I realize that I caveated the last entry with a spoiler warning concerning Homeland. Well that warning is still in effect. But I am just going to assume everyone has watched every episode of Breaking Bad and of Dexter. Like, how could you not?

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Homeland's Carrie Mathison is an overachiever. In the first episode of the series we saw her reveal to her mentor Saul that she believes a lapse in her prowess meant the non-prevention of 9/11. She, like a lot of poker players, internalizes results as a reflection of her abilities. Moreover, she takes responsibility for things outside of her control. In short, she suffers from the illusion of control. Back in the pre-9/11 days she was presumably just a jejune analyst in her early 20s, fetching coffee for Saul and fetching to her boss Estes, without a hope of preventing such a calamity. But to this she would respond, as she did to Saul, "Everyone's not me." When we meet Carrie we see that, ostensibly, her drive to perform her job to the best of her abilities is a reflection of this perceived shortcoming and that urgency her work demands. Getting to know her, we quickly figure out that no amount of success will satisfy her. If there were no more threats to stop she would imagine one. Poker players often suffer from a similar affliction, sometimes into perpetuity, that no amount of money is enough. And poker makes most people as Carrie, strong but fragile, to the point where losing five days in a row can engender an existential funk. Some vocations, take that of the pastor, never provides one with stark falsification, and maybe this is how some of those so employed never suffer their self-doubts to live. For no poker player is this ever the case, since evidence of one losing money in poker is constantly pouring in, every session, every day, every week. Even a long term winner can come to believe they are washed up after a bad run. Sometimes they are right.



Carrie's fervent, emotional commitment to the cause of protecting America is strangely offset by her fleeting concern for the bodies left in her wake. She has become hardened to death by her experience, yet for the cause hers is a teenage fixation. As unhealthy as this seems, the poker equivalent, I would argue, is close to optimal. It being, becoming indifferent to the swings, the beats, and the mistakes, while remaining fanatical about long term improvement. This requires not acting like a girl on prom night waiting for the doorbell to ring, every time you lose five flips in a row. But internalizing results is not entirely an unproductive thing. The philosophy of results-oriented thinking as sin has some major downsides; it increases victomology, promotes cocksure attitudes, and discourages self-criticism. All of these are to a poker player's disservice. In the quietude between sessions, one would be hard pressed to make a case against Cartesian doubt. Moreover, a downswing is almost always partially, and sometimes entirely, the fault of the player. Given the positive feedback loops poker inspires (confidence begets confidence, unconfidence begets unconfidence), often a downswing is only sparked by something out of one's control, something we should not be results-oriented towards. Concerning the twenty thousand hands of terrible play subsequent to that event, however, it would be a huge mistake to sweep it all under one unoriented rug.

Niggling for some Homeland watchers is the fact that Carrie is the protagonist of the show. She is lionized for her obsessive qualities, punished for speaking truth to power, but absolved totally of negligence in the death of innocent people. As in Breaking Bad, the characters in Homeland operate in a universe without considerations to ethereal karma; sometimes things come around and sometimes things don't. This is also known as reality. Breaking Bad charts the ascent (or was it descent?) of high school chemistry teacher Walter White into the violent, territorial world of methamphetamine trafficking. In one of the more controversial treatments of Breaking, Chuck Klosterman sees the series as a comment on personal choice. He quotes creator Vince Gilligan, "Television is historically good at keeping its characters in a self-imposed stasis," meaning that someone like Dexter, or more obviously, like Bart, never really evolves. Sure things happen to Dexter which change his life and force adaptation, but they never manage to change him. He gets married, he's a psychopathic serial killer with a wedding ring; he has a child, he's a psychopathic serial killer with diapers to change. To Klosterman, "It's not just that watching White's transformation is interesting; what's interesting is that this transformation involves the fundamental core of who he supposedly is, and that this (wholly constructed) core is an extension of his own free will."



