A dealer explains that everyone’s left the casino to play online: “Why come to casino when you can stay home and play in pajamas?” The brilliant idea motivates Frankel to sign on once she gets home. She’s excited to "take a foray into this new world. I’m Columbus, ready to discover, ready to conquer.” Sadly, Frankel is the one who’ll be conquered by this new online world.

These are the days of dial-up, so it takes Frankel over two hours to download the poker software and get into a room. The service allows new players to test out the games with fake money; Frankel turns two thousand “dollars” into three thousand within the hour. Not bad. She starts to think this could be a career. She’s only got to make a few thousand dollars per month to maintain her lifestyle. How hard could it be?

Pretty hard, it turns out. Once she starts spending real money on the site, Frankel loses her initial $300 in chips quickly. She buys more. And more. And more—until she hits the site’s $3000 monthly limit. She begs Paradise Poker to allow her to buy more chips—she just has to win back what she’s lost. Yet the more she plays, the more she loses, creating a monstrous hole she can’t dig herself out of. She’s forgotten her father’s gambling advice: “If you don’t have anything, get out. If you’re second best, get out. But if you’ve got the goods, make them pay.” In hanging all her hopes on getting some goods, Frankel’s neglecting the most rule of poker: know when to fold ‘em.

“Why are you leaving when you’re winning?” is a question Frankel was constantly asked throughout her (offline) poker career. Everyone seems to think there’s no limit to what you can win once you’ve started, no way your luck can turn once it’s gone good. Frankel, however, comprehended that you can easily start sinking even if you’ve swum for miles, and had a strong sense for when to get out of individual games—a sense that evaporated once she signed on to Paradise.

Frankel describes how “So many kids, and so many women, [are] drawn in [to online poker] precisely because it’s something they can do in front of their computer screens, in private, with no one watching.” Until she finds Paradise, poker is a social undertaking for Frankel. She plays with people, reads their faces, watches for their tells, flirts with them, enjoys the interaction. Her social skills make her a rousing success in person. But online, there’s no social aspect. There are only cards—which usually don’t fall in Frankel’s favor.

Though she's had extensive support from her close-knit family throughout her life, Frankel avoids family members at the time when she seems to need them most--to help confront her addiction. Her mother calls her in tears wondering what she’s done to push her daughter away, but Frankel still doesn't confess. Instead, she tries Gambler's Anonymous, which fails to send her promised information. She attends a meeting where a fellow gambler advises her, “Addiction isn’t a… Chinese menu. You can’t choose two from column A and none from column B. You have to stop altogether.”

But Frankel doesn’t. She stops playing online poker, eventually, and admits her misstep to her family, even her husband. She’s forgiven and welcomed back into the fold. But she keeps playing poker in the Wednesday night poker game that ignited her affair with the game in the first place. And, given the relatively serious presence of addiction in her family, that’s somewhat disturbing.

Frankel’s certainly had a rich and interesting life, and she portrays poker in a fun, positive light, so her book’s worth reading for entertainment and a little bit of poker education. But anyone seeking an inspirational tale to help them overcome their own gambling—or other—addictions will be sorely disappointed. In fact, Frankel pretty much glamorizes poker as something that makes her feel brilliant, alive, and connected. She draws a very distinct—if perhaps false—line between her desperate obsessiveness about online poker and the cheery camaraderie she feels when playing in person. Though she’s obviously been able to handle her continued play just fine, it makes her book more of a memoir and less of a self-help manual. Again, there's nothing wrong with that—but it does make the book a little bit difficult to categorize.

Reading this book is a big like reading a drug addict’s memoir and having the conclusion be that she’s found herself able to shoot up once a week but no more often. If that works for one person, fine, but it seems like a dangerous message to send to addicts in general. Here’s hoping no one’s reduced to “hats and eyeglasses” after reading Frankel’s book.

Images from flickr users timsnell, mooranguinho, and plutor