Poker is a microcosm of all we admire and disdain about capitalism and democracy. It can be rough-hewn or polished, warm or cold, charitable and caring or hard and impersonal. It is fickle and elusive, but ultimately it is fair, and right, and just.—Lou Krieger
If you can’t spot the sucker within the first half hour at the table, then you are the sucker.—common poker saying, as spoken by Matt Damon in Rounders; originally attributed to Amarillo Slim
Whether he likes it or not, a man’s character is stripped bare at the poker table; if the other players read him better than he does, he has only himself to blame. Unless he is both able and prepared to see himself as others do, flaws and all, he will be a loser in cards, as in life.—Anthony Holden (from Big Deal)
There are few things that are so unpardonably neglected in our country as poker… Why, I have known clergymen, good men, kindhearted, liberal, sincere, and all that, who did not know the meaning of a ‘flush’. It is enough to make one ashamed of one’s species.—Mark Twain
Nobody is always a winner, and anybody who says he is, is either a liar or doesn’t play poker.—Amarillo Slim
They anticipate losing when they sit down and I try my darnedest not to disappoint one of them.—Amarillo Slim
Poker is a game of people. . . . It’s not the hand I hold, it’s the people that I play with.—Amarillo Slim
Hold-’em is to stud what chess is to checkers.—Johnny Moss
The guy who invented poker was bright, but the guy who invented the chip was a genius.—Julius Weintraub, a.k.a. “Big Julie”
Poker is the game closest to the western conception of life, where life and thought are recognized as intimately combined, where free will prevails over philosophies of fate or of chance, where men are considered moral agents and where – at least in the short run – the important thing is not what happens but what people think happens.—John Lukacs
Last night I stayed up late playing poker with Tarot cards. I got a full house and four people died.—Steven Wright
Cards are war, in disguise of a sport.—Charles Lamb, Essays of Elia (1832)
Poker is a godless game, full of random pain.—Andy Bloch
You call this one and it’s all over, baby.—Scotty Nguyen, during the 1998 World Series of Poker. Down to him and one other player, he said this to his opponent who called, and it was all over.
Luck favours the backbone, not the wishbone.—Doyle Brunson
Mae West: Is poker a game of chance? W.C. Fields: Not the way I play it.—My Little Chickadee
Yeah, well, sometimes nothing can be a real cool hand.—Cool Hand Luke, showing his stone-cold bluff after winning a 5-card stud pot
The game exemplifies the worst aspects of capitalism that have made our country so great.—Walter Matthau
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