What Obama Means to Poker...?

I shared a flight home from Costa Rica yesterday with PokerNews member FerricRamsium and ESPN's Gary Wise. Wise started waxing eloquent about Barack Obama's election victory after we arrived at Houston for our connecting flights. He linked it to something he had just read in a book about the Brooklyn Dodger teams of the 1940s and 1950s and the potential for changed perceptions of what a 25-year old black man could hope for and aspire towards from then until now.

Somehow the discussion got twisted around to black poker players. It's to be expected that people who make poker a lifestyle will try to tie everything to it, but it still drives me nuts. I listened to FR and Gary theorize in a pseudo-philosophical sort of way about what things like this might mean for black poker players for a few minutes before putting my foot down.

"What black poker players?" I asked them. "I guarantee that both of you can name ten recognizable white poker players off the top of your head and ten recognizable Asian poker players off the top of your head, but I defy either one of you to name ten recognizable black poker players."

Of course they tried. After five minutes, they were up to eight: Phil Ivey, Paul Darden, David Williams, Teddy Monroe, Ray Davis, Don Cheadle, Michael Carroll, and someone whose name is escaping me at the moment. I refused to give them credit for Tiffany Williamson or Shirley Williams, but I conceded Barack Obama. And since Dawn Summers is neither recognizable nor black, stalled at nine they remained.

I don't have much of a point with this post except to say that there aren't that many black poker players and I'm not sure why that is. (P.S. For the Asians, you could say "Nguyen, Nguyen, Nguyen, Tran, Tran, Tran, Tran, Chan, Chan, Lee" and that would about cover it.)