Certainly Walt and his partner, the unlikeable, temperamental Jesse, feel the repercussions of breaking bad. But at the decision point they have little to lose. Walt's dying of a lung cancer with colossal treatment costs. Jesse has nothing to live for. As they become emulsified in the drug trade, their circumstances change. Walt's lung cancer finds itself in remission; Jesse finds a kind, decent woman with a kid he grows to care for. There is no turning back though, as the saying goes, and Walt finds his family in upheaval and he himself responsible. I doubt none but the most soapbox enamoured would see this as a censorious comment on the quick and dirty choices Walt has made. Being a drug dealer puts a strain on your familial relationships, you don't say? The more interesting observation to come out of Walt's choices, to Klosterman, is that, "He changed himself. At some point, he decided to become bad, and that's what matters." To be sure, Walt becomes bad. By the end of season four, he just doesn't give a fuck. He phones his neighbour and, under the pretense that his family has left town, asks her to check if he left the oven on. He watches her oblige, from his car down the street, waiting to see if his house explodes from the potential trap laid by the callous, unequalled empire maker, Gustavo Fring.



Walt comes to control his world. Back when he was a washed up research chemist teaching at the local high school, sporting an attenuated moustache, and hardly ever fucking his wife, he was suffering from, among other things, the disillusion of control. By force of realizing the inevitability of his death he elevates himself over his circumstances through will and guile, but most importantly, outlook. This Heideggerian carpe diem is fully affirmed by Walt while he sits in a clinic waiting room, listening to prognosis predestination from a feeble 'survivor.' "That is such bullshit," Walt interrupts him, "... life comes with a death sentence, so every few months I come in here for my regular scan, knowing full well that one of these times - hell, maybe even today - I'm gonna hear some bad news. But until then, who's in charge? Me. That's how I live my life."



There exists a mindset whose only concern in game is making the correct decision. Playing well is its own reward. And it satisfies. The way the board ran out, who won the pot, those things are just the interstitial aether separating one decision from the next. In the redux following the last pot being pushed, it seems to me, the poker player must also understand that transcending the illogic of results-oriented thinking does not go far enough. There is a higher plane upon which one takes responsibility for one's results. After all, getting one outered isn't a natural disaster or an act of god (and not just because one doesn't exist). It is what you signed up for. It is what you have come to expect. You know what someone working at Subway knows after eight hours of eight dollar per hour work? That they are owed sixty-four dollars. You chose to wander in the chaos.

Dexter certainly did. True to his psychopathic nature, whenever he gets in a spot where the threat of death or of detection seems elevated beyond what he can quell with steely rage, never is a regret uttered, never is a repentance formulated. Usually his intonation could be used to voice "oh well." His sentiments are often "I guess I got sloppy." Dex is realistic about the inevitability most of history's mass murderers have come to know, all too soon. He lives it a few times a week after all, when he executes a defiant, or a slobbering, or a proselytizing human being wrapped in plastic.

Walter certainly did. In the penultimate episode of season four, with some things that once went around coming around, the chaos swirling, he explains to his wife Skylar, that he chose this life.

"I have lived under the threat of death for a year now. And because of that, I've made choices."

"Walt, I-"

"Listen to me. I alone should suffer the consequences of those choices, no one else. And those consequences...they're coming. No more prolonging the inevitable."

Carrie cannot. In a mania, leading up to the terrorist strike (of which her clairvoyance informs her), she completely loses control, shouting at unwitting cops "The world is about to end and we're standing around talking!" The messy possibility of failure doesn't just fall short of Carrie's acceptance, its incarnation breaks her. For both Dexter and Walter, personal demise, the ultimate undesirable result, is not a failure of the ultimate kind, for they have already come to accept the ramifications of the choices they have made, a power they will never relinquish. They are above being results-oriented, while simultaneously taking responsibility for the result, no matter the outcome. For the poker player, who can only control the decisions he makes and the reactions he has, the lessons are clear. The choice to take responsibility for wandering in the chaos won't be an easy one to make, but it is a path that makes tempting promises. And the choice to break with oneself is incessantly available. All you have to do is take it.