Los Angeles, California
August 4, 2000

Dear Readers,

Today’s letter is by Ethan Watters, a freelance writer in San Francisco. Ethan and I are old friends; we met when we were interns together at Harper’s Magazine, twelve years ago.

When I moved from Toronto to San Francisco last winter, to begin work on Open Letters, I lived in Ethan’s house in the Mission for a couple of months. We soon developed a weekly ritual: every Monday, we’d get in his Volkswagen and drive eleven miles south to Colma, to a tiny casino called Lucky Chances, where we’d play Texas Hold ‘Em for a few hours. Ethan’s right; it’s a great game, very addictive.

What Ethan understood instinctively, and I learned slowly, is that Texas Hold ‘Em is essentially a game of psychology – you win not by having the best cards at the table, but by being able to see into the hearts of the other players. Ethan constantly amazed me with his ability to know, often precisely, what cards everyone else at the table was holding. He was able to do this simply by watching them, studying their patterns, learning their tells. I was lucky if I managed not to bid out of turn.

It was clear to me, too, that Ethan was not just an aficionado: he was compelled to play cards, in a way that I will never be. So I asked him if he would write me an open letter about Lucky Chances, to explain what it is that draws him there.Today’s letter is the result.

Tomorrow, a new experiment for Open Letters: our first illustrated letter, from a New York artist named Jorge Colombo.

And on Sunday, the seventh issue of the weekly PDF version of Open Letters will go out to subscribers. If you haven’t yet subscribed, you can subscribe, for free, simply by sending a blank email toweekly@openletters.net. Take a look atthis page for more information about how Open Letters subscriptions work, and atthis page for a brief dissertation on the future of content delivery on the Internet, and on how our PDF subscription might fit into that future.

Next week: letters by and about parents and children, including two more letters from X., in Winnipeg, who has been writing an ongoing series of open letters about her teenage son, to his absent father. In preparation, you might want to read X.’s last letter, published a couple of weeks ago.

Also: the email struggle continues here at OLHQ. Apologies to those who’ve written in to the magazine this week and received no reply. Your mail is not lost; it’s just waiting. Things should be back to normal soon. In the meantime, Open Letters will remain, unfortunately, only semi-interactive. You can still write me, of course; I’ll get your email, someday.

Again, thanks for your patience, and for reading.

Yours truly,

Paul Tough