{"id":480853,"date":"2019-01-14T07:23:50","date_gmt":"2019-01-14T14:23:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rollingstone.com\/?p=777902"},"modified":"2019-01-14T07:23:50","modified_gmt":"2019-01-14T14:23:50","slug":"watch-steve-albini-detail-poker-championship-win-in-new-doc","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kqzr\/music-news\/watch-steve-albini-detail-poker-championship-win-in-new-doc\/","title":{"rendered":"Watch Steve Albini Detail Poker Championship Win in New Doc"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Last Spring, Shellac<\/a> frontman and recording engineer Steve Albini<\/a>, best known for producing gold and platinum albums for Nirvana, Pixies and others, won a shiny award of his own: a gold bracelet at the World Series of Poker<\/a>. He also took home nearly $106,000 after beating out 309 other people playing in the Seven Card Stud tournament in Las Vegas.<\/p>\n

Now his big win is the subject of an episode from Poker Central\u2019s Stories From the Felt<\/a><\/em> series<\/a>. The series, whose second season premieres on PokerGO today, features episodes that chronicle the history of the game in Sin City, how it\u2019s become a televised game and the stories of select players like Albini. The 12-minute mini-doc features interviews with Albini and his friends, footage of his time at the World Series of Poker and shots from his regular, weekly \u201cTuesday Game\u201d (where you can spot a poster of him with his former Big Black bandmates on the wall).<\/p>\n

Albini, who is humble about his victory, tells Rolling Stone<\/em> he grew up in a cards-playing house. \u201cMy father was a champion bridge player,\u201d he says, \u201cbut in our family we played pinochle.\u201d His great-grandmother taught him poker when he was 7 and he\u2019s played it ever since. He got serious about the game in the mid-Nineties when a friend of his started up the Tuesday Game and has only started going to Las Vegas recently.<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cPoker\u2019s an endlessly fascinating game. It\u2019s like chess, but where the pieces are money\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t know if you\u2019ve ever been there, but it\u2019s pretty awful,\u201d he says of Sin City. \u201cThe vast expanse in the desert means there was room to invent a whole way of life and fantasy world. But while you\u2019re playing cards, it doesn\u2019t matter where you are, whether you\u2019re in a casino or somebody\u2019s home. Las Vegas happens to have the very best poker games in the world.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere are things there which are uniquely suited to having a large number of poker games. Las Vegas has a tradition of having a very low \u2018rake,’\u201d he adds, referring to the casino\u2019s house fee.<\/p>\n

What he likes about the World Series of Poker is that it\u2019s a bit like a \u201cconvention for poker players.\u201d \u201cThere\u2019s a series of tournaments, but it also attracts players from around the world,\u201d he says. \u201cThen you have very, very lively side-game action or cash-game action. There are players who go to the World Series religiously who never play in the tournament.\u201d (That convention quality also explains why Albini is dressed like an astronaut in one scene of the documentary; a friend had asked him and others to dress in NASA flight suits as a gag. Albini adds that he\u2019s not wearing headphones in that scene \u2014\u00a0it\u2019s just part of the costume \u2014\u00a0but he will sometimes wear earplugs to block out the noise.)<\/p>\n

In the doc, Albini says he didn\u2019t feel like he was the best poker player in the room, even though he won. Although he doesn\u2019t downplay his own skill, he chalks his success up to luck. \u201cIn order to win a tournament, you have to have a good run of cards now and then,\u201d he says. \u201cYou can\u2019t be terrible at it, but it\u2019s certainly not the case that the best player in the game wins the tournament. I recognize the fact that I won the tournament didn\u2019t make me a better poker player than I was before I won the tournament.\u201d<\/p>\n

Moreover, he says that winning the tournament didn\u2019t change the way he plays. \u201cI play poker for money,\u201d he says. \u201cI find the game endlessly fascinating, but the reason I play it is because I can make a little extra money at it. In this case, having a six-figure score made a pretty significant difference in the way the summer progressed for me, just in my normal life. The best thing about winning a tournament is you get a little bit of notoriety amongst your poker-playing peers. They might notice that you won a bracelet, and that\u2019s always nice, but bear in mind there are 60 or so bracelet events every year at the World Series, meaning there are 59 other guys that won a tournament last summer.\u201d<\/p>\n

