POKER AND PORN

Last night Jae I played a little poker at Planet Hollywood, without much luck.  At my table there was an extremely beautiful young woman, who played with a sense of fun and daring that was infectious.  She had a fresh, innocent quality which was deceiving — she was always playing games, check-raising on draws for example, which is a bold move in a Las Vegas poker room, where people don't mind putting you all-in if they think you're trying to mess with them.

Afterwards Jae said he thought he recognized the woman, and suddenly realized where he'd seen her before — in a porn movie, where she performed sex acts for pay under the name of Jenni Lee.  She's now “gone legit” and works as a model and professional poker player here in Las Vegas under her real name Stephanie Sadorra.  She's just 26.  Odd to move from porn to poker, where preserving your mystery is a key to winning.  On the other hand, she did bet heavily and make people pay to see her cards, which is also a key to winning.

There are many cute female poker players here in Las Vegas who dress provocatively, showing lots of cleavage, and flirt ostentatiously to distract men and put them off their game.  Ms. Sadorra wasn't that sort.  She was dressed modestly and paid personal attention only to her boyfriend, who was playing at a nearby table.  She looked more like the All-American girl in the photo at the head of this post (from her MySpace page) than like the provocative glamor girl gazing at herself in the mirror above.

Poker is a game where it's easy to leave your past behind in the intense concentration of excitement occasioned by each new fall of the cards.  That's part of the intoxication of gambling, which, as Walter Benjamin once observed, obliterates time.  I wonder if Ms. Sadorra looks at the faces of the people she's playing against and wonders if they've seen her in other contexts and think of her not as a pretty good poker player but as a very pretty ex-pornstar.

3 thoughts on “POKER AND PORN

  1. You really understand poker, I liked the way you talked about it, I share pretty much the same vision. As for poker and port I don't really see the connection but then again, everybody has the right to start a new life so…

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