Poker has changed since the TNG days. Not the actual game itself, but certainly the widespread popularity of it. No longer is poker just about four or five guys sitting around on a Friday night playing Five Card Stud with plastic chips bought from the local gas station. Today, with the advent of online poker, young and old players alike are making made lucrative careers out of it, and there’s no sign that it is about to stop. There are countless books and websites that sell the promise of making you a better poker player.

Logic vs. Emotion
I enjoy the game because it is a good mix of skill and luck (you can’t convince me that it’s all skill – but it is true that over the long-term, skill weighs more heavily than luck). Poker is a combination of probability and game theory, yet also requires acute observational skills and a strong instinct for people. It is a game that has so much texture compared to so many other games. Poker is attracting some of the brightest people on the planet, from all backgrounds – computer science Ph.D.’s, lawyers, hedge fund managers – you name it.

So it surprises me somewhat that Star Trek never really explored the game beyond TNG. Poker has two sides: a mathematical component and an emotional component. Anyone familiar with the game will understand the importance of maintaining one’s cool at the table; a bad beat can put one on a serious tilt and can end up losing all of his/her money. So gee, a player with excellent mathematical skills and with the ability to contain one’s emotion…sound like any race we know?

Instead, the writers had the crews of DS9 and Voyager play different games, like darts or billiards (I don’t think the crew of Enterprise played anything). Obviously the writers said ‘well, we need to pick a different game for them to play.’ But it’s not so much that ‘a crew needs their own game to play,’ but what a game can reveal about the people who play it. Riker hones his bluffing skills and instinct for his opponents, a useful skill in command. Data can learn more about human interaction, and can be unique in his play by being able to calculate all of the odds in a split-second. Counselor Troi, with her empathic powers (I have no idea why she didn’t win more often), can hone her skills in reading people. The same cannot be said for darts or billiards. Whether selecting poker as the game for the TNG crew to play was intentional or completely by chance, I think it was part of the genius that distinguished it from the other series.

Bringing a Shark to the Table
I thought it would be fun to have a poker shark as part of my crew. I made one of my characters, Counselor Jenovia, that shark. I think this makes sense considering that a counselor needs a strong instinct for the aliens that the crew comes in contact with. Without the empathic powers of Counselor Troi, Jenovia relies on her intelligence, powers of observation, and emotional instinct to win. I think this makes for an appealing character, who has ‘powers’ that are largely within the realm of what we understand to be possible.

Targs Playing Poker
Similar to the painting Dogs Playing Poker, I thought it would be a humorous image to see a starship crew sitting at a casino playing poker with old Star Trek villains. Now that people can play with literally thousands of different ridiculous avatars on the Internet (I’m a ninja on FullTilt), I didn’t think it too silly to be able to play as a holographic Klingon, a Xindi, a Targ, or a Borg Queen on an ‘intergalactic’ Internet. Who wouldn’t want to play poker as the Borg Queen?

To read the chapters where the Counselor plays poker, see Chapter 9 and Chapter 70.