Winning didn\u2019t sink in immediately for Albini. It wasn\u2019t until he started getting congratulatory texts from friends who were following the game with his wife at home in Illinois later that night. \u201cThat was both surprising and very satisfying,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

At home, he\u2019s happy with his Tuesday Game. \u201cIt\u2019s a cherished thing,\u201d he says. \u201cThe camaraderie is intense, and the ball-breaking is epic.\u201d About 60 percent of the other players in his weekly game are part of the Chicago music scene, a mix of amateur and semiprofessional musicians, other engineers and people who work at record labels or in publicity. He doesn\u2019t invite bands he\u2019s recording at his Electrical Audio studio to play in the game, unless it\u2019s a social invite, because he doesn\u2019t want them to feel \u201cpreyed upon,\u201d but he has welcomed a few people from bands to play.<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a cherished thing,\u201d Albini says of his weekly game. \u201cThe camaraderie is intense, and the ball-breaking is epic.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

He says Breeders frontwoman and former Pixies bassist Kim Deal is a \u201cbetter-than-average poker player.\u201d \u201cI\u2019ve known Kim for a very long time,\u201d he says. \u201cWe\u2019ve just maintained a very warm friendship. She was here recording one time when there was a game on, and she hopped in and I think she won a couple hundred bucks.\u201d Another notable player is former High on Fire bassist Joe Preston. \u201cThis was in a five-card draw game,\u201d Albini says. \u201cIt\u2019s extremely rare to draw one card and make a straight flush, and that\u2019s what he did. I had to pay him off because I think I had made a king-high flush.\u201d<\/p>\n

The engineer says that poker winnings account for about 25 to 30 percent percent of his income, along with what he makes from recording bands and touring with Shellac. \u201cI would miss that income if it wasn\u2019t there,\u201d he says. He says he takes home just a modest income from Electrical Audio, so as to keep it going and keep his six employees paid. \u201cI play medium stakes,\u201d he says. \u201cI think my biggest win before the tournament was maybe in the order of $5,000 or $6,000, and that\u2019s a pretty notable win. A few hundred dollars to a few thousand dollars are normal swings.\u201d (Incidentally, Shellac is working on new material \u201cat a glacial pace\u201d; currently they have about half a dozen or so songs that haven\u2019t been recorded for a new album.)<\/p>\n

So what is Albini\u2019s advice for non-champions to improve their poker games? \u201cDon\u2019t play above your head,\u201d he says. \u201cDon\u2019t get into a bigger game than you\u2019re comfortable with, because people make poor decisions if they\u2019re stressed out about money.\u201d Also, he says people should read up. \u201cIn the Seventies and Eighties, when I was first getting serious about poker, there wasn\u2019t much written about it. Now there\u2019s a whole publishing company called Two Plus Two that publishes books about all the different disciplines in poker and the technical aspects. Previously all the great players treated that knowledge as their edge over the world, and they weren\u2019t gonna share it with anybody.<\/p>\n

\u201cPoker\u2019s an endlessly fascinating game,\u201d he continues. \u201cIt\u2019s like chess, but where the pieces are money and if you develop an aptitude for it, it\u2019s certainly possible to make millions of dollars playing poker. But it\u2019s also a game that you can play for your entire life and get a lot of satisfaction out of without ever risking more than a good dinner.\u201d<\/p>\n

via:: Rolling Stone<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last Spring, Shellac frontman and recording engineer Steve Albini, best known for producing gold and platinum albums for Nirvana, Pixies and others, won a shiny award of his own: a gold bracelet at the World Series of Poker. He also took home nearly $106,000 after beating out 309 other people playing in the Seven Card […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-480853","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-music-news"},"acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-06-12 14:41:37","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"distributor_meta":false,"distributor_terms":false,"distributor_media":false,"distributor_original_site_name":"KQZR - The Reel","distributor_original_site_url":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kqzr","push-errors":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kqzr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/480853","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kqzr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kqzr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kqzr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kqzr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=480853"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kqzr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/480853\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kqzr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=480853"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kqzr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=480853"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kqzr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=480853"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}